The soda tasted like ginger soap.
“I’m beginning to feel this entire venture is barmy,” she said.
He pushed his hands across the tabletop, leaning closer. “When did we get into the barmy part?”
“When we all piled into your mother’s car together?”
He shook his head. “Try earlier.”
“When we went salsa dancing?”
“Keep going.”
“When you came to lunch with Nikil?”
Kal smiled.
“When we flew first class to New York in private berths with hot showers and aromatherapy?”
“You thought that was crazy, too?” Kal caught her hand up and held it between his, and the knot in her heart eased a bit. “I thought you flew like that all the time.”
“I’ve never paid more for a plane ticket in all my life.”
“That’s reassuring. Anyway, I don’t think that was the first barmy thing. You passed out on the street in Kathmandu before that.”
“Nearly passed out. But before that, you got robbed.”
“And before that—”
He was smiling now, the good smile, the best smile that showed off his eyes and the gap between his teeth, the one that made her remember that she loved him.
Which was the thing she was most upset about, of course. That she loved him. And tomorrow she would leave.
“Yes, well, we needn’t remind ourselves what we did before that.”
Kal raised an eyebrow. “I was going to say we were on Mount Everest, losing brain cells by the thousands.”
“You were not.”
“Was too.”
“Liar.”
The proprietress emerged from the kitchen with Rosemary’s food. She set it on the table and left them looking at each other, not quite smiling but fond, the black night pressing against the windows, Rosemary exhausted and buzzing with nervous energy and…and sad.
This time tomorrow, she’d be at an airport in New York, boarding a flight back to London. Between there would be people, conversation, a trip to Milwaukee to fulfill Yangchen’s agenda. Rosemary didn’t know where Kal would fit, if he would fit at all. This could very well be the last time she spent with him alone.
That felt like a terrible waste.
At least twenty-nine people had lost their lives in the avalanche on Everest, but Rosemary wasn’t one of them. She would carry them in her heart for the rest of her life, an anchor that tied her to tragedy, a loss she couldn’t make up for.
She’d survived. Kal had survived. Here they were together, and for what? For her to wait for the clock to run out and fly to London to resume her adventure, never to see him again?
Did it mean anything?
Rosemary wanted it to mean something. She wanted Kal to want it to mean something, too—to make it mean something with her.
But she didn’t know how to begin to say any of that, or what it would mean if she did. She took a bite of her burger.