One by One(61)

I stop. I can’t go on. I can’t describe those nightmarish hours on the mountain, sobbing as I dug with numb bleeding hands through the hard-packed drifts to try to reach Will, who was trapped head down beneath a hundredweight of snow and ice. I dug and I wept, and I wept and I dug, using anything I could find in my pack—my lift pass, my water bottle, anything that could form a makeshift pick, for my poles and skis were long gone, ripped away from me somewhere far up the slope.

It was too late. I knew that. I had known it even before I began to dig, I think, and as the hours wore on, and the snow lay all around in unmoving silence, I somehow found the strength to accept it. But still I dug. Not just for Will, but for my own survival. Because Will had the GPS locator beacon in his pack. And if I didn’t activate it, I would die along with him.

The search and rescue eventually found us. Or rather, they found me. By the time they arrived I was hypothermic, cradling Will’s dead body. Alex was not recovered until the following spring.

“I—I couldn’t go back,” I say, very quietly. “Do you understand that? I couldn’t go back to my old life. It was completely meaningless. I went home to bury Will, and then I came back to the mountains—at first because I couldn’t bear to leave without Alex, and then afterwards because…”

I stop. The truth is, I don’t know why I stayed. Only that I couldn’t stand to be at home, with the pity of all my friends suffocating me, and my parents’ awful, crushing grief. And it seemed like a kind of penance to stay here, among the terrible austere beauty of the Alps, to keep forcing myself to look at the mountains that had killed Will and Alex.

“That’s why you don’t ski off-piste,” Danny says hoarsely. He is looking at me very differently now. The anger has gone. There is only a kind of… pity left. It hurts to see it in his face, and I turn away, nodding.

“Yes, that’s why. I still love skiing—which is perverse, I know. My parents think I’m crazy. My dad called me a masochist when I took this job. But I can’t seem to bring myself to leave the mountains, and you can’t live here year-round without skiing. But I don’t think I’ll ever go off-piste again.”

“Fuck, Erin. Why didn’t you tell me?” Danny asks, but he doesn’t say it like he’s expecting an answer. I think he knows that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell him—it was that I couldn’t bear to say it. I couldn’t bear to become a victim to him too.

There is a silence, and then he folds me in his arms, and I rest my face against his warm, muscled shoulder and I close my eyes and breathe in the good, Danny smell of him. I feel the tears soak into the worn softness of his sweater.

“So you’re proper posh, eh?” he says, with a rumbling chuckle, and I give a shaky answering laugh, and lift my head, wiping the tears off my nose with my sleeve. “You belong down there, with that lot, not up here in the servants’ quarters, with the hoi polloi.”

“No, I don’t.” I say it more emphatically than I mean, and Danny laughs again, but I’m serious. “No, I mean it, Danny, I don’t belong with them anymore. I’m not sure I ever did. What they stand for—”

I stop, thinking of Topher and his cushioned, monied existence—the way he has had everything handed to him on a plate, the way he’s never had to scrap for anything, never had to swallow a snub from a boss, or pick up a stranger’s dirty underwear, or do any of the myriad demeaning, boring jobs the rest of us take for granted.

They are arrogant, that’s what I realize—maybe not Liz and Carl quite so much, but all of them to some degree. They are protected by the magic of their shares and their status and their IP. They think that life can’t touch them—just like I used to do.

Only now it has. Now life has them by the throat. And it won’t let go.





LIZ


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“You’re saying Erin is behind this?” Miranda’s face is skeptical. She folds her arms, looking at Topher with narrowed dark eyes. Topher’s expression is defensive.

“No. No, that’s not what I said—I simply—”

“It’s what you implied though,” Miranda says. I realize something—Miranda does not like Topher. I don’t know why I didn’t notice this until now—perhaps it is the fact that she is so formal and polite. Now she is not bothering to hide her opinion.

“I’m just saying, once is bad luck, twice is a hell of a coincidence. How many skiing deaths can one person be involved in?”

“Oh, why don’t we stop beating around the bush,” Miranda says bitingly. “We all know why you’re desperate to throw suspicion on other people.”

“What are you suggesting?” Topher says, and his voice is suddenly dangerous.

“I’m not suggesting anything,” Miranda says. She steps up to him. Even without her heels, they are almost exactly the same height. “I’m stating facts. Most people in this room stood to gain a lot of money before Eva died. Very few people had a motive for wanting her out of the way. You were one of those few.”

Rik and Carl exchange an uneasy look. Neither of them jump in to defend Topher.

“One, that is fucking slander, and two, you are talking about my best friend,” Topher begins furiously, but then Tiger lifts her head and says something. It’s an almost inaudible croak, but all heads turn to her, and Topher stops midsentence.