One by One(69)

“Yes. I cut my face on something in the fall, probably my own ski.”

“And is that why you left uni?” I ask, and she nods, very slowly.

“Yes. I can’t really explain why, even now. I just—I felt like I’d become a different person, do you know what I mean?”

I nod too. I know exactly what she means. I have the impression that she is talking about this perhaps for the very first time.

“I had to dig him out.”

Her voice is barely above a whisper. I have to strain to hear it.

“I wasn’t carrying a GPS locator. I had to dig out my boyfriend to activate his beacon, knowing he was already dead.”

She looks down, cuts the pack, deals the first card into the pickup pile, moving mechanically all the while.

Suddenly I do not want to talk about this anymore. I wish I had never asked the question. After all, I have my own secrets, my own subjects I do not want to discuss. What if Erin asks me about my past in return? What if she brings up Snoop again? About why I left? What if she asks about the friends I don’t have, the schoolmates who bullied me for fourteen years, about the family I have cut myself off from?

I hear again my father’s slurring voice, my mother’s sobs… I taste blood. I am chewing my cuticles again. I stick my hands in the pockets of my jumpsuit.

But Erin does not ask about any of these things. She seems to be somewhere else completely, somewhere very far away. When she speaks, her voice has a strange quality to it. It is like a confession.

“It was my fault, you see,” she says. She picks up her cards. Her hands are trembling a little. “I suggested we go. Off-piste skiing. I was the one who wanted to do it. I killed them.” She swallows. “That changes a person.”

She looks up at me, as if expecting me to understand. I have the most peculiar urge to take her hand and tell her that I know how she feels.

But that would be crazy. So I don’t. Instead, I look down at my own cards. I pick up a three of hearts and discard a jack.

“Your move,” I say.





ERIN


Snoop ID: LITTLEMY

Listening to: Offline

Snoopers: 0

Snoopscribers: 10

I don’t know what made me spill my past to Liz like that. It was the strangest thing. I’ve never talked to anyone about that time—not my parents, not Will’s parents; even the coroner and the search and rescue team only wanted the bare facts, not to hear about my bewilderment and grief.

It’s not that I didn’t have the chance—my mother urged me to see a therapist, and I lost count of the number of friends who called me up, saying, If you need to talk, I’m only a phone call away. But I didn’t want to talk. I didn’t want to be that person. An object of pity. A victim.

Because I know how Topher and the others must feel, in a way. For I felt it too. And that’s the thing I have never told anyone—that in the minutes and hours I spent searching for Will and Alex after the avalanche, it wasn’t terror or fear that was uppermost in my mind but a kind of shocked disbelief, that this had happened to me, to us. I was not this person. I was not the person terrible things happened to. That was other people, other families. I was golden, slipping through life on a charm, insulated by the security of my family, my own good looks, and the luck of having found Will’s love.

Because yes, that was luck. All of it. And I knew it. But it was also how it was supposed to be, because I was supposed to be lucky.

And now suddenly that luck had turned.

And after it did, I found that I couldn’t stand to be there with the people still walking in that perpetual golden sun while I lived in a place that was black with guilt and grief. I couldn’t stand to see the pity in their eyes.

It’s almost completely dark in the living room now, and when I walk across to the clock over the mantelpiece, I see that it’s getting on for 6:00 p.m. Danny and the others should have been at Haut Montagne about two hours ago. It’s possible they could be starting back. It’s possible they have managed to contact the police and a chopper is on its way.

Possible. Not certain. Possible.

It’s equally possible the road is trashed and they are still trudging across icy rubble, or Haut Montagne was empty and shut up.

God, the possibilities are going to send me mad.

I don’t know why, but with Danny and the others gone, it feels like the atmosphere of the chalet is closing around me and Liz. I can feel the weight of the snow pressing against the roof and the walls, feel the tonnes and tonnes still resting on the mountain side, waiting for another trigger. I can feel the darkness seeping through the rooms and corridors.

I know what the edge of endurance feels like, because I passed it once before—sitting frozen on a cold mountainside with the dead body of my lover, not knowing whether help was going to come. I passed it, and I survived. I came back. Back to safety. Back to normality.

But there are times when I feel myself being dragged back across that line into a place where nothing matters anymore, where every heart beat drags you closer to the edge, and I think I am going to fall into the abyss again, and this time I won’t be able to claw my way out.

When I shut my eyes I can see his face, Will’s face, cold and white as marble, and peaceful, so terribly peaceful.

“Erin.” The voice comes from very far away.

I shake my head.