Say the Word(149)



It turns out, the answer is pretty simple: the difference lies deep within the hearts of the climbers.

Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to successfully climb Mount Everest, said it best.

It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.

Centuries before Hillary was born, a brash conqueror named Hannibal knew that same thing, as he gave the order to lead his elephant army across the Alps.

Because when you’re faced with an insurmountable task, when you’re on that peak, and your body has reached its absolute limit, you have to reach inside yourself and find that stubborn, reckless, insistent part of your own psyche that refuses to quit. That tiny part of your mind that’s howling at you to either find a way or make one, dammit, because you can’t return to the ground now. Not when you’re so close to your dreams you could reach out and touch them with your fingertips.

I might not have always been one of those people. I might not have always listened to that little voice inside my head, that insisted I carry on. But I swear, as long as I live, I’ll never ignore it again. Not when, on the occasions I did listen, it helped me find my way.

When Jamie was sick and we were losing the house, something deep within my soul told me to press onward.

When everyone — including me — doubted my theories about the missing girls, something made me keep searching.

And when everything was stacked against us — time, family, history, heartache — Bash and I found our way back to each other.





***


I didn’t know what the future would hold. I didn’t need to.

For the first time in a long time, I was so happy I didn’t look down the line at what was coming for me. I lived fully in my present, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Two weeks after the freighter raid, I’d given up the lease on my apartment in Hell’s Kitchen and officially moved into the loft with Bash. It wasn’t a tough transition, since I’d already been sleeping there every night and half my clothes were moved into his closet — and, anyway, it was where I wanted to be. Bash gave me a few more drawers in his dresser and there was now another color photograph brightening up his walls: a large, blown-up canvas of Jamie, Bash, and me that had been taken the summer we were all seventeen, our tanned skin and sun-bleached hair a testament to our many hours outdoors that season.

I remember that day at the lake like it was yesterday — eight years may’ve passed, but it remained painted bright and bold in my mind, rather than watercolored in the typical washed out hues of distant memory. We’d wheeled Jamie’s chair to the edge of the dock and helped him stand, supported between Bash and me with all his weight on his right leg. A woman at the shore snapped our photo as we jumped off the edge of the dock in unison, our three forms suspended midair over the lake in the fraction of time before our feet broke through the water. In that moment, when the camera shutter clicked down, we were flying — forever frozen in our youth, with our arms stretched high above our heads as though if we reached hard enough, we might extend our flight for another few seconds or maybe never return to the earth at all.

Looking at that picture every day brought a little Jamie back into our lives and always put a smile on my face.

There were other changes, too.

The day after my story hit the front page of newspapers across the country, I walked into Jeanine’s office and officially gave my two weeks notice. I wish I could say I called her a cow and stormed out in a blaze of glory, but that would be a lie. There was no grand exit — in fact, Jeanine barely looked up from her laptop as I told her I’d be leaving the post I’d held for nearly three years.

With little fanfare, I cleared out my desk and left Luster behind, the murmured goodbyes of my coworkers chasing me through the elevator doors and down onto the street. As I stepped out onto the curb and pulled a breath of fresh — well, fresh by city standards — air into my lungs, I felt an enormous weight slip off my shoulders.

As I’d once told a young, terrified, Swedish maid — there were other jobs, but there was only one of me. It was about time I started doing something I was truly passionate about, rather than staying somewhere I was miserable because of good health benefits and a steady paycheck. I had three interviews lined up next week at small newspapers throughout the city, for freelance positions that would no doubt pay me in peanuts. I knew I’d have to start at the bottom and work my way up the totem pole. I knew it would likely be tougher than my worst day at Luster. Yet, I was surprisingly okay with that. With Bash at my side and my investigation into Vera’s disappearance well behind me, nothing seemed quite as scary as it had two months ago.

I wasn’t the only one who quit Luster to chase their dreams. Simon gave his notice the same day I gave mine. He was full of plans to start his own fashion line of evening wear, spurred in no small part by the recognition he’d received since photographs of his dress had been plastered all over the internet and every major media outlet for the past few weeks. I couldn’t wait to see his designs on the pages of Vogue — and maybe even Luster — someday.

Fae was, of course, mournful that both Simon and I were leaving her alone at the magazine. But I had a feeling she wouldn’t be sticking around too long either. That girl was like a ticking time bomb of secrets — I couldn’t help but think that someday soon, she was going to explode from the sheer pressure of keeping them all contained. Thankfully, she had two extremely overbearing friends to help put her back together if and when that happened.

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