of us, was it? Either you or me. It was about Patrick and what he wanted. How he saw his life shaping up.
“I damn near fell off the mountain when he told me. This was earlier, in the tent. The night before.” Horn didn’t have to specify what datum he was using. “I told him he was backing the wrong horse—that he was a great climber and a terrific all-round guy, but he wasn’t my idea of a good lay.” He swallowed. “In fact, I said rather more than that. Things I shouldn’t have said—things I wouldn’t have said if I’d had a bit more warning. Hurtful things.
“He apologized, said he understood—he was just telling me how he felt, he wasn’t expecting anything from me in return. I think he was pretty shocked himself that he’d come out and said it. I don’t know how long he’d been working up to it—if he’d always meant to come clean while we were in Alaska, or if it got away from him in an unguarded moment. I’d no idea it was anywhere in his mind until he said the words.
“And after he did, we never really got the chance to talk about it. He’d said all he wanted to, and so had I—too much. We avoided looking at one another for the rest of the night. Maybe if the next day had ended differently, we’d have got round to talking. We’d have had to if we wanted to keep climbing together. Or maybe we’d have got home and gone our separate ways—I don’t know. We’re never going to know, now.”
Tell a woman that the man she was in love with loved another man and you do more than just set the record straight. You turn her view of the world, and her own place within it, on end.
Being left for another woman is upsetting, offensive, demeaning—however kind the man is, however gently he tries to let her down, the cold, hard, inescapable fact is that, whatever attracted him to her in the first place, she doesn’t have enough of it and he’s met someone who has more. It’s worse than being the kid who’s never picked for team games. It’s like being picked, tried out, and then sent back to mind the pullovers.
Now imagine being the kid who’s given a tryout, then told he played so badly that not only is he not getting a place on the team but the team’s out of the league and the owner of the ball is going to go play with it in another park.
Every emotion in the lexicon flickered across Beth McKendrick’s face, but none of them settled for more than a moment. There was of course shock. There was outrage, and disbelief. There was ridicule. Then incredulity lifted a corner of its petticoats to give a glimpse of the mental turmoil beneath, as if she was at least trying to acknowledge the possibility. But it was too hard a truth to face, and she slammed back into the comfort of her default position, which was anger. It stiffened her sinews and suffused her cheeks with blood, but it didn’t reach all the way up to her eyes. Her eyes were appalled, and terribly wounded, and they believed.
Beth McKendrick and Nicky Horn stared at one another across the unbearable truth—the young woman who’d have been willing to die for Patrick Hanratty’s love and the young man who wasn’t, both their lives blighted by a biological quirk that should barely have been worth comment except that a lack of honesty about it had woven filaments of kindness and misunderstanding, and the desperate attempt to avoid causing pain had trapped them all as surely as a gill net traps fish.
“He told you that?” Beth was struggling for the words. “That I loved him, and he loved you?”
“Yes.”
She went on staring at him, humiliation rising to join the maelstrom in her eyes. “What did you do? Laugh?”
“No.” He wasn’t laughing now either. “There was nothing to laugh about. What he said—the way he was feeling—it knocked me sideways. Multiply what you’re feeling now by about three and you’re still not close. I thought I knew him, and it turned out I hardly knew him at all. And the thing about being in a tent in a snowstorm halfway up a mountain is, you can’t stalk out and slam the door and be on your own until you’ve got your head together. We were going to be sleeping