Chapter 9: The Video

We watched it at eight in the morning in Ginny's kitchen, on her laptop, with the cherry oilcloth sticky under our elbows.

The liftee had deleted it off his phone in April.

He'd been too scared to keep it where anybody might find it.

But his phone had uploaded it to his cloud first, and he remembered the password on the second try.

"You don't have to watch," Tobin said.

"Yes, I do."

Ginny pushed play.

The video was shaky.

It started on the liftee's boots, then swung up to the top of the Crown.

The bowl was white and smooth and beautiful, with Tobin's rope line strung across the top of it.

Then a figure in orange coveralls came into the frame.

Me.

I watched myself walk up to the first knot.

I watched my hands reach for it.

On the laptop speaker, my own voice was high and broken.

"I can't stop. I can't stop. Somebody stop me."

My hands untied the knot.

They moved to the next one.

The radio on my chest crackled, loud and clear even on that tinny phone mic.

"Pull it, Marlow."

Roman's voice.

"All of it. They're on the lift."

On the screen I was sobbing.

My hands didn't care.

They pulled the rope out of the snow, knot by knot, and coiled it over my shoulder.

In Ginny's kitchen, nobody breathed.

The video swung away to the lift, to the Embry party getting off at the top in bright new jackets.

Portia, laughing, with goggles up on her helmet.

Then it ended.

I sat back in my chair.

My hands were in my lap, and I looked at them.

They were just hands.

Grease under the nails, a burn scar on one knuckle from a manifold.

"Okay," Ginny said, very quietly. "Okay."

She wiped her face with the bar towel.

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