Chapter 14: Twelve Minutes

Calvin's POV

I parked the truck across the street from her friend's building and turned off the engine.

Abbott had gone up an hour ago.

The surgeon's phone was still in my head, turned toward us on his desk.

Nine-ten, a county exchange, and a man saying he was at the courthouse.

Nolan had lied about my surgery from the steps of the place where he married someone else.

Her light was on in a window on the third floor, and it stayed on, so I stayed where I was.

I told myself it was because the street was bad.

It was not a bad street.

I had a thermos and a sandwich I did not want, and I had four miles of mountain in my head that I had not let myself walk since April.

I walked them now.

The shelf had been narrow, and wet, and the man on it had his eyes open when I came down the rope.

He did not look at me.

He looked at a point past my shoulder and kept saying one word, over and over, in a voice that had no air in it.

I leaned close to hear.

"Kirsten," he said. "Kirsten. Kirsten."

I thought it was a prayer, or a dog's name.

I got his arm splinted and my jacket around him and my shoulder under his chest, and I climbed.

He said it the whole way up, at every step, until it stopped sounding like a name.

I said it back to him once, near the second mile, when I thought he was dying.

"Kirsten's waiting," I said. "Keep walking."

He had not been walking.

I was carrying him.

But he tightened his hand on my collar, and I took four more miles on that.

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