“Listen to you. You spend three months with my best friend and already you’re an expert on love and how to make it work.”
He flinched. “You spent three months with my best friend and it’s lasted years without being near each other. Why the fuck do you think I went to all this trouble to bring you out here?”
“Can we just not do this?” I asked.
“Hell no. I have you trapped for another half hour, and he’s out cold. I’m taking full advantage of this.”
I snorted. “If she didn’t love you so much…”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, but I saw the nervousness in his eyes, the set of his jaw as he looked over our friends. “I’m just saying that everything happens for a reason, Rachel. You’re here. He’s here. Life is showing you what it could be like with him”—his gaze flickered to Landon—“or without him.”
I didn’t want to think about that—a life without Landon. Not that I wanted him in my life, wrecking what peace I’d managed to attain, but I couldn’t imagine a world where he didn’t exist.
I checked over both of them as the flight continued. Landon’s pulse was strong, the warmth returning to his face, but Gabe’s was weakening.
Through the comms, I heard the pilot making arrangements in Nepali and assumed it was with the hospital. As we approached the small landing pad, I knew I had to have been right.
“They are expecting us,” he said.
My nerves fired back to life as we touched down on the pad, and the doors were opened by medical personnel waiting with gurneys. They took Gabe out first.
“Do you speak English?” Wilder yelled over the noise of the rotor blades to one of the doctors.
“Yes!” he shouted back.
“Avalanche. Broken bones, we think internal bleeding, and his pulse is thready. His name is Gabe Darro.”
They nodded and sped away.
I tossed my headphones on the seat and climbed out after the medics took Landon on the gurney. God, they were going to take him. What if he never woke up? They didn’t have his medical records here; they knew nothing of him.
He was just another tourist to them, another idiot who’d nearly gotten himself killed because he couldn’t respect the mountains they knew to fear.
We followed them into the hospital.
“You speak English?” I asked one of the doctors.
“I do,” he answered.
“His name is Landon Rhodes. He’s twenty-two years old. It was an avalanche, and he has a two-inch laceration inside his upper right arm. His pulse is strong, but he hasn’t woken up yet.”
We reached the swinging doors that had a universal sign for no entrance.
“Okay, we have him from here. You can stay in the waiting room down that hall,” the doctor said, pointing toward the well-lit hallway.
“No, I’m not done,” I nearly shouted, my chest tightening. That damn lump was in my throat again.
“Rachel…” Wilder warned.
“He’s O positive for blood. If you need to transfuse him, come get me. I’m the same. He had his ACL repaired when he was sixteen. Tonsils out when he was seven, and he’s allergic to penicillin.”
The doctor’s eyes softened. “Thank you.”
I nodded, my teeth slicing into my bottom lip as they wheeled him away. The doors swung shut, and as if they closed on my adrenaline, too, my body crashed, exhaustion and fear overwhelming me.
“Rachel,” Wilder whispered and gathered me into his arms as I started to sob. The cries were loud and ugly, giving voice to the wild emotions that had been penned up inside me.
If it hadn’t been for the avalanche, for Landon, for the blood, for the thought of almost losing him, I wouldn’t have been so weak. I would have stood on my own, walked away with my head high.
But that ridgeline had taken more than just my breath.
For the first time in years, I let the man I’d betrayed hold me.
Because he was in love with my best friend…and I wasn’t sure I’d ever stopped loving his.
I watched the seconds tick by on the face of the clock in the waiting room. They’d had him back there a half hour.
“He’s got to be waking up, right?” I asked Wilder as he handed me a steaming cup of coffee. “Thank you.”
“I know you’re a bigger tea fan, but I couldn’t find any.”
I blinked. “You remember that?”
He shrugged. “Leah said something about teapots.”
I smiled and sipped at the hot liquid, hoping that it would warm where my chest felt numb. “She’s amazing.”
“She is,” he agreed. “And…” He sighed. “And I know I have you to thank for that. After the accident, when she was hurt and her boyfriend died, I know you’re the one who pulled her through. Thank you.”
“I didn’t do it for you,” I said softly.
“I know.”
“You don’t. When Landon left…when he went back to you, she was all I had. If I pulled her through, it was only because she held me together, gave me something to do so I didn’t lose my mind.”
He unzipped his jacket and did a little juggling with his coffee to get it off. “Crazy how everything interweaves, right?”
“Yeah. If I’d never met Landon…never met you, I wouldn’t have been standing on that counter, trying to change a lightbulb in our brand-new apartment. I wouldn’t have fallen and broken my wrist and met Leah in the ortho office. Maybe we would have met at Dartmouth or not, but we were both so damaged that we kind of filled in each other’s cracks.”