LITMIR.BIZ

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camp. That was accessible by road. But no, she’d had to do it the old-fashioned way. Ready or not.

      And, in her case, definitely not.

      She looked around as her guide saw to their trusty yak. She’d become quite fond of the matted, stinky thing that tootled along under the very small burden of her backpack, tent and food supplies. It finally dawned on her, halfway up the trail to base camp, that the yak was actually for her, if she passed out, so that her Sherpa could get her back down again without having to carry her himself.

      She might have been wobbly but she was still, at least, on her feet.

      And she was here. The entrance to Everest base camp.

       Tick.

      Something about being halfway up this mountain made her feel very close to her mother. And to God, though she was not a religious person, generally. Here, it seemed, she was.

      Her breath came as shallow and tightly as ever, thanks to the altitude, and she did her best to only half-fill her lungs the way her Sherpa had shown her. But she’d grown accustomed, now, to dizzy spells and dark patches at the edges of her vision and to slowing her pace to accommodate the lack of oxygen in her blood.

      ‘Shirley?’

      She spun at the sound of her name. Pure instinct. Visions were something else she’d grown used to as her oxygen-starved brain played tricks on her but that was her first aural mirage.

      Except that it wasn’t.

      Hayden stood in front of her, bright orange trekking gear, tan even darker than normal.

      Her breathing escalated. The dark patches swarmed.

      She reached for her guide on instinct.

      And then she passed out.

      Gentle fingers stroked her back to consciousness.

      She opened her eyes a crack and stared at Hayden.

      The real one. Not the Hayden of her walking daydreams. Or her fevered night dreams. Her brain wasn’t so oxygen-starved that it had forgotten how to deduce.

      She sagged. ‘You sent the ticket.’

       Played again.

      ‘I saw your blog,’ he said. ‘I wanted to do something to reward your courage. It was the only thing I could do.’

      ‘Most people would send flowers.’

      He smiled and quoted her. ‘I’m not most people. I had to find something far more dramatic and convoluted.’

      Her wind-cracked lips turned up at the corners just a little. ‘Figures.’ She looked around. ‘Where am I?’

      ‘Medical tent.’

      ‘Did you carry me?’ Lord, please no. As if passing out in the first place wasn’t unseemly enough.

      ‘You had a yak.’ He laughed at the horrified expression she couldn’t mask. ‘The altitude hit me hard too; I wouldn’t have been able to carry you here.’

      She struggled to sit up. ‘So you slung me over the yak, butt waving in the air?’

      ‘Pretty much,’ he conceded. ‘You’re going to be fine, by the way. You just hyperventilated.’

      ‘I don’t care why I got here. I care how I got here.’

      ‘Shirley …’ He smiled, reaching out and tracing a loose strand of hair. The soft expression on his face spoke volumes.

      Her outrage dried up. Her smile died. How was he even here? She asked him.

      ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

      ‘You knew I was coming?’

      ‘I knew you’d use the ticket. I hoped you hadn’t decided on a lengthy tour of Nepal first. I nearly died when I discovered there are two base camps. Who knew?’

      Anyone who’d done the slightest bit of planning? ‘What if I’d gone to the other one?’

      ‘I had spies along both trails. I knew word would very quickly spread of a lone woman trekking towards base camp. Besides,’ he added, ‘I figured you wouldn’t do the easy one.’

      So he did know her, just a little bit. She narrowed her eyes. ‘How did you get here ahead of me? Chopper?’ She knew him a little bit, too.

      A dark flush crept above the pinched neck of his trek gear. ‘Yeah. From halfway up. Greatly jeered at as I landed by the climbers.’

      ‘So that’s “how” taken care of.’ She swallowed. ‘Now why are you here?’

      ‘I needed to see you.’

      ‘You have my address.’

      ‘I needed to see you far from home, somewhere magical.’

      Her breath started to thin out. Was it the air again, or just her usual reaction to Hayden’s presence? She took what passed for a deep breath in the highlands of Nepal.

      ‘Why?’

      He stared, glanced around to see if they were alone. ‘Because …’

      She waited. The first month of being away from him had been pure misery. Knowing he didn’t love her. Knowing he didn’t even want her enough to just tell her what she wanted to hear. The second month, marginally better and by the third month she’d made some decent progress on getting her life back on track.

      Hence the Everest trip.

      ‘Were you overdue to throw my life back into turmoil?’

      His eyes softened. ‘Is it turmoil—seeing me?’

      She swung her legs off the side of the stretcher and sat up. Her head spun. She breathed back the nausea. ‘Nothing I won’t survive again.’

      His gaze changed. ‘I don’t know whether to be proud of your courage or ashamed of myself that you need to call on it.’

      She held her tongue. ‘Why are you here, Hayden?’

      ‘I missed you.’

      Was he serious? ‘Couldn’t find a blonde?’

      ‘Not sex, Shirley. I missed you. The moment you left the dinosaur campsite, the moment you climbed out of bed that day.’

      ‘You turned your back on me that morning in the tent, Hayden. The message was pretty clear.’

      ‘I didn’t want you to see my face. And I couldn’t look at yours again. At the pain.’

      The first part stopped her cold. But the last part rankled. ‘Don’t pity me.’

      He took her hands where they’d bunched into fists. ‘I don’t pity you, Shirley. I pity me.’

       What?

      ‘I’d convinced myself that the pain I felt that day was yours. That I was simply responding to hurting someone I cared about.’ He resettled himself on his haunches. ‘But it went on. And on. And it finally dawned on me that it was my pain. I’d never been in pain before.’

      ‘Everyone feels pain.’

      ‘Not if you’ve numbed yourself to survive. I’d never let myself care enough, be engaged enough, be emotionally invested enough to care if something was taken away from me. Not since I was a boy. I’d shoved it right down deep inside out of sheer survival. I’d forgotten what loss felt like.’

      Every humane cell in her body responded to that, totally overruling her anger.

      ‘I don’t want to be like him, Shirley. Controlling others to make up for something in myself.’

      ‘You’re not like him.’

      ‘Two years ago it finally

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