Page 112 of Free Fall

Sejin clenches me close and kisses me hard. “Yes,” he promises.

The fire snaps and crackles. “Just promise you’ll come home to me.”

“I love you.”

He shivers in my arms, and I hold him tighter. There are a lot of things we don’t talk a lot about, and Sejin’s experience of loving a person who didn’t come home to him one day has always been one of them. Someday soon, though we’ll have to dig into it more. The mother he lost, the father who’s coming, and the future in front of us.

But I have to send Heart Route first.

And there’s no time like the present.

*

0 days to free solo ascent

I wake atdawn. I don’t know why or how, but I feel it in my bones. Today is the day. The culmination of years of hard work, and months and months of training. The culmination of my very life until this moment. It’s like a whistle in my cells, a rising call I can’t ignore.

This might not be the day I’d planned to do it—that was next week—but it’s the day I’m meant to do it. There’s no other way to put it.

It’s time.

I leave Sejin sleeping in bed, all tousled and beautiful, and I bypass several sleeping cats to head out to my van. I briefly worry the van’s wheels on the gravel might wake Sejin, but my phone doesn’t light up with any texts questioning where I’m going so early.

I leave my phone on for the duration of the drive and the entire approach hike in, but I turn it off when I reach the base, so no texts or calls will come in while I’m climbing. I can’t afford even the smallest distraction today.

At the start of the route, I sit down on the ground and breathe in and out. I allow myself to imagine everything that I’ll otherwise try to put out of my head during the climb. In detail, I imagine falling. I imagine the fear as I plummet. I imagine dying. I think of my body on the ground—or what’s left of my body after impact. I imagine Sejin getting the news. That makes my gut churn, but I force myself to envision it all as fully as possible. His heartbreaking sobs. The pain he’ll feel.

I breathe in and out.

I imagine him moving on. Learning to live a different kind of life, making new friends, finding new love… Forgetting about me most of the time.

Then I change out of my approach shoes and into my rock shoes, clip on the chalk bag, and shake out my hands and feet. My heart pounds. My blood feels effervescent. Life roils inside of me with a vibrancy I only feel at moments like these. Potent. Powerful.

This is it. I step forward with determination.

It’s time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Sejin

“What time isit?” I murmur, feeling draggy and strange.

There’s no answer from the other side of the bed.

“I think my alarm didn’t go off, but, fuck, I’m still so tired,” I whimper, and I push my foot out to touch Dan’s leg. All I feel is cool, smooth bedsheets. I sit up and squint through my tangled mess of bedhead. He’s not there.

Coldness seeps through me.

But before I panic, I listen carefully for sounds in the house. Is he making coffee? Doing kettlebells or a club bell workout in the living room?

I hear nothing. Not even the sound of the cats bounding around looking for breakfast.

Shifting to find my phone on the bedside table, I check the time and see that it’s just after six. My alarm is set for seven-thirty, so I haven’t missed it. I climb out of bed and pull on some sweatpants, hoping Dan is just out in his van doing some hangboarding or reading, or God knows what.

But I already know.

As I open the front door and stare at the empty space where Dan’s van is supposed to be, my heart seems to slow, along with my breathing, and the cold morning wind lifts my hair and races over my bare shoulders and chest. Romeo slides past me out into the pearly glow of dawn, and I don’t try to catch him. He’ll be back meowing for breakfast before long.