Chapter 140
Chapter 140:
Her mind was pulled violently backward through time, all the way to the heavy, suffocating snows of Davos, Switzerland, seven years ago.
She was eighteen years old. Her parents had just been killed in a car crash. The trauma had shattered her mind completely. She was diagnosed with severe PTSD and clinical depression so deep it had rendered her almost non-functional. The cold, impersonal lawyers handling her parents’ estate had arranged for her to be transferred to a highly exclusive, isolated psychiatric sanatorium in the Alps.
She spent her days staring at white walls, confined to a wheelchair because her body had simply stopped cooperating. She was a ghost inhabiting the approximate shape of a person.
She remembered the exact temperature of the air on the afternoon she decided to end it.
Brutally cold. She had managed to push her wheelchair through the back doors of the facility and roll herself toward the steep, jagged cliff edge behind the sanatorium. She only wanted the pain in her chest to stop. She gripped the armrests. She leaned forward, shifting her weight toward the edge.
The sound of crunching snow exploded behind her.
A boy in a bright white ski jacket came sprinting forward and tackled her — wheelchair and all — backward into a deep snowbank.
June remembered fighting him. Screaming. Thrashing.
𝘗oр𝘶l𝘢r 𝘴𝘁о𝘳𝗂𝗲s оn ѕ.𝗰𝗼𝗆
The boy did not yell back. He did not call for the nurses.
He pulled off his gloves and pressed his large, bare hands against her freezing, tear-streaked face. He looked directly into her eyes. His gaze held such raw, unguarded empathy that it shocked her nervous system into silence.
That boy was Caleb.
From that day forward, he became a permanent presence outside her room. He appeared every afternoon without fail — sometimes with a rare alpine flower he had climbed the dangerous ridges to find, sometimes with advanced medical journals, settling into the chair beside her and reading the data aloud in a calm, unhurried voice.
June remembered fighting his kindness with deliberate cruelty. She was terrified of being reached. She screamed at him to leave. Once, she had seized a mug of scalding cocoa and hurled it at his chest. Caleb had not flinched. He looked at the dark stain spreading across his expensive sweater, gave her that soft, unhurried smile, and quietly wiped the floor clean. The next afternoon, he was back.
He forced her out of the wheelchair. He made her walk through the snow-covered pine forests, pointing out the tiny green shoots fighting up through the ice — lecturing her, with patient, relentless conviction, about the biological resilience of living things.
Slowly, the thick ice around her heart began to fracture. She started waiting by the window for the white jacket to appear on the path below.
Then came the night of the blizzard.
They had ventured too far from the sanatorium and taken shelter in an abandoned ranger cabin on the mountainside. The avalanche hit with the force of a freight train. The roof buckled and began to collapse.