Chapter 1 - The Weight of Plastic
The emergency lights of the Summit County Search and Rescue convoy painted the snowbank in frantic pulses of crimson and cobalt. The air at nine thousand feet tasted like pure iron, so frigid it burned the lining of my trachea every time I tried to draw breath.
"Don’t let him see that one."
Her words didn’t carry the fury of an abandoned wife. They carried nothing at all. It was the dry, rasping whisper of vocal cords stripped raw by four days of screaming into howling mountain gales, yet it cut through the idling rumble of the diesel ambulances and struck me directly in the sternum.
Clara’s hand—blackened at the fingertips by third-degree frostbite, wrapped in thermal foil and sterile gauze—clutched the deputy’s parka sleeve with a desperate, trembling tenacity. She was not looking at the paramedic who was adjusting her intravenous saline, nor at the physician shouting vitals into a radio. She was looking at the transparent zip-top evidence bag held in the deputy’s left hand.
Inside that bag lay her iPhone 13. The tempered glass screen was shattered into a spiderweb of opaque fractures, the aluminum chassis warped, caked in frozen pine needles and dried, brownish-black blood.
"Clara," I choked out, taking an involuntary half-step forward across the churned slush. My custom Italian leather shoes, entirely unsuited for two feet of packed Colorado snow, offered no traction; I slipped, my knee slamming hard against the icy tailgate of the rescue truck. The damp chill soaked through my trousers instantly, but I barely felt it. "Clara, please. Look at me. I'm here. I’m right here."
She didn't flinch. Her hazel eyes, normally vibrant and perceptive, were sunken deep beneath bruised, purple-rimmed sockets. Her lips were split, cracked horizontally like parched riverbeds, peeling and pale. When my shadow fell over her stretcher, her gaze drifted past my shoulder, tracking the vapor of my breath as if I were nothing more than a thermal disturbance in the atmosphere.
"Sir, you need to back up," Deputy Miller barked, stepping between us. His beard was frosted white, his face stern with the righteous, simmering contempt of a man who had spent ninety-six hours pulling frozen bodies out of drifts while I had been sipping Cristal on a sun-drenched atoll six thousand miles away. "She is in profound stage-three hypothermia. Core temperature is barely ninety-one degrees. Her left tibia is compound-fractured and she has internal abdominal trauma. Back off."
"I’m her husband," I snarled, the reflex of my wealth and authority flaring before I could suppress it. "I own Blackwood Holdings. I have two medical helicopters chartered from Denver landing at the county airfield right now. I will transfer her—"
"You’re four days late, Mr. Black," Miller said flatly. The quiet venom in his voice silenced me far more effectively than a raised hand. "The county bus is taking her to St. Anthony Summit Medical Center. If you want to follow, drive behind us. Do not touch her."
They hoisted the gurney into the back of the heated rig. The hydraulic lift gave a low hiss, and as the double doors slammed shut, I caught one final glimpse of Clara’s profile. She had closed her eyes. Her head was tilted back against the orange cervical collar, her chest rising in shallow, agonizing hitches.
The deputy walked over to the passenger side of his cruiser.
"Miller," I pleaded, running toward him, my cashmere overcoat dragging in the grime. "The phone. What did she record? What was on that device?"
Miller paused, his hand on the door handle. He looked at the plastic evidence bag on the passenger seat, then up at me. His jaw clenched so tightly I could hear the grinding of his teeth.
"You don't deserve to know," Miller muttered. "She recorded it when the blizzard breached the shed roof at four in the morning yesterday. She thought she was dying, Mr. Black. She was saying goodbye to the only thing left that mattered to her. And spoiler alert: it wasn't you."
He slammed his door, engaged the sirens, and tore down the serpentine mountain pass toward Frisco, leaving me standing in the blinding white silence of the Rockies.
In my pocket, my own phone vibrated violently.
I pulled it out with shaking hands. The glass screen was bright, obscene in its triviality. A notification banner from Sophia Lane appeared across the home screen:
*Babe? Where did you go? The pilot in Malé says the Gulfstream was redirected on emergency clearance. My luggage is still at the resort. You didn't leave your card for the villa incidentals. Please call me, I'm literally having a panic attack.*
Beneath her message were seventy-four unread emails from my corporate PR firm, nineteen voice memos from our board of directors, and three push alerts from Bloomberg: *BLACKWOOD ASSETS COMMODITIES DOWN 8.4% AMID CHIEF EXECUTIVE SPOUSAL DISAPPEARANCE SCANDAL.*
I stared at Sophia’s name on the glass.
Just seventy-two hours ago, that name had smelled of jasmine oil and warm saltwater. It had represented liberation, vanity, and the intoxicating illusion that I could outrun age and domestic decay.
Now, looking at her text while standing in the sub-zero wind that had nearly frozen Clara’s lungs to stone, the name made me want to tear my own skin off.
May you like
I threw the device onto the frozen asphalt. The titanium casing skittered across the ice, undamaged. I stomped my heel onto the screen once, twice, three times, until the OLED panel burst into a purple flare and died. Then I climbed into the rental SUV and sped after the flashing red lights down the canyon.
***
