Chapter 3 - Eleven Minutes and Forty-Three Seconds
The screen flickered.
The lighting was pitch black, illuminated only by the faint, pulsing blue glow of a dying phone screen and the emergency LED beacon on her coat.
Clara appeared on screen.
Her dark hair was matted with ice and sweat. A thick smear of dark, dried blood ran down her left temple from a deep laceration near her hairline. She was shivering violently, her breath coming in thick, white plumes that obscured the lens every few seconds. Behind her, the terrifying sound of groaning wooden beams and howling wind rattled the microphone.
“Ethan,” her voice came through the tablet speakers—thin, raspy, and small. “I've called you seventeen times. I kept thinking... I kept thinking you'd answer the next one.”
A sob tore through my throat. I pressed the tablet against my chest, unable to breathe, before forcing myself to look at her face again.
“I know about Sophia,” Clara whispered on screen. Her lips were blue, cracking from the dry, sub-zero air. “Miami. Rome. Manhattan. Even the pink diamond bracelet you picked out on her birthday list. I've known for ninety days, Ethan.”
“I’m sorry,” I sobbed into the empty air of the snowcat. “Clara, I’m sorry! Please!”
“I came up here to decide whether to leave you,” she continued, holding up a snow-stained legal document into the camera’s dim light. The bold heading read: PETITION FOR DISSOLUTION OF MARRIAGE. “I sat in this cabin for six hours looking at these papers. But part of me... a stupid, foolish part of me... still hoped you'd remember what today was.”
My mind raced. What today was.
I checked the calendar on my wristwatch. October 14th.
Our eleventh wedding anniversary.
The day eleven years ago when we were twenty-three years old, living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment in Boulder with three hundred dollars in our bank account. The day I had taken her up to Black Ridge, dropped to my knees in a knee-deep snowdrift, and given her a twenty-dollar silver ring.
“Eleven years ago,” Clara’s voice shook on screen as tears traced clean lines through the frost on her cheeks, “you held my hands in a storm just like this one. You promised me that if I ever got lost in the snow, you'd search until you couldn't stand anymore. You swore you’d never let me freeze alone.”
She wiped a tear away with a heavy, snow-covered glove.
“My leg is pinned under the main roof timber,” she whispered, looking directly into the camera lens—looking directly into my eyes. “The generator died an hour ago. The temperature inside the room is dropping past zero. I know you aren't coming, Ethan. You're in the Maldives.”
She closed her eyes, letting out a long, shuddering breath.
May you like
“I'm not waiting for you anymore.”
The camera shook violently, a loud roar of falling snow filled the audio feed, and the screen cut to total, suffocating black.
