Morning

Tomek woke under a heated blanket, with a drip in his arm and a ceiling the color of milk.

For a few long seconds he did not know whether he was alive. Then the pain arrived, a dull, deep ache in his shoulder, a fierce burning in his hands and feet as the blood came back, and he understood that pain was the best news in the world.

"Frostnip," said the doctor at the Chamonix hospital, a brisk woman with tired eyes. "Your fingers will be sore for weeks. The shoulder is a bad sprain, not a fracture. Another hour in that rope, and I'd be telling you a very different story." She paused. "Or telling someone else."

He said nothing. There was nothing to say. He looked at his hands, wrapped in white gauze, and he began, quietly, to shake.

Kasia had come off the mountain the other way. The ground team had reached her an hour after the helicopter took him, wrapped her in a foil blanket, fed her sugar, and walked her down in the afternoon light. They put her on the cable car, then in a rescue vehicle, then in a hospital corridor where she sat for forty minutes with her red jacket in her lap, refusing every offer of a chair, until a nurse finally came and said, "He's awake. He's asking for you."

She didn't remember crossing the room. She remembered only his face, gray and thin and alive, and the way it broke open when he saw her.

"You sang," he said. His voice was a croak. "I heard you. You were so bad."

"I know." She laughed, and it turned to tears halfway through, and she pressed her forehead to his bandaged hand. "I know. The football chant was the worst."

"It was perfect."

Outside the window, the morning had cleared. The sky above Chamonix was a hard, pure blue, and above the roofs and the pines the whole white range stood in the light, the Aiguilles, the Dôme, and far off, small and black and unforgiving, the Giant's Tooth.

Marco and Julien came by that evening, shy and awkward in civilian clothes, holding a box of chocolates that looked suspiciously like a gift for someone's mother. Tomek tried to stand to thank them. Julien waved him back down. "We had the sky, and the sky gave us a gap," he said. "The rest was your wife."

"Not my wife," said Tomek. "Not yet."

When they had gone, he asked Kasia to open his rucksack, which a rescuer had carried down. She found the ring in the lid, a small, plain circle of silver, tarnished slightly by cold, wrapped in a handkerchief. She did not say anything. She only held it up to the window, where it caught the last of the light.

"I never finished the question," Tomek said.

"No," Kasia said. "You didn't." She sat on the edge of the bed, took his bandaged hand carefully between both of hers, and smiled the smile that had undone him on a rainy crag two summers ago. "But you lived. So I think you'd better ask."

He asked. It took him three tries to get the words out around the lump in his throat.

She said yes before he finished.

In April they went to the Tatra, and they climbed something easy and stupid, and they ate pierogi in the grass until they fell asleep in the sun. On the wall above their kitchen there is a photograph of a black granite fang against a blue sky, and beneath it, in Kasia's handwriting, a line from the spreadsheet of their lives: Turnaround time: whenever the other one needs us.

Everybody needs luck, she had said, on a ledge, in the sun.

They had been given a little. And they had made the rest themselves, out of rope and patience and a voice that would not stop singing in the dark.