- 9 hours ago
Abandoned on a Snow Mountain, I Became a Tycoon's Obsession EPISODE
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Short filmTranscript
00:00He did not sleep that night. The chair he pulled up to my bed was leather and too small. He
00:05folded himself into it anyway. He held my left hand inside both of his, and watched the heart monitor as
00:11if it might lie if he looked away. Sometime around 3 a.m., I pretended to be asleep, just to
00:17see what he would do. He stood up. He walked to the window. He looked out at the East River
00:22for 10 minutes. He turned back. He stood at the foot of the bed and watched my chest rise and
00:28fall, counting, with the
00:29precision of a man who had once counted my pulse on a medevac. Then he came back to the chair.
00:34He leaned in. He pressed his lips, very lightly, to the inside of my wrist where the ivy line went
00:39in. He whispered into my skin.
00:56I am sorry I did not come sooner.
01:01When?
01:05You were awake.
01:07Sooner when, Damien?
01:14Eight years ago.
01:16When?
01:17The night you came home from grad school for the holiday. You laughed at something Preston said about a sample
01:22I had never heard of. I went home and painted 700 Nassaville on a wall. And decided I would wait.
01:31I should have come for you that night.
01:34Damien.
01:36I would have, if I had known how it would end.
01:40He looked at the signet on my fourth finger.
01:43I bought this a long time ago.
01:46This ring?
01:48This ring.
01:50For me?
01:51For the day I stopped waiting.
01:56I waited far longer than I should have.
01:58I am not waiting an hour longer than I have to.
02:01Damien.
02:02Hmm.
02:04What are you telling me?
02:06He met my eyes.
02:12I am telling you that the rest of my life starts at sunrise.
02:15When you walk out of this hospital, you walk into my house.
02:24And you do not walk out of it again unless I am holding the door.
02:31The next person who tries to take you from me will spend the rest of his life regretting it.
02:36The next person who tries to take you from me will spend the rest of my life regretting it.
02:43The next person who tries to take you from me will spend the rest of my life regretting it.
02:51Faster.
02:52Good.
03:01Discharge day.
03:02Damien did not let a nurse touch me.
03:04He sent the wheelchair away.
03:06He sent the orderly away.
03:08He scooped me out of the bed with one arm under my knees and one behind my shoulders and carried
03:12me.
03:12Slowly.
03:13The length of the corridor to the elevator.
03:15I had walked.
03:17By then.
03:18The length of that corridor on my own three times.
03:20I did not need to be carried.
03:22I did not object.
03:24The elevator opened in the underground garage.
03:27A black idled.
03:28He set me down only long enough to open the door.
03:30And then he lifted me again into the back seat as if the act of placing me there himself was
03:34something he could not delegate.
03:36Garcia.
03:36In the front passenger seat.
03:38Did not turn around.
03:39The pulled out.
03:41Damien did not let go of my hand on the drive uptown.
03:54I bought the building.
03:56Which building?
03:58My building.
03:59I own the penthouse.
04:00I bought the rest of it last month.
04:02All of it?
04:02All of it.
04:04Why?
04:06I did not want strangers across a wall from you.
04:12Damien.
04:16The other residents have been compensated above market.
04:19They had 90 days to relocate.
04:21The last unit cleared on Friday.
04:23The building is empty except for the staff I vetted.
04:26And the floor I am going to put your father on if he wants it.
04:30My father has a house.
04:31He has a house.
04:32He may also have the 8th floor.
04:35Damien.
04:36You are being excessive.
04:39I am told I am being excessive.
04:43He brought my hand to his mouth.
04:45Tell me to stop.
04:47I am not telling you to stop.
04:50I can't bear to.
04:52The pulled into the garage.
04:57He carried me into the elevator.
04:59The doors opened directly into his foyer.
05:01Into the wall of painted narcissus.
05:03And he set me down in front of it.
05:12Look.
05:12Look.
05:13I looked.
05:14A second wall.
05:15Opposite the first.
05:17Had been painted in my absence.
05:19Cores.
05:19The shapes of ice cores.
05:2137 of them.
05:23One for every site I had drilled in 7 years.
05:25Labeled in white paint in my own handwriting.
05:27Which had been copied.
05:29Line for line.
05:30From photographs of the field journal Reagan had stolen.
05:33I could not speak.
05:41I commissioned it in March.
05:43The artist worked from your notebooks.
05:45I had the originals returned from the federal evidence locker on a temporary basis.
05:49They are now back in the locker.
05:52Damien.
05:53The paintings are yours.
05:55Welcome home Sloan.
05:57The first week in his apartment.
05:58I learned how he had been loving me for a long time.
06:00I learned it in small pieces.
06:02The way a person learns the contents of a house they have moved into without at all.
06:06A bookshelf in the library held every paper I had ever published even the undergraduate ones.
06:10Even the conference posters bound in matching cloth and arranged in chronological order.
06:15A drawer in the kitchen held my mother's recipe for soda bread.
06:18Hand copied from her handwriting onto a card he had laminated.
06:21A folder in his study.
06:23Kept in a drawer he did not lock.
06:25Contained years of photographs of me.
06:27Clipped from family Christmas cards and university newsletters.
06:30And the society pages.
06:32I found the folder.
06:33On the sixth day.
06:34I did not tell him I had found it.
06:36I sat on the floor of his study and turned through the photographs in order.
06:39And at the back of the folder I found a single envelope.
06:42Sealed.
06:42Addressed to me in his handwriting and dated a long time ago.
06:45I almost opened it.
06:47I did not.
06:47I left it where it was.
06:49That night at dinner.
06:50I asked him.
06:50The letter in the back of the folder.
06:52He set his fork down.
06:54He did not pretend to misunderstand.
06:56You found it.
06:58What is it?
06:59It is what I would have said to you that night if I had come for you instead of painting
07:03the wall.
07:04You kept it.
07:06I kept everything.
07:08Damien.
07:08I have kept the napkin you wrote your phone number on when you were 11.
07:11I have kept the wrapper of the chocolate you split with me at your sister's Christensen.
07:15I have kept the program of every recital your mother dragged us to.
07:18I have kept the cockscrew you used to open the wine at your graduation dinner.
07:21I have kept the boarding pass you gave me when you came back from Iceland the year you turned 23.
07:25And asked if I would pick you up from JF because your boyfriend had forgotten.
07:30He met my eyes.
07:31I have kept all of it because I had to keep something.
07:34I set my fork down too.
07:36How many marriages did your mother arrange for you?
07:38Three.
07:40You refused all three?
07:42I refused all three.
07:44For me.
07:46Sloan.
07:47Everything I have ever refused I refused for you.
07:50His mother came on Tuesday.
07:52She had not.
07:53In the seven years I dated Preston.
07:55Sent me so much as a holiday card.
07:57She came now with a bouquet of pale pink peonies.
07:59And a smile that did not reach her eyes.
08:02And she sat across from me in Damien's living room.
08:04With the careful posture of a woman conducting a negotiation she expected to win.
08:08Damien stood by the window.
08:10He did not sit.
08:11He did not greet his mother.
08:13Sloan and dear.
08:14I came to welcome you.
08:15Mrs. Crane.
08:16I imagine all of this has been very overwhelming.
08:18The hospital.
08:18The press.
08:19My son's enthusiasm.
08:20His enthusiasm.
08:21He has always been intense.
08:24Particularly about the things he has wanted for a long time.
08:27I wonder if you have considered my dear whether intensity about this stage in your recovery
08:30is perhaps what you need.
08:32By the window.
08:33Damien turned.
08:34He did not raise his voice.
08:35Mother.
08:36Damien.
08:37You have ten seconds to walk out of this apartment.
08:41Damien.
08:42I am only.
08:43Eight seconds.
08:45You will not speak to me.
08:47Six seconds.
08:49The peonies.
08:50Untouched on the coffee table.
08:51Trembled with the vibration of the elevator returning to the foyer.
08:54She rose.
08:55She gathered her coat.
08:56She looked at me with the same smile pulled tight across her face.
09:00My dear.
09:00When this novelty passes.
09:02Two seconds.
09:03She left the elevator doors closed.
09:05Damien did not move for a long moment.
09:07Then he crossed the room and knelt in front of the chair where I was sitting.
09:11He took both my hands.
09:12Sloan.
09:14Damien.
09:14My mother will not be in this apartment again.
09:17Damien, she's your mother.
09:18My mother spent a long time telling me I would forget you if I tried hard enough.
09:21She introduced me to fourteen women whose family is my last name.
09:24She told my father at one point that I was an embarrassment to the family for refusing to marry.
09:27She does not get to walk in here now and call you a novelty.
09:30There is no version of this where you are second to anyone, Sloan.
09:33Not my mother.
09:34Not the company.
09:36Not the past.
09:37He pressed my knuckles to his mouth.
09:40Not for the rest of my life.
09:43He visited Preston in prison on a Wednesday.
09:45I did not know he had gone until he came home and sat across from me at the kitchen island
09:49and poured himself a glass of whiskey and told me.
09:52I went to see Marsh today.
09:54Damien.
09:55I had to.
09:57Why?
09:59I wanted him to see my face.
10:01He turned the glass in his fingers.
10:03He has been telling himself since the hearing that what happened to him was the system.
10:07That the audit broke him.
10:08That the federal prosecutor broke him.
10:11That the press broke him.
10:13I wanted him to know it was a man.
10:15What did you say to him?
10:17I sat across a steel table from a fourteen minutes.
10:20I didn't speak for the first ten.
10:21He waited.
10:22He was the one who broke.
10:23He asked me what I wanted.
10:24I told him I wanted him to understand exactly what he had done.
10:27That he had touched a woman I had loved for a long time.
10:30That he had taken seven years of her life and gambled them on a press release.
10:34That he had left her in the snow because he assumed her family would clean it up.
10:38I told him that the part he didn't understand and would now have years to understand was
10:41that there had never been a moment in all the time he had known her when she was unprotected.
10:44I told him that he was alive only because you had asked me not to make a different decision.
10:48He drank.
10:50He cried.
10:52Damien.
10:53I did not enjoy it.
10:54Did you not?
10:56He set down the glass.
10:58I enjoyed every second of it.
10:59I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
11:00I sat across from a man who had hurt you and I watched him understand, for the first time,
11:05that he had been a small animal stepping on the tail of a much larger one.
11:08He came around the island.
11:10He stopped in front of me.
11:11He cupped the back of my neck the way he had cupped my skull in the tent.
11:14That is what I am, Sloane.
11:16With respect to you, I am the much larger animal.
11:20I will be that animal for the rest of your life.
11:22For any person who looks at you sideways, I am not going to pretend to be a different one.
11:26Tell me you understand.
11:28I understand.
11:30He pressed his forehead to mine.
11:32Good.
11:34Reagan called the apartment on a Thursday.
11:36She had been told, by every lawyer involved, not to.
11:39The no-contact clause was in effect.
11:41She called anyway, through the main line of Crane Industries, asking to be put through to me by name.
11:47The receptionist forwarded the call to Garcia.
11:49Garcia forwarded it to Damien.
11:51Damien answered on speaker, in front of me, at the kitchen island.
11:55Miss Snow.
11:57Master Crane, I am calling because...
12:01You are calling because your book deal collapsed.
12:03Your father's foundation has been quietly delisted from three donor circles in the last six weeks.
12:08Your fiancé's family has rescinded the engagement.
12:11Your apartment lease is not being renewed.
12:13And you have correctly disduced that all of this is connected.
12:16Silence.
12:17It is connected.
12:19Mr. Crane.
12:20I would like you to listen to me very carefully, Miss Snow.
12:23The reason your life is currently coming apart is not because I am vindictive.
12:27I am perfectly capable of vindictiveness.
12:29I have not yet been vindictive with you.
12:31The reason your life is coming apart is because the woman whose career you tried to take,
12:35whose data you stole, and whose recording I played in front of you in a tent at minus 31,
12:40asked me three months ago to leave you alone.
12:42I have honored that request.
12:46I have, how however, not asked any other person who knows you did to honor it.
12:51It turns out there are a great number of those people.
12:53They are removing you, on their own, from the rooms they control.
12:58The book editor at the publishing house was a former student of Sloan's.
13:01The donor coordinator at your father's foundation served on a Whitfield panel four years ago.
13:04Your fiancé's mother has been on the board of the Whitfield Climate Initiative since 2011.
13:09They are not retaliating, Miss Snow.
13:11They are simply choosing.
13:12Mr. Crane, please.
13:14I am not the one you should be asking, Miss Snow.
13:16He ended the call.
13:18He set down the phone.
13:19He looked at me.
13:20She will call again.
13:22She will eventually call you.
13:24She might.
13:25I would like permission, when she does, to make a small adjustment to her circumstances.
13:29What adjustment?
13:30A federal investigation currently dormant into the source of the wire that funded her Arege Graywood internship.
13:35Damien.
13:36I will only act if you tell me to.
13:38I looked at him for a long moment.
13:40I did not tell him to.
13:41I also did not tell him not to.
13:43He read my face.
13:44He nodded once.
13:45He poured me a cup of tea.
13:47The nights were the hardest.
13:49I had not, in seven years with Preston, slept poorly.
13:52I had slept on his couches and in his tents and across his shoulders on long flights.
13:57And I had slept the way a person who believed in the structure of her life slept.
14:01The structure was gone now.
14:02The nights showed it.
14:04I did not tell Damien.
14:05He noticed anyway.
14:06He noticed on the fourth night, when he came up to bring me a book I had asked for,
14:11and found me sitting on the couch by the south windows with the lights off.
14:14He set the book down.
14:16He sat next to me.
14:17He did not ask.
14:18He simply pulled me, carefully, against his shoulder, and we sat that way until the city
14:23lights began to thin toward dawn.
14:25On the fifth night, he came up at ten.
14:28On the sixth night, he came up at nine.
14:30On the seventh night, he stayed.
14:32He did not ask permission.
14:33He came up with a small leather bag and a book and the smallest, most contained smile I had
14:38ever seen on his face.
14:40And he said,
14:41Sloan, I am going to sleep in the second bedroom.
14:43The door will be open.
14:45If you need me, you say my name.
14:47You do not have to get up.
14:48You do not have to ring a bell.
14:49You say my name and I will be in the room in under three seconds.
14:53Damien.
14:54I am not asking for anything.
14:58I know.
14:59I am telling you that for the rest of your life, if you say my name in the dark, I
15:03will
15:04be there in under three seconds.
15:06He kissed my forehead.
15:07He went into the second bedroom.
15:09He left the door open.
15:11I lay in my own bed for the first hour.
15:13I listened to the sounds of him in the next room, the small zipper of the leather bag,
15:17the click of a lamp, the soft rustle of a turned page.
15:19At 11.30, the page turning stopped.
15:22He had fallen asleep with the book on his chest.
15:24I got up.
15:25I crossed the hallway.
15:27I stood in the doorway of the second bedroom and watched him sleep a man in a charcoal
15:31pullover and reading glasses in a guest bed in his own house, lit by a single lamp.
15:36He had been waiting a long time to sleep in the same hallway as me.
15:39I went back to my room.
15:41I left both doors open.
15:42I slept the whole night through.
15:44He gave me the cranes on a Sunday.
15:46I had told him, two weeks earlier, in the way a person tells a story that no longer matters,
15:51that as a child I had folded a wish into a paper crane and put it in a jar on
15:55my bedroom
15:55windowsill.
15:56The wish had been for my mother to get well.
15:58My mother had not gotten well.
15:59I had stopped folding cranes.
16:01He had said nothing at the time.
16:03He had simply nodded.
16:04He led me to the library that Sunday morning.
16:07He opened the double doors.
16:08The room three stories of bookshelves.
16:10A leather sofa.
16:11His piano against the back wall had been filled.
16:14Since I had last been in it the day before.
16:16With paper cranes.
16:17There were thousands of them.
16:19They hung from the ceiling on threads of clear nylon.
16:21In soft drifts.
16:22At different heights.
16:23In the pale yellow of winter narcissus.
16:26I stopped in the doorway.
16:27One thousand.
16:30Damien.
16:30One for every wish I have made for you since we were children.
16:33I kept count.
16:34He stepped into the room.
16:36He turned one of the cranes.
16:37Gently.
16:38On its thread.
16:38I started after the year your mother died.
16:40I did not know what to do with the things I wanted for you.
16:42I started folding.
16:43I folded one a week for the first year.
16:45Two a week for the next.
16:45Some time around my undergrout years I lost track.
16:48I counted them last month.
16:49There were 947.
16:52I folded the last 53 in the apartment downstairs while you were upstairs sleeping.
16:56I crossed the room.
16:57I touched one of the cranes.
16:59The paper was thin and cool.
17:01The crease was perfect.
17:02I knew the fold.
17:03It was the same fold I had used at 9.
17:05He had been folding cranes for me.
17:07Alone.
17:08In his apartment.
17:09For a long time.
17:11Damien.
17:12Hmm.
17:13What were the wishes?
17:14He looked at me.
17:15That you would grow up happy.
17:16That you would grow up loved.
17:17That you would grow up to do the work you wanted.
17:20That you would eventually be able to come home and rest.
17:23That you would eventually see me.
17:26That is the only wish I never finished folding.
17:29He reached up and unhooked a single crane from a thread above his head.
17:32He held it out to me.
17:34I would like you to fold the last one.
17:35I took the crane.
17:36It was a half fold.
17:37The paper waiting.
17:38The crease set.
17:39Damien.
17:41When you are ready.
17:43I am ready.
17:44I folded the last crane.
17:46The wish I folded inside it was that I had not taken so long to see him.
17:50I hung it on the empty thread.
17:52He held me.
17:52In the doorway of the library.
17:54For a long time.
17:58I kissed him that night.
17:59Not the careful kiss on the couch he had given me weeks ago.
18:02Not a kiss I was allowing him to give me.
18:04A kiss I gave him.
18:06I crossed the library after dinner.
18:07He was at the piano.
18:09Playing the eight notes my mother used to hum.
18:11He did not see me coming.
18:12I sat down next to him on the bench.
18:14I waited for him to finish the phrase.
18:16I tilted his face toward mine with two fingers under his chin.
18:20I kissed him.
18:21He went very still.
18:22For a heartbeat.
18:23He did not respond.
18:24Then he made a small sound not a word.
18:27Something quieter.
18:28A sound I had never heard him make in all the time I had known him and his hand came
18:31up to cut the back of my neck and the bench creaked because he had moved without
18:35thinking.
18:35He kissed me back the way a man kisses a person he has been kissing in his head every
18:40night for a long time.
18:41When he pulled back.
18:42Both his hands were on my face.
18:44His breath was not steady.
18:45His eyes had gone very dark.
18:47Sloan.
18:49Damien.
18:49I would like to say something.
18:52Say it.
18:54I have loved you for a very long time.
18:56I have loved you across continents and three engagements I refused and seven years of a
19:00man who was not me.
19:01I have loved you while you cried about other men in my passenger seat.
19:04I have loved you while you wrote thank you notes addressed to him on stationery I paid
19:07for.
19:08I have loved you while you called me at midnight to ask which dress you should wear to his
19:11department dinner.
19:12I have loved you in every shape a man can love a woman and still hide it.
19:16I am not going to hide any of it from this minute forward.
19:20Damien.
19:23I love you.
19:25His hands tightened on my face.
19:27Say it again.
19:29I love you.
19:30Again.
19:31I love you Damien.
19:33He pressed his forehead to mine.
19:34For a long moment he did not move.
19:36He simply breathed.
19:38Then he picked me up off the bench carefully with respect to the wound and walked me out
19:42of the library past the wall of narcissus into the foyer.
19:45He did not put me down at the elevator.
19:48He carried me into the bedroom.
19:49He set me slowly on the edge of the bed.
19:52He knelt on the floor in front of me.
19:54He took both my hands.
19:55I am not going to do anything tonight that I will not still be doing the night I die.
19:59He looked up at me.
20:00But I would like tonight to ask you one thing.
20:03Marry me.
20:03The cranes in the library down the hall turned slowly on their threads in the draft from
20:08the open window.
20:11Yes.
20:14Damien yes.
20:15He did not let me go to Alaska alone.
20:17We had agreed weeks earlier that he would not come.
20:20He had said it himself in the kitchen that the right answer for my career was yes and the
20:24right answer for his heart was no.
20:26And that he would not be the one who decided which side of the snow line I slept on.
20:30He had meant it.
20:31He had also, the same night he meant it, started building a contingency.
20:35I found out about the contingency on the morning of April 2nd.
20:39He came into the breakfast room with a folder under his arm and set it down next to my coffee.
20:43Sloney.
20:44Hmm.
20:46Crane Industries has launched a polar research division.
20:50When?
20:53Last week.
20:55Damien.
20:56The division is headquarters out of Anchorage.
20:59It is funding three independent scientific teams across the Rangel and St. Alaya ranges.
21:04The director of the division is a 58-year-old former Nenoway scientist whose hire I personally
21:08approved at 3 a.m. on a Sunday.
21:10The director reports to a vice president of strategic operations.
21:13Damien.
21:14The vice president of strategic operations will be working out of a forward base camp in the
21:18ringlish range from April 15th through the close of the field season.
21:21Damien.
21:22The vice president of strategic operations, me.
21:24I close the folder.
21:25You are not coming with me to the field as my boyfriend.
21:28I am not coming with you to the field as your boyfriend.
21:30You are coming with me to the field as the vice president of a polar research resension
21:35you invented in the last three weeks.
21:38With cover that will hold up to any audit.
21:41Damien.
21:42I will sleep in a separate module.
21:43I will not interfere with your team.
21:44I will not be on your radio frequency.
21:46I will, however, be 300 yards away every night you are in the field.
21:50You did not have to do this.
21:52I had to do this.
21:54Why?
21:55He sat down across from me.
21:57He took my left hand.
21:58He looked at the signet ring he had slid onto it the night of the surgery and never asked
22:02back.
22:03Because the last time you went to that mountain without me, you came home with a hole in
22:06your chest.
22:07I am not living through that twice.
22:09I can take care of myself.
22:11I know you can.
22:13I am asking, please, for the rest of my life to never have to find out again.
22:17I looked at him for a long moment.
22:19I had spent seven years asking a man to follow me to airports.
22:22I now had a man who would follow me to ice.
22:25All right.
22:25He brought my hand to his mouth.
22:30We landed in Anchorage on April 15th.
22:32He had flown commercial three days ahead of me to maintain the cover.
22:36He met me at the airport in a Crane Industries parka with a name tag that said D.
22:40Crane, VP Strategic Ops and a face so neutral that even I almost believed it.
22:45He shook my hand at the gate.
22:47He did not kiss me.
22:48He carried my carry on to the SUV.
22:50In the SUV, with the doors closed and the windows tinted, he took my face in both hands
22:55and kissed me as if he had not seen me in a year.
22:58Three days was too long.
23:00Damien.
23:01I am revising the cover.
23:03I will be sleeping in your module.
23:05That defeats the cover.
23:07I do not care.
23:09Damien.
23:10Three days, Sloan.
23:12He kissed me again.
23:13The cover, for the record, held.
23:15The cold weather medic worked it out the first night.
23:18Finn worked it out the second.
23:19Briggs, who had transported me out of the equipment crate at Wrangell in February,
23:23worked it out before we even landed.
23:26Nobody said anything.
23:27Nobody had to.
23:28Damien did not hide that he watched me work.
23:30Damien did not hide that he ate every meal next to me.
23:33Damien did not hide that when I came back from the day's transects with snow in my hair,
23:37he met me at the door of the heated module with a towel he had warmed by the stove.
23:41The team, by week two, simply absorbed him.
23:44Finn said it best, late one night in the operations module,
23:47after Damien had stepped out to take a call.
23:50Sloan.
23:51Hmm?
23:51I have seen a lot of men love a lot of women.
23:54I have never seen one love a woman like that.
23:56Like what?
23:58Like you are the only currency he has ever wanted.
24:00I did not have an answer for that.
24:02Finn went back to his clipboard.
24:04Damien came back in.
24:05He sat down next to me.
24:06He set a fresh cup of tea at my elbow without asking.
24:09He glanced at the medical chart on my clipboard,
24:12frowned slightly at one number on it, and said,
24:14Pulse is up.
24:15I just walked in from the field.
24:17That is not Field Walk Pulse.
24:19Damien.
24:20I would like the medic to look at you tonight.
24:22The medic looked at me that night.
24:23The pulse was, as it turned out, fine.
24:26Damien did not apologize for asking.
24:28In the third week, I learned about the foundations.
24:31I learned about them by accident.
24:33The way I had learned about the wall of Narcissus,
24:35and the box of cranes,
24:37and the bound copies of every paper I had ever published.
24:40He did not volunteer.
24:41The information, I found it by following a thread.
24:44The thread was a small thank you note from a graduate student in Cape Town that arrived at
24:48base camp by satellite mail.
24:50The student had received a stipend from the Polar Atlas Foundation to attend a
24:54conference where I had given a keynote four years earlier.
24:57The note was effusive.
24:58It thanked me for the body of work and the foundation for the stipend.
25:01I had never heard of the Polar Atlas Foundation.
25:04I looked it up.
25:05Polar Atlas Foundation had given approximately $800,000 over the past nine years in small
25:10individual stipends to graduate students in glaciology, climate science, and polar geophysics.
25:16The recipient list was a precise map of every young researcher whose work had any tangential
25:21connection to mine.
25:22The foundation's board was three people.
25:24None of them I had heard of.
25:25I traced the LLC behind the foundation through three jurisdictions.
25:29It was Damien's.
25:30I traced four other foundations through the same pattern.
25:33Northern Light Trust, Ice and Salt Initiative, the 1,962 Foundation.
25:40Named, I realized, for the year of the lock at the Lake House, the Whitfield Adjacent Fellowship.
25:46Together, they had quietly dispersed about $11 million to young scientists in fields adjacent
25:51to mine.
25:51I confronted him about it that night in our module.
25:54He did not deny it.
25:56Damien.
25:57I funded your students.
26:00I do not have students.
26:02You will.
26:03I funded the field you were going to lead.
26:09Damien.
26:10He took my hand.
26:11I have been preparing the ground, Sloan, for a long time.
26:15I built the foundation network the same way I built the apartment and the wall.
26:18Not for you to notice.
26:20For you to land in, when you are ready.
26:22When you announce your own laboratory next year, and you will, every promising postdoc
26:25in the discipline will already have a personal reason to apply to you.
26:28I did not stack the dare because I did not trust you to win without it.
26:31I stacked it because I would rather you not have to fight for what should have been handed
26:34to you seven years ago.
26:35Damien.
26:35Yes.
26:36There is no part of my life you have not been holding up from underneath.
26:41There is no part of you, Sloan.
26:42I am not willing to hold up from underneath.
26:44In the fourth week, he showed me Reagan's file.
26:47He had not brought it up since we landed.
26:49He brought it up only because, that morning, an emergency message had come through the satellite
26:54system.
26:55A tabloid in New York had published a photograph of me being carried, by Damien, off the medevac
27:00in February.
27:01The photograph had been bought from a freelancer who had snuck onto the helipad.
27:05The caption beneath the photo was a quote attributed, anonymously, to a close friend
27:09of Reagan Snow, suggesting that I had been romantically pursuing Damien Crane during my
27:14seven-year relationship with Preston.
27:15Damien read it to me at breakfast.
27:18He did not raise his voice.
27:19He set down the satellite tablet.
27:21He picked up his coffee.
27:22He took a slow sip.
27:25Sklone.
27:27Damien.
27:28I am withdrawing my offer to leave her alone.
27:31Damien.
27:31She violated the no-contact clause when she planted the quote, that is now her problem,
27:35not mine.
27:36The deferred prosecution agreement is forfeit.
27:38She will be charged with the underlying fraud on Monday.
27:41The federal investigation into her undergraduate funding will be opened on Tuesday.
27:44I would like to do one additional thing.
27:46He looked at me.
27:47I would like to release the recording.
27:49The full one.
27:50The recording Reagan's midnight phone call from the Wrangell command tent had been used
27:54in the ethics hearing, and in Preston's case.
27:57But the full audio had never been made public.
27:59The two-minute clip the press had covered had only contained the part about the journal.
28:03The remaining 90 seconds contained the part where she had called me stupid for thinking
28:07money could buy a man.
28:08The part where she had described, in detail, the strategy of waiting for me to humiliate
28:13myself into walking away.
28:15The part where she had laughed.
28:17Release it.
28:18He did not blink.
28:19All of it?
28:20All of it.
28:21To the same outlet that ran the tabloid quote?
28:23To the same outlet.
28:25He took out his satellite phone.
28:27He made one call.
28:28The call lasted four minutes.
28:30By dinner, the recording was up.
28:32By midnight, it had been picked up by every major outlet that had covered the original audit.
28:36By the next morning, the tabloid that had run the quote had retracted it.
28:40By the end of the week, the publishing house that had originally pulled Regan's book deal
28:44had publicly announced that it had also voided her advance contract for any future work.
28:48Regan's snow did not surface in public again.
28:51Damien did not say anything about it.
28:53He did not have to.
28:54He had told me, weeks ago, that there had never been a moment in our entire acquaintance
28:59when I was unprotected.
29:00I was beginning, finally, to understand exactly what that had meant.
29:04I drilled Whitfield 1 the same day the recording went live.
29:07We had not planned the timing.
29:09The team had simply gotten to the site in the rotation, and the weather had cooperated,
29:14and Briggs had said, that morning, today is your day.
29:17Damien insisted on coming.
29:18He had not pressed to be on any other field site with me.
29:21He had stayed within his cover.
29:23He had let me work without his shadow on my shoulder.
29:25On the morning of Whitfield 1, he did not ask permission.
29:29He came.
29:29He carried the equipment up the ridge himself, even though Briggs had two team members ready
29:34to do it.
29:34He stood 10 feet away while I drilled.
29:36He did not speak.
29:38I drilled.
29:38I loved the call.
29:39I labeled it.
29:40I stood up.
29:41I turned to look at him.
29:42He was watching me the way he had watched me come off the medevac at Teterboro a year
29:46before.
29:47Not breathing.
29:47Not blinking.
29:49Counting.
29:49With his thumb pressed unconsciously to the inside of his own wrist.
29:52Where he had once pressed it to mine.
29:55Damien.
29:56Hmm?
29:57I am all right.
29:59I know.
30:02This is the spot.
30:03I know.
30:05This is where I called you.
30:06This is where you called me.
30:08He took a step closer.
30:09He looked down at the snow.
30:10He looked at the small rise where the equipment crate had been.
30:13He looked at the lee of the outcrop where the walls had moved through.
30:16Then he knelt.
30:16He did not cry.
30:17He pressed his palm flat to the snow.
30:19The way a person might press a palm to a grave.
30:21He stayed there for a long moment.
30:23When he stood, his glove was wet through.
30:25He took my hand.
30:26I would like to ask you something.
30:28Ask.
30:29I would like to ask you to come back to this spot every year with me.
30:31On the anniversary for the rest of our lives.
30:34Not because it was the worst day.
30:35Because it was the day you called me.
30:37That is the day I want to keep.
30:39I closed my hand around his.
30:40Every year.
30:42Every year.
30:44All right.
30:44Briggs.
30:4520 feet away.
30:46Very politely.
30:47Turned his back to give us privacy.
30:48We stayed at Whitfield 1 for 10 more minutes.
30:51When we walked back down the ridge.
30:52Damien did not let go of my hand.
30:54Briggs did not say anything about that, either.
30:57We came home on May 28th.
30:59He had said, the night before we landed.
31:01That he wanted to be the one who drove me back from the airport.
31:04He had said it the way he said most things now calmly.
31:07With the assumption that I would not object.
31:09I did not object.
31:10He drove me back from Teterboro at 6 a.m.
31:13On a Tuesday in late spring.
31:15The apartment, when we walked into the foyer, had changed.
31:18The wall of course the one he had commissioned for me in March was the same.
31:21The wall of Narcissus, opposite, was the same.
31:24The piano was the same.
31:26The library, three rooms down, was the same.
31:29The bedroom had changed.
31:30He had moved his things in.
31:32His shoes by the door.
31:33His charcoal pullover folded over the back of the reading chair.
31:36His book on the bedside table on what had become.
31:38In the last two months.
31:40His side.
31:41Sloan.
31:42Damien.
31:43I am not asking permission.
31:45I am not asking you to.
31:46He smiled.
31:47It was the first full, unmanaged smile I had ever seen on his face.
31:51He set my carry-on down by the door.
31:53He picked me up.
31:54I have had a small panic.
31:55Every day, for six weeks, that you would change your mind on the plane.
31:58I did not change my mind.
32:00I know that now.
32:01Damien.
32:02Hmm.
32:02Put me down.
32:03No.
32:04I can walk.
32:05I know.
32:06He carried me through the foyer.
32:08Past the wall of course.
32:09Into the bedroom.
32:10He set me, very carefully, on the edge of the bed.
32:13He knelt in front of me.
32:14He took both my hands.
32:16He looked up at me for a long moment.
32:17I would like to ask you the question I told you I was going to ask you in the winter.
32:22Damien.
32:22It is May.
32:23I cannot wait until the winter.
32:25It's May.
32:26Sloan.
32:27He reached into his pocket.
32:29He took out a small velvet box.
32:31He did not place it on the piano this time.
32:33He opened it.
32:34Inside.
32:35On a small bed of pale cream silk.
32:37Was a ring.
32:37It was not the kind of ring I would have expected.
32:40Not from him.
32:41Not from a man who could have walked into any jeweler in Manhattan and chosen any stone
32:45in the city.
32:46It was a small, deliberate band of brushed gold.
32:49Set into it.
32:50Almost flush.
32:51Was a single pale yellow sapphire.
32:53The color of winter narcissus.
32:54I knew the stone.
32:56I knew the stone.
32:57Because it had been in my mother's locket.
32:59The locket she had worn the day she died.
33:01The locket my father had been keeping in a velvet bag in a drawer in his desk for 18 years.
33:05Damien.
33:07I asked your father six months ago.
33:09Damien.
33:10He gave it to me with both hands.
33:13Damien.
33:14Sloanie Whitfield.
33:15Damien.
33:17I will say it twice if I have to.
33:19Say it.
33:22I have loved you for a very long time.
33:25I built a life with one room in it.
33:26The room had no furniture and no light and one chair facing the door.
33:30I sat in the chair year after year.
33:32I sat in it through three engagements I refused.
33:35I sat in it through your seven years with another man.
33:37I sat in it through the night your mother died and the night you graduated and the night
33:41I painted the wall.
33:43I sat in it on the afternoon you called me from a mountain in Alaska.
33:47I have not been in that room since the day I picked you up off the floor of that tent.
33:51The room is gone now Sloane.
33:53The whole house is yours.
33:55Marry me.
33:56I had thought for months that when this moment came I would say something simple.
34:01I had thought I would say yes.
34:02I had thought I would say yes because the word was small and complete and did not need
34:06any of the surrounding architecture.
34:08Instead I sat on the edge of his bed in his apartment in front of the wall of cause he
34:12had commissioned for me holding my mother's yellow sapphire on its brushed gold band and
34:17I started to cry.
34:18I had not cried since the helicopter.
34:20I cried now.
34:21He did not move.
34:22He did not say a word.
34:24He let me cry.
34:25After a long time I said it.
34:28Yes.
34:29He closed his eyes once he opened them.
34:31Say it again.
34:33Yes.
34:35Again?
34:36Yes Damien yes.
34:38He slid the ring onto my fourth finger above the signet he had given me in the hospital.
34:43The brushed gold was warm.
34:45The yellow sapphire caught the morning light coming in off the east river.
34:48He stayed kneeling.
34:49He pressed his forehead to my knees.
34:51I bent forward.
34:52I rested my forehead against the crown of his head.
34:54We stayed like that in the bedroom in his apartment for a long time.
34:58After a while he stood up.
35:00He picked me up off the edge of the bed.
35:02He did not, this time, set me down anywhere.
35:05He carried me to the south windows.
35:07He stood there, holding me, looking out at the city.
35:10Mrs. Crane.
35:12Damien.
35:13I am rehearsing.
35:15Rehearse it once more.
35:17Mrs. Crane.
35:19Yes Damien.
35:20He smiled into my hair.
35:21He did not put me down for the rest of the morning.
35:24We were married in November.
35:26He gave me.
35:27In the months between.
35:28The kind of wedding that a man who has been planning a wedding in his head for a long time
35:32gives a woman who has been allowing herself to imagine one for ten weeks.
35:35Which is to say, a small wedding.
35:37I had thought he would want a large one.
35:39He could have filled every cathedral in Manhattan.
35:42He did not.
35:42He picked the lake house.
35:44He picked a Saturday in late November when the first snow was due.
35:47He picked the porch.
35:48He invited my father, three of his cousins, Garcia, Briggs, Finn, my two graduate cohort co-investigators, the cold weather
35:56medic, the surgeon who had patched my lung, and the National Science Foundation chair.
36:01That was the entire guest list.
36:02His mother was not invited.
36:04She wrote him a letter the week before the wedding.
36:06He returned it unopened.
36:07He did not tell me he had returned it.
36:10Garcia mentioned it, in passing, on the morning of the wedding.
36:13The way she mentioned most logistical details.
36:15I asked him about it that afternoon, in the bedroom.
36:18While I was getting dressed, he buttoned his cuff.
36:20He did not look up.
36:22Damien.
36:23She asked, two months ago, if she could attend.
36:26And?
36:28I told her she would be welcome the day she apologized to you.
36:31She did not.
36:33She did not.
36:35Damien.
36:37Sloan.
36:38She is your mother.
36:40She had 30 years to be my mother.
36:41She used that time to try to take you from me.
36:43I am not paying her interest on a debt she did not service.
36:46He buttoned the second cuff.
36:48When she is ready to apologize to you, she may come to dinner.
36:51Until then, she may live with what she chose.
36:53I crossed the room.
36:54I straightened his tie, slowly, with both hands.
36:58Damien.
36:58Hmm?
36:59I love you.
37:01He caught my hands at his collar.
37:03He kissed both wrists, one after the other.
37:05Mrs. Crane.
37:06Not yet.
37:07In 43 minutes.
37:0843.
37:09I have been counting since 6 a.m.
37:10He kissed me on the forehead.
37:12He turned me toward the door.
37:14Your father is waiting downstairs.
37:15All right.
37:16Sklonen.
37:17Hmm?
37:17Walk slowly.
37:18Why?
37:19Because the next time you walk through a door toward me, you are mine.
37:21I would like to remember every second of it.
37:23He cried at the ceremony.
37:24I had not expected him to.
37:26I had not thought it possible.
37:28He had been, for the entirety of the time I had known him, a man who had not visibly cried
37:32at a funeral, a wedding, a court ruling, or a press conference.
37:36He had stood at his father's gravesite and not shed a tear.
37:39He cried on the porch of the lake house on a Saturday in November when he saw me come around
37:44the corner of the house in my mother's dress.
37:46My father saw it first.
37:47He squeezed my elbow.
37:49Look at him.
37:50I looked.
37:51Damien was standing at the end of the porch in front of the open front door.
37:55The brass lock, the lock that had held since the house was built was just behind him.
37:59His hands were clasped in front of him.
38:01His eyes were closed.
38:02Tears were moving.
38:03Slowly, down his cheeks.
38:05He did not wipe them.
38:06He opened his eyes when I was three steps away.
38:09He smiled.
38:10It was the smile of a man who had been waiting a long time to use it.
38:13My father set my hand into his.
38:16Damien.
38:17Sir.
38:18She is yours.
38:20Sir.
38:21She always was.
38:22Dad smiled.
38:23He took his seat in the front row.
38:25The officiant, a friend of the family, who had married my parents in the same spot long
38:29ago said a few words.
38:30He spoke about commitment.
38:32He spoke about the longevity of love that has been quietly held.
38:35He spoke, briefly, about my mother, who had taught him to make soda bread when he was
38:39a young man.
38:40Then he said.
38:41Damien.
38:42Your vows.
38:43Damien took both my hands.
38:45Sloan Whitfield.
38:46Damien Crane.
38:47I have loved you for a very long time.
38:49I kept a small notebook.
38:50The notebook had in it everything I learned about you that nobody else knew.
38:53The way you held your fork.
38:54The way you closed a door so it did not click.
38:57The way you ate the corners of a sandwich first.
38:59The way you bit your thumb before you took an exam.
39:01I do not need the notebook anymore.
39:03The porch was very quiet.
39:04He went on.
39:05I am keeping it for our daughter.
39:07I vow to love you with the precision and the patience of a man who has practiced.
39:11I vow to defend you the way I have always defended you, which is publicly, immediately
39:14and without negotiation.
39:16I vow to bring you tea every morning and to play the piano for you every night.
39:19I vow to come home for dinner.
39:21Every night.
39:21For the rest of my life.
39:22I vow to never, under any circumstances, let you walk out of a room without telling you
39:26first that I love you.
39:27That is what I have for you, Sloan.
39:29The rest is yours to ask for.
39:30I said my vows.
39:31I do not remember them.
39:32I remember only that when the officiant said you may kiss the bride.
39:36Damien did not move quickly.
39:37He moved very slowly.
39:39He cupped my face the way he had cupped it the day he came up off the floor of the
39:42tent
39:43in Ringlaw.
39:43He kissed me, the first snow began, on cue, behind him.
39:48We did not have a reception.
39:49We had dinner, twelve of us, around a long wooden table in the dining room of the lake
39:54house, with two of my cousins and my father and Garcia and Briggs and Finn and the medic
39:58and the surgeon and the National Science Foundation chair, who had brought his wife.
40:02The food was simple.
40:04The wine was old.
40:05The conversation moved, the way conversations at lake houses move, in slow loops that did
40:10not need anywhere to go.
40:11After dinner, Damien played the piano.
40:13He played the eight notes my mother used to hum.
40:16He played the second eight notes he had written for me alone in his apartment, while I had
40:20been in Alaska drilling Whitfield One.
40:21He played a third set of eight notes I had never heard.
40:24He stopped after the third set.
40:26He turned to me.
40:27That one I wrote this morning.
40:29When this morning?
40:314am.
40:32Damien.
40:33I will write you a new eight notes every morning of our marriage.
40:37Damien.
40:39I have already started counting.
40:41Around midnight, the guests went to bed in the guest rooms upstairs.
40:44Damien took my hand.
40:45He led me out the front door, onto the porch, and down the gravel drive to the boathouse
40:50at the edge of the lake.
40:51The boathouse was lit with a single lamp.
40:53He had had it cleaned.
40:54He had had a single chair placed inside it, by the window facing the water.
40:58He had hung and I almost laughed when I saw it every single one of the thousand cranes from
41:03the apartment library.
41:04They hung from the ceiling of the boathouse in soft drifts of pale yellow, and the lamp
41:08lit them from below.
41:09He stood with me in the doorway.
41:11Sloan.
41:13Damien.
41:13This is the last thing.
41:14The last thing.
41:15Every other thing I have done over all this time I have done quietly.
41:18I have folded a rain.
41:19I have painted a wall.
41:20I have learned a piece of music.
41:21I have bought a building.
41:22I have built a foundation network.
41:23I have refused a marriage.
41:24I did all of it quietly because you were not yet mine.
41:27This is the last thing I do quietly.
41:28He turned me to face him.
41:29From tomorrow, I do everything loudly.
41:31I bring you flowers in front of every restaurant.
41:33I hold your hand at every board meeting.
41:35I introduce you at every event in this city as my wife for the rest of my life.
41:39Tell me you understand.
41:40I understand.
41:42Sloan.
41:44Welcome home.
41:45He cupped my face in both hands.
41:47He kissed me slowly.
41:48The way he had kissed me on the porch.
41:50And behind him, the thousand cranes turned slowly in the draft.
41:54I had spent seven years thinking my life was a story about being seen by the wrong man.
41:58It had been, all along, a story about being held up from underneath by the right one.
42:03The right one was holding me, now, in a boathouse at the edge of a lake at midnight in November,
42:08in front of one thousand paper wishes he had folded for me before he was thirty years old.
42:12The wish I had folded into the last crane, months ago, had been that I had not taken so long
42:17to see him.
42:18The wish I made now, standing in the doorway, was that I would have a lifetime war.
42:22The end.
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