Chapter Twelve
Four weeks.
It was like yesterday and it was like forever. Shyla didn’t try to make any sense of it.
It was ridiculous to feel like something was missing from her life on the basis of relationships forged in such brief and unlikely circumstances, but she did. She’d given up trying to find the logic in any of it.
Logic - or the lack of it - didn’t stop her feeling blue. Neither did it ease the hollow feeling inside of her.
Her life felt like someone had pressed the pause button. She continued with her day-to-day obligations, but it was as if she moved through life like an automaton, simply doing the basics while all the joy had been wrung out of it.
Except for at night when her dreams, her subconscious, transported her back into the arms of her three fantasy lovers and she relived every second of the pleasure and delight they had brought her.
But none of it was real and the day dawned even more bleak with that knowledge.
God! She needed to get out of this funk.
“How are you feeling today?” her father asked as he dropped his latest set of notes on the desk for her to write up and turn into a magazine article.
Even though Shyla had already returned home, Laurence Digby had cut short his trip to Tanzania as soon as he’d received the mountain rescue messages regarding her situation. Shyla didn’t know why she was surprised. He’d always been a very loving, if slightly distracted, father.
Still, it was heart-warming to realize that she really did come first in his life. Perhaps his constant, grueling, schedule was his own way of outrunning the specters of her mother’s death. She could understand that to some extent.
“Okay,” she replied with a shrug at his question. Just like she did every day.
Laurence looked at her with sharp eyes which belied his often-preoccupied disposition. It was a mistake to imagine that he wasn’t completely aware of her mood, but of course he couldn’t possibly know the cause. Her father thought it was a reaction to the near-death experience, which was affecting her so, and Shyla chose not to correct that assumption.
Today, instead of letting it go, like he normally did, Laurence took a seat in front of her.
Shyla looked up in surprise. “Did I forget something?” she asked. It was entirely possible with the way she’d been distracted recently. She started rifling through the papers on her desk to see if there was something she’d overlooked but her father’s hand cupping the top of hers, stilled her.
She looked up to find him watching her with the weight of concern in his eyes.
“When your mother died…”
Shyla’s eyes widened. He never spoke of her mother’s death. It was like it was taboo or something and she’d learned to stop asking about it before she turned ten years old.
“…I felt guilty for the longest time.”
She turned her hand over, so it was clutching his.
“For a while I tried to block all of it out of my mind. If anyone approached me with an expedition to the entirety of the Himalayas, never mind K2, I refused it.”
His eyes were unfocussed, like he was looking back on the past. Then he returned his gaze to her face, and it felt like he could see all the secrets inside her mind.
“Then, around the second anniversary of her death I was invited to take part in a ground-breaking attempt on Labuche Kang III. It had always been one of your mothers’ dreams to scale a virgin summit and to go down in history as the first person to climb it.”
“So, you did it for her.” Suddenly Shyla realized her father’s motivation.
He nodded. “I tried, but it also meant I had to overcome a lot of the demons I had invited into my head.”
Shyla remembered that year because it had been one of the longest stretches her father had ever left her behind. It had also signaled a huge change in their lifestyle, as her father became one of the most recognized mountaineers in the world as a result of the Labuche Kang attempt. She hadn’t really understood it at the time. To her eleven-year-old self it had just been another mountain.
To her father it had been his launch into the big time. His skills got him noticed by all the right people, although, ironically, some of that was down to his story. The tragic loss of his wife, another casualty of what was widely considered to be the K2 curse, and the intriguing alternative lifestyle of a climber who took his young daughter along with him. It was the kind of story that caught the public’s interest, and suddenly people in the industry were willing to fork out serious money to have Laurence Digby’s name associated with their brand. Plus, any expedition to a mountain which had never been climbed made big news, whether scaling the peak was successful or not.
After that he was able to pretty much climb when and where he liked, as long as he posted on social media about it and tagged the sponsors.
That’s where Shyla had come in. Her father had no interest in Facebook or Instagram, so he simply took the pictures and she had taken over that part of his obligations. The sponsors just wanted as much publicity as possible, and Shyla had become his secret weapon where the others around him abhorred a part of the job they found stressful and felt took all the fun out of what they did.