Page 19 of Good as Gold
Until the day he didn’t.
“He used to be the guy who’d poke you at the top of the run and ask, ‘Think I should try that chute?’ And I’d always give my honest opinion. Sometimes he listened, sometimes not. But he was just, like,magicon a snowboard. He could do things that other people only dream about.” I shake my head. “And he had no ego, either. He didn’t enter competitions. He just wanted to ride on powder under a blue sky and tell you stories in between runs.”
“Sounds like a good friend,” she whispers.
“The best. We worked for the same company. And then, a couple years in, he said, ‘Let’s start our own business. What do those guys have that we don’t?’And I said, ‘A helicopter that costs millions of dollars.’”
Leila laughs.
“But it turns out you can lease helicopters and you can hire pilots. Our big lucky break was buying a piece of land nobody wanted outside Aspen town limits. We needed a remote spot and approval for our helipads. That piece of land would probably cost two million now. But we had good timing and a dose of Sean’s good luck.”
I’m smiling now, even though I’m about to get to the depressing part. “Anyway—there was this particular peak we always liked to ride, but only on one side. The back of it was too hairy for paying guests. It had a mean chute right in front of a crevasse. It looked jumpable, but nobody had ever attempted it. The locals call it No Man’s Run…” When I glance at Leila again, she looks scared. “You sure you want to hear this?”
She swallows hard. “Yeah.”
I take a deep breath. “Last December, Sean heard that a crew of Canadians was going to film one of those guys taking first tracks on No Man’s Run. So he said, ‘I’ll beat ’em to it. You can film it from the bird.’”
Leila watches me with deep, sad eyes.
My chest feels tight now. I put down my drink. “I could have told him no, but I didn’t. He knew as much about safety as anyone, right? We’d just had a lot of snow, and of course he did some avalanche tests at the top. Those came out okay. But…” I take a deep breath. “I told him, ‘I got a bad feeling about the snow pack. What if you let the kiddies have it?’ And he just grinned and said, ‘I got this, Matty. Make sure you get good video.’”
Leila puts her hands in front of her face. But then she takes them down. “He was a grown man, right? He made his own call?”
“Yeah. Forty years young. But I’d talked him out of some of his worst ideas before.” I swallow hard. “Anyway, it looked good for a minute, there. The top part of his descent was textbook. He came through the chute, no problem. He made two nice crisp turns, and then he lined up for the jump. The crevasse was only about eight feet across, but…” My voice breaks on the last word.
I see it in my dreams every night. Sean approaches the rift. He bends his knees for the takeoff. And then the ground shifts beneath him. The moving snow pushes him right over the edge, and he vanishes, right before my eyes.
“He was just gone,” I rasp, my voice stolen by emotion. “Fell eighty feet down. Took them three days to recover his body.”
Leila lets out a heavy breath. “This wasnotyour fault.”
“Yeah, tell that to his sixteen-year-old daughter.”
Her eyes grow wide. “Oh,God. Does she blame you?”
“Not really.” I shake my head. “But she should. I was just hanging out above him in the helicopter, filming it and thinking—This is going to look so badass on our website.”
Again, I try to clear my throat. But it will never be clear again.
“Matty,” she says softly. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry, too.” That’s the response I’ve honed over the last four months. Because Iamsorry. Except there isn’t a single fucking thing I can do about it now, except try not to run our company into the ground. “His wife and I still own the damn business. But we canceled most of our season after his death.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Leila whispers.
“Yeah. Helicopter leases aren’t cheap, and now we have cashflow problems. So if I look exhausted, now you know why.”
She sets down her glass, rises up onto her knees and wraps her arms around me. “That’s a lot.”
I take a deep inhale, and the scent of her perfume socks me in the chest. My sleeping libido raises its head off the floor, perking up. She smells like flowers and feels like a goddess in my arms.
Fuck.
All too soon, she eases away and pours me another glug of wine. “Thank you for telling me.”
“You’re welcome.” The weird thing is that I actually feel a little lighter. “Hey—want to watchMeet the Parents? For old time’s sake?”
Her face breaks into a beautiful grin. “You know I do.”
