Chapter 6 - The Edge of the Abyss
The wind shrieked like a choir of banshees, whipping freezing salt spray into my eyes until my skin felt raw and bleeding.
Every step up the frozen, rocky switchback was an agony that defied description. My postpartum body, strained to its absolute physiological limit, begged me to collapse. Blood pounded in my ears; my lungs burned with the dry, sub-zero air. But every time my knees buckled against the jagged shale, I looked up through the swirling snow and saw that solitary silhouette perched on the rim of the precipice.
He hadn't jumped yet.
He was standing on the absolute edge of the black granite cliffs, three hundred feet above the surging Atlantic surf. The waves below exploded against the rocks with thunderous booms that shook the stone beneath my boots.
“Logan!” I screamed, but the wind tore the sound from my lips and scattered it into the void.
Marcus was thirty feet behind me, his heavy tactical boots slipping on the sheet ice, yelling for me to slow down. But I couldn't slow down. A single gust of wind, a single misstep, a single split second of absolute despair, and the father of my child would plummet into the freezing churn below.
I scrambled up the final crest of the ravine, bursting onto the windswept plateau of the old Blackwood cemetery.
Rusted iron railings, long since collapsed by sea salt and decades of neglected winter storms, poked out of the snow like broken ribs. Sunken slate headstones, green with lichen and half-buried in drifts, stood in jagged, uneven rows.
And there, standing before two simple gray granite markers near the cliff’s edge, stood Logan.
He wore no coat.
He stood in the sub-zero blizzard wearing only his thin denim shirt and work trousers, his clothing plastered to his emaciated frame by freezing rain. His bare hands were purple with advanced frostbite. His hair was caked in ice. He was looking down at a small stone carved in the shape of a sleeping lamb—Noah’s cenotaph.
He took a slow, deliberate half-step forward.
His boots were now half off the edge of the sheer precipice. A three-hundred-foot vertical drop into black water and jagged boulders.
“LOGAN!” I roared with every ounce of air, life, and fury left in my soul.
The figure stiffened.
Slowly, as if turning through deep water, Logan looked back over his shoulder.
When his eyes found mine through the blinding snow, his face didn't register surprise. It registered a terrifying, hallucinated awe. He looked at me as if I were an apparition summoned by his dying brain.
“Joanna?” he whispered, his voice cracked and hollow, barely carrying across the ten yards of frozen grass that separated us. “No… no, you’re not real. You’re warm… you’re back in the city with the baby… I left you so the shadow wouldn't touch you…”
“Look at me, you coward!” I yelled, stepping closer, my boots crunching violently into the snow. Marcus reached the plateau behind me, his hand instantly reaching for his radio, but I threw an arm back, signaling him fiercely to stay where he was. Any sudden movement from an armed stranger would push Logan over the brink.
“I am real!” I shouted, wiping the sleet from my eyes, taking another step forward. “I am flesh and blood, Logan! I am the woman you swore to love in sickness and in health! And I did not freeze my hands in sub-zero surf just to watch you jump off a cliff like a pathetic, self-pitying broken boy!”
Logan flinched, his head jerking back. “You shouldn't be here! Don't look at this place! Don't breathe this air! It’s poisoned, Joanna! This island is where everything I love rots! Noah is here! Clara is here!”
“Noah is dead, Logan!” I screamed, the brutal truth slamming into him like a physical fist. “And Clara is dead! And nothing you do tonight will bring them back!”
“I know that!” Logan shrieked, his voice breaking into a ragged, guttural wail that tore my heart out of my chest. He threw his arms wide toward the black, surging ocean below. “I know they’re dead! And it’s my fault! I was Noah’s father! I was supposed to keep him safe! I turned my back for ninety seconds, Joanna! Ninety seconds to warm a bottle of milk, and God stole his breath away! How do I live with that? How do I look at another baby knowing that I am the man who let his brother die?”
Tears poured down Logan’s frozen cheeks, turning instantly to frost on his skin. His entire body was shaking with violent, uncontrollable tremors of hypothermia.
“I looked at Leo,” Logan sobbed, his voice dropping to an agonizing whisper. “I looked at his face in that hospital room, and I saw Noah’s eyes. I saw Noah’s mouth. And I felt the terror, Joanna. A terror so massive, so suffocating, that I couldn't draw air into my lungs. I knew that if I held him, if I fell in love with him, the universe would rip him away from me just like it ripped Noah! The only way to save him was to leave! If I am dead… the curse dies with me!”
“There is no curse, Logan!” I cried, taking another two steps forward. I was now only five yards from him. I could see the pale blue tint of his lips, the dead, hollow emptiness in his pupils. “Noah didn't die because of you! He had an undetected heart defect! Your father told me! He was a physician, Logan! He fought for forty-five minutes to save his grandson’s life! Noah died because the world is fragile, because terrible, unfair tragedies happen to good people! Not because you are marked by the devil!”
“You don't understand,” Logan whispered, shaking his head, his heel sliding another fraction of an inch over the cliff edge. A small cascade of frozen dirt and pebbles broke loose, tumbling silently down into the boiling surf three hundred feet below. “I can’t survive it again. If I held that baby and lost him… my soul would shatter into pieces that could never be glued back together. I am too weak to be a father, Joanna. I am broken.”
“Then be broken!” I screamed, taking a massive stride forward, closing the distance between us until I was standing barely three feet from him, the howling ocean wind whipping between our bodies. “Be broken, Logan! Cry! Scream! Fall to your knees and mourn Noah every single day for the rest of your life! But you do not get to abandon us!”
I reached into my heavy wool coat.
With trembling, freezing fingers, I pulled out Dr. Wright’s gold heirloom watch. I held it up in the beam of Marcus’s flashlight. The gold gleamed brightly against the storm.
“Your father sent this,” I said, my voice steadying, burning with an authority that surpassed the howling gale. “He spent nine years mourning you while you were still breathing. He spent forty years saving strangers while his own son hid in a rusted shipping container. He is at home right now, holding your son. Holding Leo.”
Logan’s breath hitched at the sound of the name. “Leo…”
“Leo Wright,” I repeated firmly. “He is two days old, Logan. He doesn't know what a curse is. He doesn't know that his father is a coward who ran away into the dark. He only knows that when he opens his eyes, he looks for a face he hasn't seen yet. He looks for his father.”
I reached my hand out across the three feet of freezing air.
My palm was open. My fingers were trembling, not from fear, but from cold and the sheer, desperate gravity of the moment.
“I carried him through seven months of loneliness,” I whispered, tears spilling hot over my frozen cheeks. “I gave birth to him alone in a room full of strangers. I did the impossible, Logan. Now it’s your turn. You want to pay your debt to Noah? You want to honor Clara’s memory? You don't do it by throwing your body against those rocks! You do it by living! You do it by standing between this cruel world and that baby boy and refusing to let him fall!”
Logan looked down at my outstretched hand.
Then he looked past me, toward the dark ocean, and then down at the two small headstones of his past.
A terrible, seismic battle raged across his hollowed face. The dark, nine-year gravity of grief pulled him toward the void; the terrifying, fragile spark of life pulled him toward my palm.
“Joanna…” he wept, his voice breaking completely. “I’m scared. I’m so damn scared.”
“I know,” I cried softly. “So am I. But we do it scared. Come home, Logan.”
The wind roared, a vicious gust slamming against the cliff face with the force of an avalanche. Logan’s foot slipped.
His weight tilted backward over the abyss.
I didn't think. I lunged.
I threw my entire body forward, my hands locking around the wet canvas of his shirt, my fingers digging into his collarbone as his boots lost traction entirely on the black shale. The momentum dragged me toward the brink, my knees slamming hard against the frozen dirt, but before the ocean could claim us, two massive, heavy arms wrapped around my waist from behind.
Marcus Vance had thrown his full weight onto the frozen turf, his boots braced against a granite headstone, anchoring us both.
“PULL!” Marcus roared into the blizzard.
With a guttural, primal scream, I dug my heels into the earth and heaved with everything I possessed.
Logan’s body crossed back over the threshold of the cliff, crashing heavily onto the snow-covered turf beside me.
We fell together into the freezing drifts, tangled in limbs, ice, and salt. Logan lay on his back, staring up into the swirling gray vortex of the sky, his chest heaving with ragged, violent gasps of air.
I didn't let go of his shirt. I grabbed his face with both of my numb, frozen hands, forcing him to look directly into my eyes.
“You’re alive,” I sobbed, my tears falling onto his frozen beard, melting the ice against his cheeks. “You’re alive, you idiot. You’re coming home.”
Logan looked at me. And for the first time in seven months, the dead, hollow glaze vanished from his eyes. In its place was an ocean of agonizing, raw, beautiful human feeling.
May you like
He reached up with his frostbitten hands, grabbed my wrists, and buried his face into the hollow of my neck, letting out a shattered, mourning howl that finally, mercifully, drowned out the storm.
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