Completely Read online

  Completely is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2017 Loveswept Ebook Edition

  Copyright © 2017 by Ruth Homrighaus

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Loveswept, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  LOVESWEPT is a registered trademark and the LOVESWEPT colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN 9780345545282

  Cover photograph: shironosov/iStock

  randomhousebooks.com

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  By Ruthie Knox

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Rosemary Chamberlain hadn’t showered in fifty-two days.

  She’d counted.

  Climbing was a waiting game, and climbing Mount Everest forced patience on those who didn’t have it. But Rosemary had patience in spades. She spent long, indistinguishable mornings huddled in a sleeping bag on the floor of a tent, perched on a shelf between the sky and the long drop, waiting for a break in the weather. Counting.

  Twenty-one days since she’d last worn fewer than two pairs of socks, and thirty-seven since she’d seen her own naked body.

  Seventeen cracks in the sole of the climbing boot. Five points on the toe cleat that she kicked into the ice.

  She put her weight on it, paused, waiting to see if it would hold. She counted the white clouds of her exhalation—two, three, four—and pushed hard to engage her quads. They burned, but that didn’t matter. Her left arm came up, synchronized, and drove the ice ax in.

  Above her, the orange blob that was her team’s guide, Indira, beckoned with one arm. She shouted something, but the wind took her words before they could reach Rosemary’s ears. She found a good placement for her left foot, weighted it, counted her breath, straightened her leg, swung her ax.

  Three team members ahead. Four behind. If she could just know how many feet remained between her and the summit, she would count them down, but she couldn’t, so she counted everything else.

  She’d written six thousand words yesterday. Two thousand competent and chirpy for an article that would appear on a conservationist website in England, four thousand plodding and uninspired on the draft of the first significant piece of her book. She needed to turn it in to her publisher as soon as she’d completed this climb—it was meant to be a magazine article, with the serial rights already sold to a major American outdoor publication—but she knew what she’d written lacked the spark her editor was looking for, the inspiration that would turn Rosemary’s book into a bestseller.

  This morning, she’d taken a walk around the perimeter of Base Camp with Indira, speculating about their chances at making the summit. They spotted three birds flying low against the bleak sky, which Indira had told her was a good sign.

  Some climbers adopted magical thinking.

  Rosemary preferred to count.

  Her teammate Anna had three children, four, six, and nine years old. Her husband wanted a divorce. Her husband didn’t understand why Anna couldn’t get a job at a bank and stay home with her family, but Rosemary did.

  Anna’s family was for the quiet pauses in between the swings of her ax. The mountain was her life.

  Rosemary’s left leg trembled uncontrollably when she leaned into it. She paused to rest and looked out at the alien landscape of snow and ice, bald rock, clear blue sky.

  She didn’t know if Everest was her life. She only knew that she’d spent most of her adulthood barely living, then left everything behind to set off down the path that led her here.

  Rosemary was the driving force behind organizing a team of British women to climb the Seven Summits—the highest mountains on each of the seven continents, beginning with Everest and then onward to Denali, Elbrus, Kilimanjaro, and the rest. She’d put everything she had on the line to bring her to this moment.

  Her heart beat sixty-two times per minute. She was thirty-nine years old, she had two hundred and six bones.

  She had one child, a daughter, who barely spoke to her.

  She had one marriage, to Winston, who’d released her when she asked him to.

  She had one home, in England, but she sold it and bought a cottage where she’d never lived. Now what she had was a bank account fat with pounds sterling and a pack strapped to her back containing nine freeze-dried meals, thirteen energy bars, and five days’ fuel left for her camp stove.

  This was her seventh trip through the Khumbu Icefall, her fourth journey to Camp One, where she’d spent five nights acclimatizing already with the other women in her group. If everything went well, it would be their last foray onto the mountain. They would do two nights at Camp Two, push onward to a night at Camp Three, and then a short and fitful attempt to sleep on the South Col before departing for the summit in the wee hours of the morning.

  Climbers knew how to wait. They knew how to count, to plan, and to winnow themselves to nothing but gloved hands grasping lengths of rope, lungs sucking air from oxygen canisters, cold feet pushing metal spikes into rivers of ice.

  Sheer will.

  Rosemary exhaled, long and slow, and counted. One. Two. Three. Four.

  She turned back to the ice and climbed.

  When she reached the top, she passed Indira to join the others, stomping their feet and keeping their muscles warm as they waited for the stragglers to make it up.

  Anna was deep in conversation with one of the Sherpa. Rosemary scanned the group, looking for a friendly face, but she didn’t find one. She stood apart, reluctant to impose herself where she wasn’t wanted.

  The other women called her princess behind her back. They felt she hadn’t paid her dues. Her two years’ intense preparation was nothing in comparison to the thousands of hours they’d spent developing their own expertise. Some of them disliked the fact she’d sold a book about the women’s Seven Summits expedition before the climbing even began. They worried Rosemary would use more than her share of resources, that she spent too much time courting media attention and not enough with her head in the game.

  The British press called her Lady Diana on the mountain. They’d been only too pleased to run old photographs from their files of Rosemary in a demure suit and pearls, to natter endlessly about her charity work and her manor home and her status as almost-baroness.

  They’d made her the blue-eyed, white-blond face of what was meant to be an expedition that celebrated the diversity and power of contemporary British womanhood, and apart from Indira, her teammates resented her for it.

  It couldn’t be helped. Rosemary only hoped her status would improve as they bagged one summit after the next. At the end of the day, each woman had to depend on her own body
, her own interior resources to power her up the mountain. Rosemary would show them what she could do.

  If she lay awake nights wondering whether she could actually do it, she would keep that fear to herself.

  She warmed her hands in her armpits. Anna and the Sherpa man had stepped to the edge of the cliff to look over the icefall. Anna spoke animatedly, waving her arms, then walked away, shaking her head.

  “Bloody Doctor Doom,” she said as she approached.

  “Pardon?”

  She jerked her head toward the man she’d been speaking with. “That’s what they call him. Mad bastard.”

  Rosemary edged closer to her teammates. “What did he say?”

  “He says the icefall isn’t safe and we should go home.”

  The Khumbu Icefall was the chute every climber had to pass through to make it from Base Camp to Everest proper. It was live glacier, actively shifting and changing from one year to the next, so dangerous that the international climbing community left it in charge of the Sherpa “ice doctors.” It was the job of these experienced and seasoned Nepalese men to identify a safe passage, fix ropes, and lash in place the dozens of metal ladders that made it possible for the fee-paying climbers to move efficiently up ice cliffs and over crevasses.

  The first time Rosemary had come through, she’d had to remind herself again and again that yes, it was true, many climbers died in the icefall. They died when the massive seracs broke loose and shattered, releasing tons of potential energy. They died in avalanches. They broke arms or legs, or they collapsed from the accumulated effects of altitude illness.

  Death could come for her on Everest. It had come for many others.

  But one did not die traversing an aluminum ladder over a fathoms-deep crevasse in metal-tipped boots, with ropes to hold on to. One found the experience revolting in every way. One privately, deeply, and without reservation hated it. But one did not die.

  Probably.

  “Does he think the weather’s going to turn?” Rosemary asked.

  “He says the route isn’t safe, there’s too many people on the mountain, the mountain isn’t happy, you name it. The upshot is, everyone should call it a day.” Anna shook her head. “I’m trying to maintain my summit frame of mind here. I don’t need his bad energy messing with my good vibes.”

  Rosemary glanced at the man. He wore a red jacket. He was taller than the other Sherpa. She’d seen him around Base Camp and knew he was one of the ice doctors, and that he spoke perfect English with an American accent. She thought he might have helped her onto one of the ladders on a previous passage, but she couldn’t be certain.

  “He’s always this way,” Aisling said. She had attempted Everest twice previously but never made it to the summit. “Comes back every year, works the icefall, tells everyone who will listen they shouldn’t be climbing.”

  “You’d think another line of work might suit him better.” Rosemary said it with a smile, but no one smiled back.

  Right. Jobs on Everest were more lucrative by far than any other form of employment available to the Sherpa people. To be an icefall doctor was to possess a high-status job in poverty-stricken Nepal. Her joke had been in poor taste. “I only meant—”

  “His father was Merlin Beckett,” Aisling said. “And his mother—”

  “That’s Yangchen Beckett’s son?”

  “Yep.”

  Rosemary turned to look at the man again, astounded.

  Sixteen years had passed since Yangchen Beckett became the first Nepalese woman to reach the peak of Everest and return alive. In total, she’d summited seven times—more than any other woman—and become a controversial subject in the small world of elite mountaineering.

  Shortly after her most recent summit, an article had appeared on one of the online climbing websites depicting Yangchen as a sinister figure: a talented young climber, she’d become a battered wife whose husband didn’t allow her above Base Camp. Yangchen and Merlin Beckett had taken their domestic strife to the slopes of Everest, where, according to the writer, Yangchen cracked Merlin Beckett’s head open with a rock and left his body to cool while she climbed to the top of Everest to claim her first summit.

  The article cast doubt on Yangchen’s sanity and the truth of her claim to having summited so many times—doubt that others were only too delighted to amplify. But Rosemary wasn’t convinced there was anything to it. The writer cited unnamed sources and offered little hard evidence.

  Yangchen herself had never given an interview.

  Now, standing so close to the woman’s son, Rosemary could only think how fantastic it would be to get the inside scoop on Yangchen Beckett. There had to be a story there, a real story more interesting than the penny dreadful gossip the article had inspired.

  It was too bad she hadn’t learned of Doctor Doom’s background at Base Camp. She didn’t know when or if she’d see him again.

  Indira touched her arm. “You ready?”

  She whipped around to see Anna preparing to lead the next push.

  Rosemary’s heart pumped a wash of dread through her veins, and she took a deep breath. It would be a long and exhausting day, followed by a night spent in thin air, shivering behind the thin walls of their tents, lucky if they could sleep even fitfully.

  Then more climbing. More shivering. More climbing. Hours to endure, one breath at a time. One step after the next. Thousands of footfalls to count.

  She’d wanted to climb Everest since she was a girl. At twenty, she’d told her boyfriend—later her husband—that it was the first thing of consequence she’d do with her life after university. I’m going to climb Mount Everest and write a book about it.

  Pregnancy had stopped her. Marriage had stopped her. Or, she supposed, she’d stopped herself, using motherhood and marriage as an excuse not to live her life.

  No more.

  This was her adventure, years in the planning, month after month of relentless hard work. Rosemary would screw her courage to the sticking post, test the outermost limits of her mind and body, and find, deep inside herself, the woman she’d always been meant to be.

  This wasn’t the moment to think about her book. This was the moment to have the experiences that would give her something to write about.

  Smiling, she turned her face toward the mountain. “I’m ready.”

  Chapter 2

  Dark.

  Dark, underground, dirt walls around her, dirt above her head. Scrabbling in the dirt with her fingernails, no air, no light, no hope of surviving, she raked at the dirt, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe, and she kicked hard against something that broke with a crack.

  Rosemary woke up gasping.

  Dark.

  She reached out a hand, felt the tent wall, reached out the other, found the cold fabric of a sleeping bag, and remembered.

  Everest. High on the mountain, Camp Three. Tomorrow, the South Col. The summit. Indira next to her.

  She was safe. For now.

  Someone needed to inform her respiratory system.

  Breathe through a straw, she reminded herself. Slow and steady. It was difficult to sleep at such a high altitude, difficult to stay warm, impossible to catch a breath that felt full and satisfying, and her brain compensated with nightmares.

  She was alive. Not buried. Frightened but basically okay, scared in the normal way that anyone would be scared doing something so big, but lots of people had done it before her, would do it after, and—

  “What’s that noise?” Indira asked.

  The wind howled outside the tent. “I don’t hear anything.”

  They listened. Gusting wind. Then, something else, a deeper rumbling and a crack. “That.”

  A crack. The crack in her dream. The noise had awakened her.

  Rosemary sat up, reaching for her boots, shoving her feet into them as she turned on her light. “I’ll go find out.”

  As soon as she stepped out of the tent, she collided with a rushing red blur. “Sorry,” she said on instinct, and the voice
that came back at her was strong against the wind.

  “Get back in your tent.”

  Snow blew into in her face. She hadn’t put on her goggles or covered her head, and that was a stupid mistake at altitude, the kind of mistake that could get her killed.

  “Do you know what the noise was?” The cold rubbed her throat raw, the effort it took just to make herself heard astonishing.

  She could see his face now, headlamp-illuminated beneath the red hood. It was the Sherpa man from earlier, Doctor Doom, his face hard and blankly impassive. “Get back in your tent.”

  He took her by the shoulders, his grip strong even through her cold-weather suit. “Avalanche,” she heard, and then she was being pushed and turned at the same time, on her knees fumbling with the zipper, crawling into the relative warmth of her sleeping bag before she’d had a moment to make the decision for herself.

  Avalanche.

  Oh, God.

  “What’s happening?”

  For a moment, Rosemary could only think of her daughter, Beatrice, the last time she’d spoken to her, months earlier, and the promise she’d made to come home alive.

  She’d lied.

  She’d lied to Bea, lied to herself, lied her way into this expedition telling them she belonged here when she didn’t, she didn’t, she didn’t. Her chest hurt, she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak.

  “Rosemary, what?” The fear in Indira’s voice snapped a cord in Rosemary, woke her up a bit.

  “Avalanche,” she croaked.

  Indira’s hand came up to cover her mouth, and then she took it away, reached out her arms, and they held each other. Rosemary closed her eyes and waited for the snow to come. Would it all come at once? Would she know it was happening, or would it just be a blink, alive and then dead, here and then gone?