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Okay.

I get the pool off first, which I do by walking up under it and shoving with both hands, which is the wrong way, and it comes off the low corner in one gray slab and takes me down the front from collar to knee. Twenty-nine degrees. The water goes through three layers before I can move and finds skin, and I stand there in the mud making a noise I have never made in front of another human being.

The fixed rig on the alder records this.

Then I go about re-tensioning, and here is what nobody tells you about a truckers hitch. It is not a hard knot. I can tie one. He showed me on Day 4 and I have tied nine of them since and they have all held.

The problem is that a truckers hitch is a purchase system, and a purchase system needs somebody at the anchor holding tension while somebody else takes the slack, and there is one of me. Every time I get the ridgeline where it needs to be and reach for the wrap, the whole line runs back through the loop and gives me everything back.

I do this eleven times.

On the eleventh I take the tail of that rope in both hands and lean back on it with my whole hundred and eighteen pounds and my heels dug into the mud and I scream at it. A real one. Everything in the register. The mountain takes it and gives back a raven, somewhere north, saying something obscene.

Then the line runs through the loop again and puts me on my back in the mud with the rope across my hands.

I lie there.

The sky up through the cedars is the flat white it has been for sixteen days. Water is coming into my collar. Six days left on the clock, and I am on my back in the mud at the north site of Tarn Reach, having lost a fight to a piece of fabric.

He would have had it up in ninety seconds. He would have had it up in ninety seconds and then gone and split wood and said nothing about it.

That is the moment it gets me, which is a stupid moment for it to get me, and I put both hands over my face and lie in the mud and let it happen. It goes on longer than I would like. The fixed rig on the alder records that as well, because that is what a fixed rig does, and at some point in the middle of it I have the very clear understanding that whatever noise I am making right now, somebody in a room with good coffee will be moving it around on a timeline by Thursday.

Fine.

Let them have it. It is real.

Neve comes at nine.

She stops eight feet off, the way she has stopped eight feet off for sixteen days, and she has three cards instead of one, and her jaw is doing the thing.

Card one:

YOUR PARTNER WITHDREW AT 0612. THIS IS CONFIRMED.

Card two:

UNDER 14(c) YOU MAY WITHDRAW AT ANY TIME. A JOINT WITHDRAWAL FORFEITS BOTH APPEARANCE FEES.

Card three she holds a while before she turns it around.

IF YOU COMPLETE ALL 21 DAYS SOLO, BOTH FEES ARE PAID IN FULL. YOU WILL BE INELIGIBLE TO PLACE. THERE IS NO PRIZE AT THE END OF THIS.

I stand in the mud with rope burn across both palms and read that card four times.

Both fees. Paid in full. His forty-one thousand dollars, for a roof and a sill on a house four hours north of a staging town, for an eighty-four year old woman with buckets in her upstairs hall who has never once in her life been careful around him.

He walked off this mountain at six twelve this morning to keep from standing in front of that screen on Friday, and in doing it he set fire to the only money that house was ever going to get, and he did it anyway, and he did not tell me, because telling me would have made it my problem and he has spent twenty-three years making sure nothing about him is anybody's problem.

Six days. No prize. No placing. Nothing at the end of it except a number going into an account with his name on it.

"Okay," I say.

Neve does not move.

"Tell them okay."

She lowers the cards. She stands there another second, and something goes across her face that has been trying to get out for two weeks, and then she taps the third card twice against her thigh and walks.