The Substitute Daughter They Chose Over Me Chapter 05

The Substitute Daughter They Chose Over Me Chapter 05 The Fall

I heard them before I saw anything.

Voices above me, sharp and overlapping, my mother’s pitch cutting through the others the way it always did in a crisis, high and breathless and entirely focused on the wrong thing. The scramble of feet on the path. Someone said Vivian’s name.

Just Vivian’s name.

The fall had not been long. That was the thing nobody tells you about falling, how fast it is, how little time there is between the moment the ground disappears and the moment something else stops you. I had lita ledge jutting out from the rock face maybe twenty feet below the trail. My shoulder took most of it. My head snapped sideways. For a few seconds there was just white and then the white thinned and I was lyir g on my back looking up at a slice of sky between the cliff face and the open air of the ravine.

I was alive.

I moved my fingers. Then my feet. Everything responded, everything screaming with it, but responding.

Above me I could hear them at the trail edge. I could see the tops of their heads if I turned mine, which I did, slowly, the rock cold and damp against my cheek.

Vivian was up there. Standing back from the edge, my mother’s arm around her, her hand pressed to her mouth. She was shaking. She was very good at shaking.

My father was on his knees at the edge, looking down. He could see me. I could tell because for just a second his eyes found mine and something crossed his face, something complicated and fast.

Then he looked back at Vivian.

“Is she,” Thomas started.

“She’s on the ledge,” my father said. “She’s moving.”

“Oh thank God,” my mother said, and I watched her pull Vivian closer, her hand rubbing slow circles on Vivian’s back.

Daniel was at the edge now. Both hands gripping the rock, his face the colour of old ash. I thought, for one strange second, he is going to come down. He is going to find a way down here and it will mean something, it will have to mean something.

He looked at me for a long moment.

Then Vivian said his name. Just his name, quietly, her voice cracked and small, and he turned away from the edge and went to her and I felt the last thread of something go slack in my chest, quiet and final as a light switching off.

I pressed my palms flat against the ledge and breathed.

The ledge was about three feet wide. Solid enough. Below it the ravine continued down to the river and

the rocks at the bottom. I did not look down there. I looked up.

“We need to call someone.” Thomas said. “We need to get her up.”

“Call mountain rescue,” my father said. “Get your phone.”

Thomas moved away from the edge, already dialling. My mother’s voice dropped low, talking to Vivian in the soft urgent tones she had always reserved for her. Daniel had not looked back down.

I lay on the ledge and looked at the sky.

It was very blue. The specific blue of late afternoon at altitude, deep and clear and completely indiffere it. A bird crossed it, high up, unhurried. The pain in my shoulder was settling into something long and serious and I catalogued it one item at a time. Shoulder. Ribs, maybe. Head, the ringing fading. Nothing that felt like the end.

A voice came from somewhere to my left. Along the cliff face, further down the trail, a man picked his way carefully along the rock toward me. He was moving fast, sure-footed, someone who knew the terrain.

He reached my ledge and crouched beside me without drama.

“Don’t sit up yet,” he said. “Let me look at you first.”

He checked my head, my neck, and ran his hands carefully along my collarbone. Pressed gently at my ribs.

“Shoulder’s dislocated,” he said. “Ribs bruised. Head’s intact.” He looked at me steadily. “You’re lucky.”

“I know,” I said.

He looked up at the trail edge, at the cluster of people standing there, and something shifted in his expression. Careful and precise.

“I was on the upper trail,” he said, not looking at me. “I saw what happened. All of it.”

I didn’t say anything.

He stood and looked directly up at my father.

“There were two women on that path,” he called up, his voice carrying clean and flat in the mountain air. “You could see both of them from where you were standing. You could have reached both of them.”

Silence from above.

“Why did you only reach for one?”

The silence that followed had weight to it. I watched my father’s face from below and I saw it, the complicated fast-moving thing, except this time it didn’t resolve. It just sat in his features like something he couldn’t swallow down.

My mother had gone very still. Even Vivian had stopped performing.

Daniel was looking at the ground.

Nobody answered.

Nobody answered because there was no answer that didn’t confirm exactly what the question already

knew.

My father’s voice came down tightly. “Mountain rescue is on the way. Just stay with her.”

The man looked back down at me. His expression said everything his voice didn’t.

I closed my eyes.

Above me I could hear my family moving, low voices, the shuffle of feet on the gravel path. Vivian’s voice once, quickly hushed. The wind came off the ridge the way it always did in the late afternoon and moved through the trees below and I lay there on that narrow ledge with my shoulder on fire and my ribs pulling with every breath and I thought, this is the moment. This is the one I will mark everything before and after.

Before this ledge. After this ledge.

The rescue team’s voices reached me first, distant and professional, calling down coordinates into radios. My father answered them from the trail above. The particular organised noise of people preparing equipment.

The man beside me put his hand briefly on my arm. “They’re here,” he said. “You’re going to be alright.”

I opened my eyes and looked at the sky one more time.

Then I looked at the man.

“Thank you,” I said. “For asking the question.”

He looked at me for a moment. Then he nodded, once, like he understood exactly what I meant and didn’t need me to say anything more than that.

Above us the rescue team was setting up the line.

Below us the ravine dropped away into the dark and trees and the sound of water far down, indifferent and constant, the way things are when they have been there long before any of this and will be there long after.

I breathed.

I waited.

And somewhere up on that trail my family stood in the question that nobody had answered, and I knew, even then, even lying broken on a ledge with the mountain cold seeping through my clothes, that the question was not finished with them yet.

It was only just beginning.

The rope line dropped down past me and swayed in the afternoon wind and I watched it without moving. without reaching for it, just watched it hang there against the rock face while above me boots crunched on gravel and radios crackled and my family stood in a silence that had no clean edges anymore.

I had fallen.

They had watched me fall.

And now the mountain was asking them to live inside that choice, one second at a time, for however long it took the answer to fully arrive.