“All of them but one,” he said.

“You came here to get out from under Bran’s eye so you could kill yourself,” I said.

He didn’t say anything, which was a “yes” in my book.

I thought of the kind of courage it would take to climb all the way up here to kill yourself, decide not to, and climb all the way down nearly every day for the better part of the month. And the question that occurred to me then wasn’t “why?” but “why not?”

“What stopped you?” I asked his back.

He raised his head and looked up, gesturing to the night sky with one hand, waving with what I considered to be reckless abandon. “Look at that. Do you see the lights? And the sky? Beautiful. Up here? It feels like the huge tightness in my spine that contains all those things I’ve forgotten loosens up a little.” He tapped his forehead. “I can feel those things, curled up inside me, waiting like the sword of Damocles. And I think, maybe I should wait and see if I can find myself. Then I’ll have a better idea of what I have to lose.”

I made sure my grip was tight, then I looked—out, not down. And he was right. It was beautiful.

And the wind decided right then to blow hard enough to send a buzz through the rail I was holding on to. I felt the vibrations of it under my fingers and had to reassure myself that this crane had been sitting here for at least a couple of years and hadn’t fallen down yet. It was certainly designed to hold up more than the three or four hundred pounds that Sherwood and I represented between us. Surely.

And still, the metal vibrated.

“I see your point,” I said tightly. “But I think your hiding place has been found out. You think maybe we could talk with our feet on the ground? Fair warning, if I fall and break every bone in my body, Adam will never forgive you.”

He laughed again. “Okay,” he said. “Do you need any help getting down?”

About halfway to the ground, I stopped to rest. He was below me. When I’d told him I’d get down the same way I got up, he’d scrambled around me to get underneath where he could catch me if I fell. He hadn’t said it, but he hadn’t had to.

After a minute, I said, “You know what makes me crabby? I didn’t need to go up there, did I? If we’d waited for you, you’d have come down just like you always have.”

“Yes,” said Sherwood. Then he said, his voice a little dreamy, “Probably. But maybe I’d have come down another way.”

He started down again then, moving slower than he had to so that I didn’t hurry.