The rock holds its secrets tightly, but if you are respectful and listen carefully, you can hear it whisper.
No, put your foot to the left.
Yes, your weight will hold.
Go here and you'll have to backtrack.
Any mountain worth climbing had more dead-ends than a wealthy suburban neighborhood. I didn't mind. My goal was never to break speed records; it was to decompress. My job title was the euphemistic Director of On-Site Logistics. What I really did was handle risk-assessment for Doctors Without Borders. I was vital, but the position was as low-visibility as possible. If you had someone in risk-assessment at a directorate level it indicated that lives could be in danger, and that wasn't the best message for recruitment.
If I made the wrong decision, people died. So, finding time for solitude was something I made time for, and it doesn't get more isolated than hanging off the side of a mountain. Unlike a marriage, a mountain was forever.
There was no mountain; today was a cliff. Shifting my weight, I released my left hand and stretched my fingers. After a moment I was back at it. At the top was a mansion overlooking the Pacific Ocean owned by Deacon Mulgrew. Like my title, his was misleading. He was the chief advisor to Bishop Lindor, and the deacon was in his multimillion-dollar home fucking the bishop's daughter, my wife.
Cameras covered the sides and front of the home, but who would bother covering the cliffs? Have you heard of affair fog? It's a thing; look it up. If my wife were thinking clearly, she might have been concerned. This was child's play.
At the top of the cliff, I caught the brace for the deck and climbed. There they were, the glass walls hiding nothing. Naked as the day they were born, the dutiful daughter and the religious icon were committing adultery. Clamping down on my emotions, I took photo after photo and used the parabolic microphone to catch as much of their passion as possible.
He degraded her, calling her his bitch, prompting her to insult me and her father as they fucked. This was going to destroy him, but he was a pompous prick who had looked down on me for a decade. The bishop treated his own wife as chattel. You reap what you sow.
Two hours later I was in my car with a roiling stomach, a broken heart, and wet Five Ten Adidas. I trusted no one and nothing, so I uploaded the photos and audio to four different secure sites.
A week later I was standing outside the Splendid Cathedral, his mega-church where he held his revivals and they did the filming. Despair had turned to loathing. Jason, his PR man came outside, plastic smile on his face and handshake firm.
