He got into his car, considered for a moment, then activated the security tracker he had on his phone for hers. She was at home, her phone active. Already driving, he called her again, routing the call through her home system this time, but she didn’t answer that one either. He called her phone again. Nothing. He drove faster, the frown on his face deepening.
Arriving at his house, he pulled into the driveway, got out of the car and skirted his garage to his back yard, then crossed to hers, as had become his habit, half-running to the patio doors that opened before him as her home security system recognized him. She was coming slowly down the stairs from the second floor just as he entered the living room. Her hair was damp and she was dressed in casual jeans and a sweater, and he thought she looked so—
She turned toward him, and he stopped in place, then resumed walking to her, his gait hurried. She was pale, too pale, and her eyes were dark, devoid of any emotion.
“Lara?” He reached her, but when he tried to put his arms around her, she raised her hand and lay her palm on his chest, to keep him back.
“It’s okay, everything is okay now,” he said, his voice soft.
She took a step back. He let his arms drop, not understanding. She had changed completely. He had expected relief that he was unharmed, lingering worry perhaps, but certainly not this, this was the last welcome he had expected from the woman he had thought had the same feelings for him that he had for her.
“What’s going on?” he said. “Lara, I know you were told what happened. Leland knows about you, about us. So he wanted to make sure you—”
“Go.”
“What?” He stepped back, moving away from her. He couldn’t possibly have heard right.
“I want you to go.”
“Lara, what are you doing? We—”
“There is no we, it was a mistake. I made a mistake.” She shook her head, and he thought he caught a whiff of anguish, of pain, before her eyes hardened again and she turned and walked away from him. It was, he realized, very much like the pushback he had felt from her when they had first met. Walls, he thought. Walls again. Walls he had thought broken.
He was tired, too many long, sleepless nights behind him, and he’d had enough. This wasn’t how he had expected it to be, expected her to be, now. The anger came out of nowhere. “The hell there isn’t!” he said. “Damn it, Lara, after all we’ve been through, I thought we were past this.”
She turned back to him, ice in her eyes. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you. All of you,” he shot at her, striding up to her again, forcing her to step back.
“All of me.”
“All of you, yes. Whatever is behind that facade you put up.”
“It’s too complicated.”
“No, it isn’t. God knows we’ve done the complicated part of it already. The rest is just love. And life. Ours.” He was trapping her against the wall now, his palms flat on it on both her sides, his body close, so close, but not quite touching hers. His eyes were dark, and he was angry with her, with himself, with this damn resistance. With wanting her the way he did.
And then he saw it in her eyes. The fear. Not of him, but—
“You’re afraid.” His eyes narrowed to blue-gray slits. “You know what, I don’t get it. As Oracle you wield great power, do you even realize that? You go into your Mission Command and you control soldiers and satellites and drones and fighters and ships, you control people’s fate. And just the other day you knowingly walked into a trap to face those who you knew wanted you dead. Yet here you are, afraid of this. Of us. Because that’s it, isn’t it, you’re afraid of what’s between us, aren’t you?” He held her eyes for a long moment, then pushed away from the wall, from her, in a sudden move that made her breath catch.
“Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’ve been wrong from the start and you’re just not interested, maybe this, us, isn’t to you what it is to me. Were you even worried about me today? Did you want me to come back?”
The look in his eyes pierced into her, awakening new pain, a sharp sense of loss. Too late, she realized. She already cared about him too much for her to once again put up any defenses, to protect herself against what he was saying, leaving her defenseless to deal with what it meant for her, for them, in the worst possible moment for her. And still she could do nothing, couldn’t take that step, couldn’t—
“I still don’t know who you are, do I, Lara?” Donovan’s eyes were full of anger. “Even now, you’re still hiding from me.”
He was right, she knew. But after all this time, she could no longer release herself from the prison she had been in for so long.
“I can’t,” she said. She closed her eyes, needed him to go, wanted him to stay, and when she finally opened her eyes and he wasn’t there anymore, she let herself slide down against the wall, and finally, now finally couldn’t stop the tears. But even when they came, the pain, too deep inside her, didn’t ebb. It only grew stronger, reaching places she didn’t even know still existed, as fear and love fought a battle that finally had to be won. But as they did, her emotions reached proportions she couldn’t begin to deal with, the loss of the past mixing with this now final loss of Donovan. He was gone, she was sure. He would never come near her again.
She ran.
Donovan strode angrily into his house and threw his jacket on the sofa. That’s it, he fumed. He went upstairs and took a long shower, washing off the desert sand, the past day, her. He began pulling on something thoughtlessly but then reconsidered and chose a more formal shirt to go with his pants, a fresh jacket. He would go to his office at USFID, he didn’t want to be here right now. He descended the stairs two at a time. Christ, he was crazy to have permitted this, to have let her in this far, to have allowed himself to care this much. She had too much effect on him. And of all women it had to be her he’d fallen for. Well, he was done. He would leave it all behind him, go back to the way it was before her, back to when it was simple. He’d move, yes, do everything he could to stay away from her.
Never see her again.
“Damn!” In an uncharacteristic rage, he flung the badge he was holding at the wall. It hit an encased holographic image standing on a recessed shelf, one of a boat in a stormy sea, and sent it to the floor in a deafening crash of breaking glass. That made him stop, breathe in deeply. He walked over, crouched between the shards, gingerly picked up his badge and slid a hand on the image, carefully pushing glass away. He looked at it for a long time. Finally, he stood up, walked over to the downstairs safe and opened it. After a moment’s contemplation, he placed his badge inside beside his gun, slammed the safe shut and walked out.
Damn you, Lara, he thought. Damn you, he raged, even as he crossed over to her house again. You’re not going to push me away that easily. He knew there was no way he could let her go. The idea of being without her just wasn’t something he seemed to be able to accept.
And the thing was, the one thing he trusted most were his instincts. And his instincts about her. He knew he’d made no mistake. He wasn’t wrong about her, about them. He would get to the bottom of this once and for all.
He strode into her house again, through the still-open patio doors. The place was ominously silent. Frowning, he looked around him. And halted. Her phone was on the coffee table, exactly where he’d noticed it before. He stared at it.
“Lara!” he called out, but no answer came, and he found himself running across the living room and up the stairs. He flung her bedroom door open. It was empty. He went to the wall safe and opened it, the home system recognizing his security override authorization. Her IDSD ID and work laptop lay inside. He slammed the safe shut and ran downstairs, and crushed through the garage door. The IDSD-issued car was there. He took a step back. Her coat, a light autumn coat she’d taken out of her closet just two days earlier, hung near the garage door.
He turned around and looked at her phone again. She never went anywhere without it. This was how Oracle was called in. And it was one of t
he ways Oracle was tracked to keep her safe, especially after the danger she’d been in.
And without the phone, the laptop, the car, he had no way of knowing where she was.
He was taking out his phone and dialing before he realized it, his heart beating fast, fear taking over. She wasn’t in danger again, he knew, not from the outside. There was no one after her, not anymore. But this . . . He thought about the way she had been with him the day before, the open emotion for him in her eyes, her acceptance of him, of them, a given. His mind returned to the way she had been with him earlier. Stupid, he thought, knowing now he should have stayed with her, knowing something was very wrong.
He considered calling Scholes but realized that in light of recent events, this would lead to the kind of panicked search his instincts told him was wrong for her now. So he called the one person who knew Lara more than anyone, the one person who would know.
“Really? Twice now? I’m beginning to think—”
“Donna.”
His tone was enough to stop her flow of words. She listened, then interrupted him. “No!” she said, her own tone enough to send Donovan’s concern up a significant notch. “Donovan, you’re wrong, she does care, that’s the whole point, you got in. Oh God, I knew it, I should have told you, I should have told you! The one time I listened to her and shut up about it, and look what happened!”
“Donna, what the hell are you talking about?”
“Something happened. What happened? Not now, not what you told me now. Before that. Did something happen to you? It had to have been that. Just tell me!” Donna was almost shouting now. Donovan had never known her to react this way.
“What? I . . .” Impatience was the first to rise, but then he realized she was right, something did happen. “Yes, last night I had to go away on a case. I got into some trouble and for a while the people I was with thought—”
Donna got it. “Did she know?”
“USFID made sure she did. But she was also informed once they knew everything was fine, and I came back to her as soon as I could.”
“It doesn’t matter. The damage is done, she had time to think you might be . . . God, I have to go, I have to find her. Where’s my bag? Come on. No, I must have left it in the car again. Okay. I should go. Wait, I have to call Patty, I’m supposed to meet her after she picks up Greg from daycare—”
“Donna, wait, just stop. What do you mean it doesn’t matter?” He needed to know. Now. “Damn it, Donna, what aren’t you telling me? What the hell happened to her?”
On the other end of the line, Donna forced herself to calm down. “I guess it’s okay to tell you now, you need to know.” She let out a deep sigh. “Five years ago, there was an attack on an alliance military base in Kuwait.”
“Yes, Camp Vrede.” It was one of the deadliest incidents in the alliance’s fight for peace. The large base was located near the Kuwait, Iraq and Saudi Arabia tri-border, its presence there sanctioned by the three countries, which welcomed its assistance in maintaining the area’s stability. The attack, by insurgents who opposed the alliance’s presence in the region, came in the middle of a heavy desert storm, and the number of dead and injured was high. Donovan remembered the incident clearly, USFID had been one of the agencies put on alert following it. “The United States lost people there, too,” he said. “Fifty-nine were killed there that day.”
“The man Lara loved was one of them,” Donna said quietly.
Donovan sat down, stunned. Everything fell into place in his mind. The hints from both Donna and Scholes, the way Lara had refused to let him in. The walls she had put up between them, meant to keep him out.
“She and Brian, they were together since college.” Donna’s voice was full of pain. “They were it, you know. They were happy. When he was killed, she just . . . it changed everything.”
Donovan turned to look at the photos on the fireplace mantel, photos he’d looked at the first time he came into this house but didn’t get a chance to have a closer look at since. He stood up and walked over to them. Lara laughing with Donna by her side. A younger, different, carefree Lara. A man with a little girl on his shoulders, both waving at the camera. The same man, in uniform, a civilian beside him, smiling.
“The two men in the photo. On her fireplace mantel. The soldier.”
“No, Brian’s the civilian. The soldier is Jason. Her older brother Jason. He was killed there that night, too.”
Donovan stared at the photo. “How did I not know about this?”
“Because you haven’t known her long enough to find out. And even then, she doesn’t allow anyone to talk about it.” Donna sighed. “You need to understand, she was gone, Donovan. They didn’t just kill Brian and Jason that night. There was nothing left of her, she shut down. It changed her. She hasn’t let anyone near her since.”
He understood now. “Until me.”
“Until you. And you’re wrong, I understand why you reacted the way you did but you’re so wrong. I’ve never seen Lara fight herself this way. It’s like she’s inside this invisible cage, fighting to get out. To you. You did that.”
“And then I walked away.” He cursed under his breath. “I need to get to her. Where would she go?”
“Their old house maybe, although no, I don’t think she’s ever gone back there. No, the cemetery. She’ll be at the cemetery. They’re both buried at Arlington National Cemetery’s extension, the newest one to its north. Brian was one of us, an American, and Tom, that’s Lara’s remaining brother, he got permission to bury them side by side even though Jason was an International. I’ll go to the cemetery first.”
“No, I will.”
“But—”
“Donna.” Donovan’s voice was quiet but left no room for argument. “I’m going to her. This is for me to do. Now, it’s for me to do.”
She was silent for a long time. Finally, she let out a breath. “Okay. Okay. Call, text, anything, if you find her. I’m not calling Tom yet, he’ll want to come right over. It’ll break his heart to know she’s hurting like this.”
She told him where in the cemetery Lara would be. Donovan was already grabbing Lara’s phone, ordering the home system to lock down the house and running to his car. She had to have walked, and he had no doubt she would know how to get to the cemetery from her house. And if she left immediately after he’d left her, she would have made it to the cemetery just about then or would be there by the time he arrived.
He turned on the grille lights of his USFID car and pushed through everyone and everything in his way, making it to the cemetery in record time. He didn’t need any help to find his way around, easily getting to where Donna had told him Lara would be. Leaving his car at the side of the road, he got out, looked around him, and was relieved to see her a distance away. She was sitting under the heavy sky of this day when winter finally decided to make its appearance, on the meticulously cut grass between the orderly rows of nearly identical headstones. Fighting the urge to run to her, he approached her slowly, quietly. She never moved as he came to stand just a few feet from her in the gentle drizzle of the gray day, oblivious to him, immersed in a cloud of pain so thick he could almost see it around her.
She was sitting, he could see now, before two headstones, positioned squarely between them. Jason Holsworth was the name on the one immediately to her right. The name on the one to its left was Brian Scott Jensen. The dates on the two headstones were the same.
His gaze returned to her. She was pale, dried tears under eyes that had none of the light he was used to seeing in them, no gold flecks. Staring vacantly at the graves before her, at a past she had been trapped in until he came along, a past she now probably thought was once again all she had.
She was wrong.
The drizzle was heavier now, turning into the first light rain of the cold season. Lara wasn’t dressed nearly warm enough, still in the clothes she wore earlier, and they were wet. Donovan took off his jacket and wrapped it around her, kneeling down on the grass beside her
. She started slightly, raised her head and looked at him, and it took a moment for her eyes to focus.
“Donovan?” she said, looking dazed, as if only now realizing he was there. “You came back.”
The way she said it, the bewilderment in her voice, tore into him. Did she mean that he came back after he had left her earlier, or that he had come back alive? Perhaps both. But then, it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that he intended to never leave again.
“Always,” was all he said.
He stood up, pulling her gently up with him, and took her in his arms.
She resisted, struggling against him. “No, let me go.” Her words turned into a sob, and she stopped struggling and rested her head against his shoulder. She crumbled to her knees, and he kneeled with her, never letting go, his arms wrapped around her.
“No, I can’t—”
“Lara.”
“No, let me go, I can’t, I can’t lose again. I can’t lose you.” She tried to push him away, crying. “I can’t love you.”
“It seems it’s too late for that,” he said softly, tightening his arms around her. He stood up again, holding her gently to him. “Come on, let’s go home.”
As he began leading her away, she stopped and turned back to the two graves and the terrible loss they signified for her. She then surprised him by turning and looking at him, her brow furrowed. As if trying to understand, to find some answer. For the past, for what was happening now, and, not least of all, he thought, for the future.
She didn’t resist anymore as he walked with her slowly back to his car, never letting go of her. He helped her in gently, then got in himself and drove to her place. That was all he wanted, to bring her home, take care of her. To show her that he was there, that he would always be there.
He parked at the curb before her house, and she didn’t move as he got out, walked around to the passenger side and opened the door. He crouched down beside her and touched his hand to her arm gently. When she looked at him, he stood up and offered his hand. After the slightest hesitation, she took it. He helped her out, then walked with her to the front door, much like he had done on the night he had almost lost her. The similarity made him pause. Never again, he vowed.
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