by Dana Marton
“Sure you will.”
“It’s a Navy SEAL thing.”
“Omnipotent?”
“Damn near.”
If her head didn’t hurt, she would have shaken it.
He pulled a paperback from a side pocket of his BDU and handed the book to her. Derek Daley: Revenge Games.
“Pretty good thriller. Friend of mine wrote it.” Pride crept into his voice. “Derek was one of the other POWs with me. He kept himself alive by making up stories in his head. And then he kept us alive by telling us the stories. After we got back, he wrote one down in the rehab hospital, and it got published. He’s doing pretty well. Big-time author now.”
She set the book on the table. “Thanks.”
“If you start getting sleepy, start reading.” He held out his hand. “Keys?”
“I don’t lock the side door on the garage. There’s nothing of value in there.”
His gaze sharpened with disapproval. “Someone could be in there waiting for you when you go in.”
Before today, she would have laughed that off. Now a shiver ran down her spine. “I’m not sure if I ever had a key to that door. I don’t think I got one when I bought the house.”
He looked back from the door. “I’ll put on a new lock for you in the morning.”
“Cole!” she called before he could turn away. But suddenly she didn’t know what she wanted to say exactly or how to say it. “I don’t expect your help. None of this is your responsibility.”
Then she wanted to groan because that didn’t come out right either.
He held her gaze for a long moment. She thought she caught a flash of longing, but that wasn’t possible, was it?
“Lock the door behind me. And don’t fall asleep,” he ordered before he walked away.
All day, Cole had had a weird itchy feeling, not anything as pronounced as a premonition, but a sense that something bad was about to happen. The same sixth sense that had saved his life at least half a dozen times overseas. Better not go into that cave. Better drive in the middle of the road instead of on the right side of the bridge.
Back then, he’d paid attention. Now, he shook the faint prickling off. He wasn’t in hostile territory any longer. Random bad moods and anxiety were part of the whole PTSD mind trip.
He drove to Annie’s place, parked at the end of her street, walked to the house, and walked around the property.
Nobody in the backyard, or at the edge of the cornfield. Nobody in the house. Nobody in the garage.
He managed to feed the skunks without getting sprayed.
He lay down like Annie usually did and let the little stinkers crawl all over him. Their soft warmth felt nice. Just lying there in the straw with the folded-up comforter under his head, he could see there was peace to be found here, maybe even for someone like him.
He wouldn’t have minded staying a few extra minutes. But because he didn’t want to leave Annie alone too long, he got going.
Hope Hill slept as he walked in. Her door was locked. He knocked. She opened.
“Didn’t I tell you not to open this door unless you ask who it is first?”
She looked like she was fighting not to roll her eyes. “I was expecting you.”
He walked in, locked up. The clock on the nightstand showed one in the morning.
She yawned. “I’m tired. When can I sleep?”
“Is the headache getting worse or better?”
“Better.”
“Let’s stay up a few more hours.”
She watched him as she sat on the bed and scooted back far enough to rest her back against the headboard, taking her cards with her. “Do you miss the navy?”
After a couple of seconds of thinking, he said, “I miss my team.”
“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”
He picked up his cards. “Only child.”
“Sounds like your mom really cares about you and worries about you. I’m glad she talked you into coming here. Do you feel like the therapies are working? It’s not that bad here, right? It’s good to learn new things.”
“Let’s say, I’m less resistant to ecotherapy than I was in the beginning. It’s not completely uninteresting.” Nobody was more surprised than he was.
A smile softened her face. He felt like a bastard for giving her such a hard time before. He could have been more open-minded. It wouldn’t have cost him anything.
“Human beings evolved as part of nature,” she said, “and lived in nature for ninety-nine percent of our history. Locking ourselves away in cities is a recent development.”
“Like taking a tree, putting it into a small pot, and bringing it inside.”
She smiled wider. “You were paying attention.”
“You were so earnest. I didn’t have the heart to tune you out completely.”
“I’ll take what I can get.” Then she said, “I love the holistic approach of nature therapy. That neither the body nor the mind is isolated, but part of a system. And that system is part of an even larger system. Working on depression with meds is like working on the motor of a car. But without changing the oil. Without changing the broken motor mount. Without putting gas in the tank and water in the radiator.”
She paused, her gaze searching his face. “What? You think me talking about cars is stupid, don’t you? OK, I don’t know that much about cars. I just try to come up with stuff guys can relate to.”
“I think you talking about cars is unbearably sweet.” And it made him want to kiss her again. He tried not to think about the fact that they were in her bedroom, behind locked doors, with her in bed, not three feet from him.
“We use the systems concept in the SEAL teams,” he told her. “Going after insurgents, we didn’t just go after insurgents. We went after why they were in a place to start with. Did the locals support them? Why? How do we turn that support to our side? Stuff like that.”
“Exactly.” She played the last of her cards.
He almost felt bad about showing her his.
She groaned.
He gathered up the cards and shuffled. “Want to play another round?”
“Sure.”
So they played cards and talked until six in the morning, Annie losing while enthusing about the role of nature in healing, Cole listening and beginning to see her point.
God, he wanted to get into that bed with her. The need for her thrummed through his blood. She reached for a pillow to put behind her back, and, for a second, her shirt stretched over her breasts. He wanted to . . .
He had to hold his cards over his lap to cover his body’s response to that thought.
At six o’clock she said, “I want to take a shower before I grab some sleep. I think I’ve stayed awake long enough.”
“Don’t lock the bathroom door. The second you feel dizzy or faint, you crash something to the floor. I’ll feel the vibration.”
Was she blushing? She turned away so fast, he couldn’t tell.
She grabbed clean clothes and retreated into the bathroom. He put away his cards and paced the room, thinking about the hit-and-run, needing to figure out what he could do to keep her safe.
She was out in fifteen minutes, wrapped only in a large towel, and Cole had this instant fantasy of her dropping it and stepping toward him. But even as his body responded to the images in his head, her hand clutched the towel tighter. Her gaze skipped him completely, darting to the door of her room.
“What’s going on in the hallway?”
Something’s going on in the hallway? He hadn’t heard a thing.
A whole insurgent brigade could be out there with machine guns, coming for Annie, and he would never have known it. Shit. What had he been thinking setting himself up as her protector? Who was he kidding?
He scowled as he went to yank the door open, with more force than necessary, but not all the way. He didn’t want people in the hallway to see Annie in a towel.
About half a dozen patients were milling around, shock on their faces. Everybody wa
s talking at once, but at the wrong angle for Cole to read lips.
“What happened?” he asked, loudly enough to be heard.
Isak, a twentysomething beanpole from Arkansas, responded, and Cole’s hand clenched on the doorknob, the words hitting his chest like bullets.
“He’s . . . They just found him,” Isak said, pale and shaky. Then he realized he’d left out a crucial piece of information, and added, “Trevor committed suicide. He’s dead.”
Chapter Nineteen
Sunday
ANNIE SAT IN the emergency staff meeting, numb. Last night’s car crash was nothing compared to this morning’s terrible news. She’d be willing to roll off the road all over again to have Trevor back.
Her phone pinged with a weather update. Hurricane Rupert was moving up the East Coast, but staying out at sea. She flipped the phone facedown. She didn’t care.
Dan Ambrose reached for her hand on the conference table and gave it a gentle squeeze before pulling back. “You shouldn’t be here. You’re not well. Go lie down.”
“I want to be here.” She couldn’t sleep if someone offered her $1 million for ten minutes’ rest.
Trevor was dead.
She looked around the table. They all had failed him. She had failed him. She felt the crushing weight of personal responsibility.
“We are going to offer emergency counseling, free of charge, to everyone who needs it, for as long as they need it,” Murphy Dolan, the program director, said. “Staff and patients alike. The police are coming to interview everyone before they officially rule it a suicide. I’m going to request that if a patient asks, the officers let a therapist sit with that patient through the interview session for support. I hope they’ll let us do that much, at least. Detective Chase Meritt is lead on the case.”
Dan began to rise, then sat back down. “This is going to be devastating for our patients. Hope Hill is supposed to be their safe space. I hate to say this, but Trevor’s suicide may trigger other suicide attempts. Statistically speaking.”
Annie nodded. Dan was only saying what they were all thinking.
“Let’s head that off at the pass,” Murph told them. “That’s our number one priority. Number two priority is to figure out how Trevor got his hands on enough meds for a fatal dose.”
“Do we know what he took?” Libby, the reflexologist, asked. The young black woman had the most amazing intuition of anyone Annie had ever met. Somehow, Libby always knew exactly what to say to a patient. People at Hope Hill loved her, and she loved them back. The news of Trevor’s death had hit her hard. Her eyes were red from crying. She looked heartbroken.
Murph’s response was tight with tension. “Not until the autopsy comes back.”
Annie squeezed her eyes shut at the thought of sweet Trevor on a cold stainless-steel table at the morgue, but she couldn’t shut out the image.
Murph cleared his throat. “There’s something else. I found out something last night that I was going to share with staff and patients today, but now I’m not sure if we shouldn’t wait telling the patients.”
The people around the table fell silent.
“I do a one-week follow-up with patients postdischarge,” he said.
They nodded. They all knew that. Part of the Hope Hill aftercare.
“I haven’t been able to reach Mitch Moritz. I finally caught up with his wife. Mitch was in a fatal car accident on his way home from here. Apparently, he fell asleep and drove into oncoming traffic.”
Annie gasped.
Libby clutched a hand to her chest. “Where?”
“Maryland. Maybe half an hour after he left here.”
For a moment, everyone was too shocked to speak.
“Under the circumstances,” Dan said, “I think we should hold this information back for now unless someone specifically asks after Mitch.”
The rest of them nodded.
Annie felt too numb to say anything.
Murph kept the meeting short, and then everyone left to focus on the patients, to help where they could.
“I’m officially back at work,” Annie told Murph as she headed out. Her vacation was over. “I can put in as many extra hours as you need. And I’m going to carry my cell phone all day, so anyone who wants to talk to me can reach me.”
She definitely expected Detective Meritt to call her for an interview at some point, since she’d treated Trevor. But when, at midmorning, her cell phone buzzed with a call from the police, the caller was Harper.
“I have an update for you, although it’s not exactly progress,” the detective said on the other end. “Joey Franco has no alibi for last night. But neither can I find any proof that he was involved in your hit-and-run. No damage to his truck, no damage to his mother’s SUV, none of the neighbors heard him come or go in the middle of the night. He says he was home alone, sleeping. I don’t even have enough to bring him in.”
“Thank you for checking.” She didn’t know what else to say.
She was relieved, because she didn’t want to think that Joey hated her enough to want to kill her. But she was also disappointed, because she wanted the guy who ran her off the road caught so she could feel safe again.
Annie headed back to her room to grab a couple of painkillers from her purse. Her headache was gone, but her body was even more sore than it’d been last night. She walked through the rec room and for a minute studied the half dozen guys there. The TV was on, but nobody was paying attention to the game, and a grim mood filled the room.
They asked how she was. They’d all heard about the car accident. She told them not to worry.
Then, on impulse, she asked, “Anybody want to go for a walk?”
Brett, an army colonel who’d lost a kidney and half a lung to an IED, asked, “Like group therapy?”
“Just a walk.” Whether they called the walk official therapy or not, it’d still help.
She wished Cole would go with them. As soon as they’d found out about Trev this morning, Annie had to run off to the emergency meeting. But she was worried about Cole. What happened to Trev had to bring back memories of Cole’s father’s suicide. She wanted to seek Cole out to make sure he was all right. But she had other patients.
Brett stood. “Sure. I’ll go.”
Three of the other guys stood with him.
As the group crossed the courtyard, Cole jogged up, joining them, nodding a greeting, which all the guys returned with obvious respect. Despite his disabilities, every time she saw Cole in a group setting, the other men were always deferential to the Navy SEAL.
He had incredible presence. The first time she’d seen him, she’d been scared of him. But then she’d gotten to know him. And now, she never felt as safe as when she was with him.
She was glad he’d come. A hard knot inside her relaxed at his presence.
He looked shaken but OK. He was dealing with Trev’s suicide, but she wanted to talk to him about it anyway. She needed to catch him one-on-one later.
The man who watched the small group from across the courtyard wasn’t pleased. His gaze settled on Annie. She refused to learn her lesson. And catching her on her own was increasingly more difficult. She was never alone these days.
The Navy SEAL, especially, had appointed himself her constant companion. He was a big guy. It’d take a lot of drugs to eliminate him. And he wouldn’t go as easily as Trevor had. The SEAL was always alert, never let his guard down for a second, not even here.
The man in the window watched as Cole maneuvered himself so he’d be walking next to Annie.
Another suicide would be suspicious right now.
Car accident? The SEAL did drive.
No, that’d raise questions too. Mitch Moritz’s car accident had just been discovered by the staff.
The man thought carefully and considered sedatives, something that would knock Cole out just long enough to drown him during his morning swim.
So much to do. Both at work and at home.
His mother wasn’t doing well. Was
she dying at last? Dark fury sliced through the man at the thought. His mother could not die. She still had a lot to atone for.
He wanted Annie to meet her. He needed to set that meeting up sooner rather than later.
Annie didn’t take her sneakers off as they reached the path. Neither did anyone else. The ground was still soggy from the rain the other day.
They walked in silence. The wind in the trees, the birds, even the sound of squirrels darting around in the underbrush were all an instant balm to her soul. That Cole didn’t benefit from any of nature’s song saddened her.
They walked in a loose formation. After about two miles, she steered them off the path to a spot she’d discovered only a few weeks before, a spot that would be new for everyone.
The clearing was tiny, maybe twenty feet across, nearly a perfect circle framed by seven oak trees. When she’d found it, her first thought was that it was a sacred place.
“You think someone planted the trees like that?” Kevin asked.
She sat at the foot of the nearest oak. “It looks pretty natural.”
Thick roots protruded from the earth, keeping her off the damp ground. “I’m guessing there’s rock under the topsoil. Maybe even one giant rock. The trees couldn’t grow on top it, so they grew around it.” She leaned back against the trunk.
The others followed her example, some folding their legs, others stretching and opening them, Cole crossing his ankles.
Annie hadn’t planned it, but there were six of them and seven oaks. One solitary tree was left without a human, almost as if waiting for Trevor. Maybe his spirit was here and they just couldn’t see his body.
“Why did he do it?” Brett asked, and everyone turned to Annie for the answer.
Probably none of them would think about much else. Her heart ached for the pain on the faces around her. The wound of Trevor’s loss was too fresh, too jagged, still bleeding.
Annie told them the truth. “I don’t know. I wish he had asked for help.”
“Maybe for a second he didn’t see the way out,” Kevin said. “But you don’t make a decision based on your worst moment. You ride out the worst. Then you work on making the next day better.”
Annie offered Kevin a watery smile for having listened during their previous sessions. He’d clearly internalized what they’d talked about. Trevor’s death filled her with despair, but Kevin’s remark made her feel as if, in some small way, she was making a difference.