by Dana Marton
Brett bumped his fist against his solar plexus as he looked at Annie. “It hurts in there. You got an exercise for that?”
Liam groaned. “Don’t get her into therapist mode, man.”
“We can certainly do a meditation,” she said, ignoring the subtle rolling of eyes around the circle. “Since you guys are begging for it.”
That drew some half-hearted protests. Truth was, they liked to resist ecotherapy, but almost as if for form’s sake. They all identified as tough, unbreakable warriors. Needing medical help—surgery or PT—was one thing. But the men felt they shouldn’t need alternative therapies, especially therapies that worked on thoughts and feelings. Some believed needing that kind of support meant they were weak.
“It takes a strong man to ask for help,” Cole offered. “The weak can’t. All they have is ego. They have to play it tough. The real tough guys, they don’t have to play anything.”
That pretty much ended any resistance. If the SEAL was on board, everybody was on board.
“So just lean against the tree behind you,” Annie began, shooting Cole a look of appreciation when he looked at her at last. “You can close your eyes or not, as you wish,” she said for the others. “Draw a deep, cleansing breath through your nose. Hold it. Let it out through your mouth.”
She made a point to relax her own shoulders. The kind of energy she projected would make a difference. She waited until everyone got in a couple of nice, calming breaths. “Good. Now let’s do that again.”
They breathed silently for a minute.
Cole was watching her mouth. Since he’d kissed her, she’d been more aware of that gaze than ever before.
“Obviously,” she said, “we all have feelings and thoughts about what happened this morning. I am sure we all have things we wish we could tell Trev.”
Several of the men murmured their agreement; others nodded.
“Let’s do that.”
A couple of the guys stiffened. In general, they didn’t like talking about their feelings in a one-on-one setting, let alone in a group situation. Most of her group therapy consisted of simply working or walking out in nature together. Her main goal was to make her patients feel better. She tried to do whatever it took to achieve that.
“Let’s all silently talk to Trev for a couple of minutes. Visualize the words you’d like to say as swirling lines of letters, flowing around inside your chest. The words flow, not out of your mouth, but out your back and into the tree behind you. They travel up the tree trunk, into the branches, into the leaves. From the tips of the leaves they will rise invisibly, like the breath of the tree, up and up, all the way to Trev.”
She fell silent, closed her eyes, and sent her own words.
Oh, Trev. I wish you’d come to me. I am sorry I didn’t pay more attention. I am sorry I was caught up in my own nonsense. I wish you’d felt all the love everyone had for you. I know that in that dark moment, you couldn’t see the light, but I wish you had waited just another minute to see the clouds part. I wish you peace, my friend.
She did a few more cleansing breaths as she wiped away her tears.
Then she said a prayer for Mitch Moritz too. He’d been so excited about going home to his wife and kids. Annie couldn’t even image how devastated they must be at his loss.
For a moment, she thought about whether Murph was right not to tell the men that Mitch had died. In the end, she decided she was glad it was Murph’s call to make and not hers.
When she opened her eyes, she saw that about half the men were still doing the exercise. The other half, including Cole, were finished, eyes open but not looking at anything in particular, the men lost in thought.
She let another few minutes pass before she said, “You all know that there is help available, right? I am available. Around the clock. I’ll be actually staying at Hope Hill for the foreseeable future.”
Kevin said, “Yeah.”
Then Liam said, “Thanks.”
“Things are good,” Brett told her.
Even Rob—the most taciturn of them all—chimed in. “Not gonna do anything stupid. You can have my word on that. Don’t spend all your day worrying about us.”
Annie smiled at him. Three complete sentences were more than she heard out of Rob sometimes in a whole therapy session.
Cole just nodded.
Annie wasn’t sure whether he’d come along because he truly wanted the walk and talk, or because he’d appointed himself to be her protector. Either way, she was glad he’d joined them.
She pushed to her feet and brushed off her pants. “How about we go back to the path and finish the loop?”
Brainlessly putting one foot in front of the other while soaking up the silence of the woods was a meditation in itself.
All five guys decided to go with her.
Once again, they were walking in a loose formation, in a single line, since the trail was narrow in most places. For the most part, they walked in silence.
Annie moved up next to Cole. “How are you doing?”
“OK.”
“This must bring back memories of your father.”
“I was chained to the wall in a cave when he died. I didn’t find out about it until we escaped and I got back home.”
“That had to be difficult.”
“More difficult for my mother. She had to deal with the funeral, and everything else, alone.”
“If you want to talk about it . . .”
“Not right now.”
He hadn’t ruled out later. She hoped he would come to her.
She hadn’t figured out yet how to handle what was happening between them. Ignore? Discuss? Avoid all contact?
She didn’t want to avoid him.
She wanted to . . .
God help her, she wanted to walk into his arms and ask for another kiss. She wanted to comfort him, and she wanted to be comforted by him. She was smart enough to know that she was in trouble.
Cole walked the path, staring at the ground in front of his feet. He wanted to be alone in the woods with Annie. He wanted her in his arms. He wanted to kiss her until the hurt and pain disappeared from her eyes.
Trevor’s death had shaken her.
It’d shaken Cole too. He should have paid more attention to the kid.
He swore under his breath.
He’d almost talked himself into believing that the treatment was working. But it wasn’t, was it? Nothing they did at Hope Hill had helped Trevor, and he’d been there for some time. Trevor had not been helped.
Maybe Cole could have helped the kid, if Cole hadn’t been so focused on his mission and Annie. Those hadn’t worked out either anyway.
He hadn’t been able to protect Annie. And he was letting his mission down too. Failing to achieve his mission objective burned him.
Except . . .
He might not have a clue about the traitor, but he was beginning to have a terrible suspicion about the op in general. What if his mission was fake?
Maybe there was no traitor. Maybe his CO had invented the texts to make sure Cole entered rehab. Maybe Cole had been tricked into therapy.
Maybe that was what he needed to investigate.
Chapter Twenty
Monday
COLE SPENT SUNDAY night lost in pain—the chopper crashing, people screaming, burning. He woke swimming in sweat and pushed out of bed for a glass of water. Falling back asleep again took forever, and when he finally nodded off, his nightmares thrust him back into endless, bloody torture sessions.
He woke in a dark mood. He insisted on going with Annie to all her Monday feedings and wouldn’t take no for an answer. She was smart enough to know that her safety should come first, so she agreed. But she kept a distance between them that Cole hated.
She’d listened to the radio and updated him on Hurricane Rupert—still out at sea, but causing heavy rains and major flooding in the Carolinas. She refused to talk to him about anything but the weather. Or his father. But Cole refused to talk about that.
Both his CO and Cole’s mother had suggested therapy before, but Cole had refused. Of course, when the request for the undercover work came up, he’d agreed in a heartbeat—despite the therapeutic setting. An op was an op. He’d never thought he would get to go on another mission again.
Would his CO trick him like that? Lie?
Or was Cole being paranoid?
For the last couple of days, he’d felt . . .
Unbalanced was the word Annie had used. Cole had been that when he’d first arrived at Hope Hill. But he’d regained some of his balance since, one piece at a time.
Now he felt not so much unbalanced as unsettled. He kept having the unsettling sensation that he wasn’t remembering something, that something was off. He wasn’t seeing something he needed to see.
When he’d felt like this in the service, he’d known to look at the roadside for IEDs, or at high ground for an enemy sniper. But where to look here?
He sensed a threat.
Real or PTSD?
His nightmares were getting worse and more frequent.
Once Annie’s attacker was caught, once Cole found the traitor—or confirmed that he’d been sent on a fictional mission—he would leave Hope Hill, he decided.
Nothing could keep him here then.
Except Annie . . .
He wanted Annie—any way he could get her. As a friend. As a lover. He voted for a combination of both, if possible.
But the truth was, Annie was better off without him. Cole might not be broken, but he wasn’t whole either. And his status as a patient at Hope Hill, where she was a therapist, was freaking her out. For a tree hugger, she was certainly conventional.
He wished he could tell her the truth, start over. Hi, I’m Cole. Undercover investigator. Not your patient.
He liked kissing her. And he wasn’t going to lie to himself; he was thinking about kissing her again. He was thinking, and definitely dreaming, about going past kissing.
He wanted to know what her long legs looked like out of her khaki cargo pants. He wanted to see her chestnut hair tumbling over her naked shoulders. He wanted to know what she’d look like tangled in the sheets on his bed.
She deserves better.
He needed to leave this place before he got any stupider.
Annie was in her bed, snug and safe—the only thing he needed to know about her, Cole decided as he walked down the hallway that night after the midnight feeding. He was proud that he’d kept his distance all day, even if, at times, he’d wanted to fall on her like a ravening beast.
He stopped in front of Trevor’s door.
The police tape was gone. Trev’s death had been officially ruled a suicide.
Cole opened the door to a bare room. Somebody had already cleaned up and mailed Trevor’s belongings to his parents.
What would happen to the body? His parents would want him home in Montana. If the coroner had released the body, Trev could be on his way home already.
He’s never going to build that barn. Cole looked around for the kid’s sketchbook, but that too had been taken. Good. His parents should have it.
Except . . .
Yesterday morning, in the strange round clearing, the group had talked about how Trevor had been carried away by one hopeless impulse, one moment of darkness. He had not understood that the clouds would part again.
Cole accepted that sometimes suicide happened like that. It had with his father. But Trevor had taken a fatal dose of meds—a dose that would have taken weeks to collect, saving his pills. So the suicide couldn’t have been a decision born in a bad moment.
And even while Trevor had been collecting pills to kill himself, he was also preparing for the future, drawing a barn. He’d been excited about going home and building that barn for his mother. The two facts didn’t mesh.
Yet depressed people’s moods could fluctuate several times a day. Maybe in his light moments, Trevor had prepared for the future, and in his dark moments, he had prepared for death.
What the hell did Cole know? He wasn’t a therapist.
He turned to leave, then stopped when he stepped on something. He crouched to examine the small piece of black plastic he’d missed on the dark-gray carpet. He picked it up, put it on his palm, then looked at the floor again, more closely this time.
Two more pieces lay near the empty garbage can. Could have come from anything. A burner phone someone smashed up before getting rid of the evidence? The thought gave Cole pause.
He collected the pieces using only his fingernails and dropped them into his pocket before he left. He would put the chunks of plastic in an envelope and send them to his CO. If the man thought they were something, he could send them on to a lab.
Had Trev been the traitor?
Cole hated the thought. Yet he couldn’t discount the possibility. His mind churned as he tried to build a case around what few clues he had.
Trevor upset. Trevor asking questions. Trevor taking his own life. Black plastic.
Tuesday
As Cole lay in bed, he chewed over every detail, every minute he’d spent with Trevor. He didn’t get more than half an hour of rest toward dawn.
When he woke up, a text message waited on his phone, a note from Annie that she’d gone to the morning feeding early. Finnegan had called her. Joey was in jail. She was safe.
Cole grabbed his phone and texted her: What happened?
She texted back: Joey’s cousin picked up a car in West Chester. Joey helped. They’re both in jail for grand theft auto. Harper’s working on changing it to attempted murder.
Cole typed: Any proof they pushed you into the reservoir?
And Annie sent: Cousin has a black Chevy Blazer. Front end smashed. That’s why they went out looking for another car last night.
Think he was the intruder at your place? Cole hit “Send.”
A couple of seconds passed before her response came: Maybe Joey complained I wouldn’t take him back. Wanted to scare me a little?
Running you off the road is more than just scaring you a little, Cole responded.
And she sent: Got carried away? Kind of a boozer.
Cole wanted to talk to Finnegan. Would the detective disclose anything about the case? Probably not. Still, Joey and his cousin were behind bars—progress. And when the paint on Annie’s back bumper matched, they’d stay behind bars. Cole liked that even better.
Another message popped up from Annie: Any sessions this morning?
Cole typed a quick response: Ambrose at eight.
As long as Annie didn’t need him, he might as well go for a run in the woods before the session with the shrink. Even if he’d much rather be with Annie, helping her with her animals. Not that she really needed his help. She was as self-sufficient as they came. And now she didn’t need his protection either. Annie was safe.
Cole went for his run, showered, then headed off to see his shrink.
“Cole.” Ambrose greeted him and pointed him to the armchair across from his desk. He knew better than to point him to the couch.
Nobody was going to put Cole on his back, a fact he’d explained to the guy right at the beginning, in no uncertain terms.
“How are you feeling?” As usual, the man poured them both a glass of ice water from the carafe on his desk.
“How does anybody feel after what happened with Trevor?”
The man watched him. “Any thoughts that maybe Trevor was right, maybe that’s the solution? Any dark or suicidal thoughts at all?”
Cole drank. You confessed suicidal thoughts to a shrink, and next thing you knew, you were transported to a locked facility. He’d seen it done at the vet hospital where they’d initially treated his shoulder.
“Nope,” he said, and made sure to look sincere.
“Were you and Trevor friends?”
“Barely.” If he said yes, Ambrose would want to spend more time on the subject. Yet denying Trev also felt wrong.
“How does this affect you in light of your father’s suicide?”
“My father’s suicide was a long time ago. I’ve dealt with it. This brings back some of the pain. Some of the guilt. But when a person makes a decision, there isn’t much anyone can do to stop them. You can’t monitor someone twenty-four–seven.”
“All right,” Ambrose said after watching him for a couple of seconds. “How about your other issues? Are you making progress there? Flashbacks?”
“No.”
“Nightmares?”
“Sure.”
“How bad? Would you call them night terrors? Do you wake up heart pounding, screaming? Do you wake up to find you’ve maybe moved off the bed, walked across the room without realizing?”
“Once or twice.”
“What were the dreams about?”
Cole leaned back in the chair. They’d been through this before. “Same old memories.”
“The crash?”
“That and other things. Sometimes I dream about the RPGs hitting the hillside. Sometimes I dream about the chopper going down. Sometimes I dream about what happened after.”
And sometimes, lately, all three, in one night, coming out of one nightmare only to enter another, and then another.
“Ready to talk about what happened after you were captured? I think it could be important for your recovery.”
Cole drew a deep breath, huffed it out. “No offense, doc, but I don’t think you could handle it.”
“You could decide to trust me and give me some credit.”
He didn’t want to. The only staff members Cole had any real respect for around here were the guy who ran the place, Murphy Dolan, and Annie. Not that the rest were bad or incompetent, but their perpetual pretend cheerfulness grated after a while. The whole Oh, you’re doing great mantra. Oh, you’re doing so much better.
He didn’t feel better. Except when he was with Annie.