He lifted a lock of hair from her forehead and she stirred slightly. He removed his hand. Today was a new beginning. She had thrown her lot in with his, and no matter how amazed he was by that choice he wasn’t going to question it again. He would have enough work to do talking to a bunch of shrinks and reliving every horror he had experienced in the service. He hoped she was tough enough to handle it, and he was betting she was.
He smiled a little, watching the rise and fall of her breathing.
As Ted Manning had said, she was a lot tougher than she looked.
Kelly moved over until his body was touching hers and then pulled the heavy quilt over both of them.
Monday would be a fresh start.
Now it was time to sleep.
* * * * *
Amanda woke in the middle of the night to find Kelly stirring restlessly beside her, and for a moment she was afraid that he was having another nightmare. She put her hand on his bare shoulder and her touch settled him. She watched as he sighed deeply and went back to sleep.
She was worried, but hopeful, about what they would soon be facing together. It had taken his arrest and incarceration to get him to discuss his past social life, which may not have bathed him in angelic light but still had to be much less disturbing than his experiences in the war. What would it take to get him to talk about Iraq, which he wouldn’t go into with her even now? He had put up more ramparts than a Roman legion in Gaul to keep his demons out, and had sought the distraction of casual sex to keep even their subliminal presence constantly at bay. Now she was asking him to tear down all those carefully constructed defenses and leave his psyche vulnerable to the pain he’d been avoiding for so long. Was it wise to do it, was it even fair? If it went wrong she would feel responsible since she knew in her heart that he was doing it for her.
She had to take the chance, and she didn’t care that he hadn’t chosen to do it on his own. If his relationship with her would push him into getting help, she was glad to oblige. If that and keeping his job would force him to save himself, so much the better. The reasons for and against it didn’t matter any more; all that mattered was his decision to listen to her and make her concern about his welfare his priority.
The rest would take care of itself.
She loved him so much. She watched him sleeping and knew that if she couldn’t help him her life was over too. She picked up his hand and held it to her lips. His eyes opened long enough to register her presence. He looked at her briefly, smiled slightly, and moved his hand to press his fingers back against her mouth. Then he pulled her down next to him and she fitted herself to his side.
It was exactly where she wanted to be.
THE END
Epilogue 1
One year later….
Lankenau Veterans Hospital
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The group of young men filed out of the conference room into the hall and Amanda appeared from the lounge and handed Kelly a paper cup of coffee. He took it and kissed the top of her head, she hugged him briefly and then disappeared. Dr. Sepansky had been witnessing this performance for several weeks in a row and finally his curiosity got the best of him. He ambled over to Kelly and said, “Brendan, have you got a few minutes? I have to submit an interim report on your progress in this group to Dr. Mitchell and I need some information. We should be able to get through it in the time we have for this break.”
“Sure,” Kelly said, turning to look at the older man.
Sepansky sat on the bench in the hallway and indicated that Kelly should sit next to him. The doctor produced a laptop from his briefcase and said, “May I ask you a general question first?”
Kelly gazed at him, nodding.
“Who’s that young lady who shows up at the break to see you each week? Red hair, petite, very pretty?”
Kelly grinned. “That’s my girl, Amanda.”
“She looks nice.”
“Yeah, she is.”
“She’s also in the lounge after the session every Thursday night, waiting for you, reading a book or doing some busy work. She seems very devoted.”
“She’s great. I’m lucky.”
“If you don’t mind me asking, is this the young lady from the Cameron case, the girl he was stalking?”
“I guess you know all about that from my file,” Kelly said to the therapist, after a slight hesitation.
“Yes.”
Kelly nodded. “I forgot for a moment that we’ve been raking my life over the coals during the last few months in the group.” He took a sip of his drink. “I met her on the job. She was being harassed by Cameron and I was assigned to get him.”
“And now you’re still together.”
“Yeah.” A small smile played around Kelly’s lips.
“I read about it in the papers too. The pair of you have already been through quite a bit together. Then what I have seen makes sense.”
“What do you mean?”
“The closeness, it’s unusual. You don’t even have to talk to understand each other.”
Kelly looked at him warily, his expression now guarded, uncomfortable with the observation. The doctor saw that his comment had intruded into an area Kelly considered private, and sacrosanct: his relationship with his lover. He knew he had to talk about his service career with Sepansky, but he shied away from revealing much more than that.
But the doctor was patient. And persistent.
“Sorry to pry,” Sepansky said quickly. “Blame it on my job. It comes with the territory. I should have realized who she was. But I’m not your personal therapist, just the PTS group leader here. I can’t keep up with the minute details on everybody.” He studied Kelly a minute longer and said, “Doesn’t she work for the DA if I recall correctly?”
Kelly sighed, aware that he would have to be rude to get the doctor off this subject.
“She did when I met her, that’s how Cameron got on to her in the first place. But she’s changed jobs. She works for the Public Interest Veterans Group now, she’s an advocate for veterans’ rights.”
“To help you?” Sepansky inquired.
Kelly’s fair skin flushed faintly.
“Well, she became interested in advocacy when I was diagnosed with post traumatic stress,” he replied shortly.
Sepansky nodded. “I noticed that textbook you’re carrying a few times also. You have a class somewhere after this session?”
“Bucks County College. I’m taking two classes. The department sponsors the program to get us cops educated.” He grinned. “I figured I’d better do something. Amanda’s a lawyer and I’m…”
“Not?” Sepansky suggested mildly.
“Right,” Kelly replied, laughing. “I love her but half the time I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about, if you know what I mean.”
“How are you doing in the classes?” the doctor asked, pausing to tap the keys on his laptop.
“Okay. Not great but I’m not flunking either. I’ve been out of school twelve years and I was no scholar when I was there in the first place. But Amanda…” he stopped.
“She helps you.”
“Yeah.”
“How much?”
“Well, she explains what I don’t understand. Then she makes me do the work.” He chuckled.
“May I say something?” Sepansky asked. “Just an observation.”
Kelly looked at him levelly. “Why stop now?” he said dryly.
“This conversation is the most I’ve managed to get out of you since you came here. Do you realize that when you showed up ten months ago you would sit in the discussion group and not say a word? You would never…”
“Discuss?” Kelly supplied, blinking ingenuously.
“Correct. So this is better, yes? To what can we attribute it?”
Kelly shrugged. “Amanda got me here. I’d still be stumbling around getting drunk any time something jerked my chain if it weren’t for her.”
Sepansky typed furiously for about a minute. Then he
said to Kelly, “You saved Amanda’s life, didn’t you? Got in some trouble for it too, busted protocol and the police brass got hot and bothered? Then they gave you a medal.” Sepansky grinned. “Sounds like they didn’t know what to do with you. The details are coming back to me.”
Kelly waited.
“Do you ever wonder if she’s with you out of gratitude?” the doctor asked.
In the old days that comment would have provoked a negative response, but now Kelly just said, “I used to ask myself that question all the time. How long can gratitude keep a relationship afloat?” Kelly shrugged. “But I’ve stopped worrying about it. Gratitude had to run out of gas at some point and she’s still with me. She is positive that we will last and I’m taking her word for it.”
“Last a lifetime?” Sepansky said.
“That’s what she thinks, and I have learned not to argue with her.” Kelly looked at the ceiling comically.
Dr. Sepansky resumed typing. “What do you think she’s getting out of it?”
he asked bluntly.
“Beats me,” Kelly said evenly, holding the doctor’s gaze with his.
“Maybe she loves you.”
“Yeah,” Kelly said softly.
“Maybe she just loves you,” Sepansky said again. “For some women, the best ones, that’s enough.”
“She’s the best, all right.”
“Again, excuse me again for prying. Why does she come to these sessions with you?”
Kelly sighed. This guy wanted to know everything. “When I first started the therapy I would get pretty… wrecked during them.”
“Even when you didn’t participate?”
“Especially then. Just hearing about Iraq brought back Muyatollah and what happened there.”
Sepansky nodded soberly.
“I didn’t want to think about that place, much less talk about it.”
“You have to deal with it, Brendan. Otherwise you’ll just bury the rage and continue to have outbursts and never get over it.”
“That’s where I was when I met Amanda. In the ‘outbursts’ stage.”
“Handling life, and your job, for the most part but having lapses when the pressure was on?”
Kelly nodded. “I had a lapse, as you call it, when I thought she was choosing her fiancé over me. It happened the night I got that medal, after I had just told her everything I felt about her. I really thought she was going to dump him for me, and then later when it looked like it wasn’t going to happen I lost it.”
“What did you do?”
“Got drunk. Passed out. Couldn’t handle it.”
“So you didn’t hurt anyone but yourself. Why did you think she was breaking it off with you?”
He shrugged. “We just got our wires crossed. I realized afterward that she really hadn’t done anything wrong, I was just so…I don’t know...”
“Anxious?” Sepansky said.
“Yeah. Just waiting for something to go south because I wanted her so much.”
“And?”
“And then even after we got together the Congressman baited me with some stupid remark and I plugged him. I gave him the opening he was looking for and it was payback time. I spent several days in jail. He tried to get me for attempted murder.” Kelly held up his hands resignedly. “Lethal weapons,” he said.
Sepansky nodded. “I remember. That’s how you came to our attention here. The charges were dropped but it was obvious that you had a problem.”
“And Amanda had seen all of that happen. She was afraid I would get into trouble again after these group sessions brought up the past I was trying to forget. So she hung out to be with me when the sessions were over so I would have company and avoid…” he halted. “Sounds like I needed a babysitter, doesn’t it?” he added disgustedly.
“Sometimes we all do. What did you need to avoid? Drinking?”
“Yeah, that and…” he hesitated again.
“Fighting?”
“Yeah, I guess. The fighting not so much but it would happen sometimes when I had a few. I gobsmacked the Congressman when I had a couple in the bag.”
“What prompted it?”
“He said something about Amanda.”
“Sour grapes?”
Kelly shrugged. “He had his future all planned with her on his arm, financing and enhancing his career, and I was the…”
“Ringer?’
“What’s that?”
“Unanticipated problem. For him, not Amanda.”
“Right.”
Sepansky typed again. He looked up when he saw that the men were coming back into the conference room again at the end of the break.
“How are you doing with the booze?” he asked Kelly.
“All right, I guess. I avoid it and Mandy never had the taste for it so that helps. I know I can’t handle it, I really never could. I have the same disease as my father, but he let it beat him. I won’t. When the drink is in the brains are out.”
“But you still have cravings?”
“I still want to get tanked every time I have a setback. When Mandy had pneumonia last January and wound up in the hospital I was sure she was going to die. I wanted to get wasted so bad I had to go to my sister’s house and stay there until Mandy was better.” He sighed. “Maybe that urge will never go away. I still want to smoke too, but not as much. I’ve had a couple of relapses there, one when she was in the hospital, but both times I quit again.” He shook his head. “I’m in lifetime rehab from bad habits.”
“Amanda lives with you now?”
“I guess you could call it that,” Kelly replied, smiling. “She goes back to her condo for clothes and books and things but she’s really with me all the time, at my apartment, which is a gerbil cage. It’s too small and inconvenient but she likes it. Go figure.”
“Why does she like it?”
“She says that’s the place where we first got to know one another and she’s attached to it. It used to be a bare cell but she’s added some stuff. Like a dishwasher that works. And one of those mini stackable washer-dryer sets.”
“Excellent ideas. Clean is good.”
“And we also bought an air conditioner that doesn’t sound like a 72 year old coal miner with emphysema.” His smile expanded to a grin. “Now the place looks like a chain motel rather than a barracks.”
“What about her condo? Isn’t that bigger, more comfortable?”
Kelly shook his head. “Her parents bought that for her. I’m not living there, on their dime. We keep saying we’ll find someplace else but it never seems to happen. I don’t care. And she says she’d live with me in a tent. That’s Amanda. Romantic and impractical.”
“She’s very much in love with you,” Sepansky said. “That’s obvious.”
“Thanks,” Kelly said, looking down and swallowing. He looked up again to see the doctor watching him.
Sepansky smiled. “I’m glad you see it as a compliment. Which leads me to ask my next question, if you would be kind enough to answer it.”
Kelly suppressed a groan, wondering what it would take to silence the nosy doctor. How much longer could this interrogation last? “What do you want to know now?
“Why haven’t you married this girl?”
Kelly sighed and put the cup he was holding down on a table. “I want to marry her more than anything, but I can’t marry anybody. Marriage means kids and a house and the whole nine yards. I don’t even have a job.”
“What are you talking about? The police department is paying for your therapy here. You are listed as a detective in your file.”
“Ex detective, or a suspended one. I don’t get my shield back for another six months, and maybe not then. Dr. Mitchell has to do my final evaluation and say it’s okay for me to return to work in my old precinct.”
“So what are you doing now?”
“Paperwork, forms, interviews, taking phone calls. They’re paying me but I’m climbing the walls.” He rolled his eyes. “I’m considered too hyper for contact wit
h the public.”
“Hyper?”
“What’s the word? ‘Volatile.’”
“Ah-ha. I see. They’re afraid you’ll hit somebody else. I can understand why your superiors might have doubts about putting you back in the field after the nose job you gave the Congressman.”
“I’m not going to hit anybody else,” Kelly said darkly. “There must be limits to Amanda’s patience, loyalty, whatever you want to call it. I don’t plan on testing those limits. If I have to keep my hands to myself to hold on to her, I’ll strap them to my sides.”
“The counseling should be helping you with that.”
“I don’t know. The idea is to for me to talk to the shrinks and confront my issues and develop self control.” He smiled sardonically. “I can recite the goals correctly, I have a tougher time reaching them.”
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