by Karly Lane
Cash had been relieved when Linc had gone to find Griff to sort things out, but the longer she’d sat alone in the Callahan’s spare room, the more anxious she’d become. Eventually she’d decided to track down the men. If they were deep in conversation, she’d just back away and leave them to it.
There was no sign of them on the verandah, and they hadn’t gone back to the reception. Lavinia and Bob, as well as Sue and Bill Dawson, along with the catering staff, were packing away some of the mess, but there was no sign of the brothers.
She was backtracking, making a slight detour, when she heard muffled swearing somewhere in the dark, only to round the corner of the machinery shed to find the two men beating the hell out of each other. She’d tried to break them up, but they were both too fuelled by rage to hear her protests. Cash had witnessed her fair share of drunken fights, but this was more than a pub brawl. She ran from the shed to get help, returning to see Linc relentlessly pounding his brother’s face and body with iron-like fists.
They all froze at the sight for a moment, then pandemonium broke out as men raced to pull the two brothers apart. She heard Lavinia cry out, her hand covering her mouth in horror.
But it wasn’t the blood or the swelling flesh that terrified Cash. It was the image of Linc after the fight had been broken up—her tough, handsome, heroic Linc, lying on the ground, crying and muttering incoherently—that haunted her.
Something had happened. Something terrible, and it had broken the man she loved.
Linc tried to work out what the strange noise was. But every time he tried to concentrate on the sound, he fell back to sleep, until the noise woke him again. Eventually he roused himself enough to keep his eyes open, and when he did he wondered if he were still dreaming.
‘It’s all right, son. You’re in hospital,’ Bob said calmly. A little too calmly for his father.
Linc forced himself to shake off the remaining cobwebs of sleep and focus. Hospital? The last thing he remembered was … What the hell was the last thing he remembered?
Griff.
The thought came like a rush of white hot liquid and he tried to sit up, the movement sending a ripple of pain through his entire body.
‘Just relax.’
‘Griff,’ he managed to get out. His voice came out as little more than a croak. His father handed him a glass with a straw and helped him lean up to take a sip. His lip stung like a son of a bitch and he could barely manage more than a few sips before his head started feeling light. As he lay back against the pillows he stared at his dad, waiting for an answer.
‘Your brother’s going to be okay.’
The whole nightmare came back to him in vivid detail and he felt a wave of nausea wash over him. His skin felt clammy and he closed his eyes. What had he done? ‘Dad,’ he started to speak but heard his voice crack as emotion welled up and flooded out.
Bob roughly patted his shoulder, but Linc felt only grief and overwhelming shame and remorse.
‘You just rest up and get back on your feet. We’ll get you sorted,’ Bob said in his gruff, no-fuss way.
If only it were that easy. He’d ignored the signs he wasn’t coping. He’d declined any help while he was still enlisted in the army—he thought he’d be fine. He’d been a combat veteran for too many years to count. He’d done three tours of the Middle East. He was a soldier, for God’s sake—he could handle his shit. It was only bad dreams and sleepless nights and a few flashbacks. He hadn’t lost his legs or had his head blown off like so many others he’d worked alongside over the years. There was nothing wrong with him … and, yet, clearly there was. He’d almost killed his brother in a fit of rage. He hadn’t even realised he was doing it.
The nausea came back and he turned his head away from his father’s concerned face. He couldn’t look at him. He couldn’t bear to see that look of pity … or the disappointment. He was messed up, and now everyone would know.
He wouldn’t look at his mother when she came in to see him later that day. He couldn’t. He refused to talk to any of them. They tried their best to act as though everything was fine, but he heard the fear and uncertainty in their voices. Nothing was fine about this. The only person he spoke to was the doctor when she came to check on him. He couldn’t ask his family about the details, but he asked her. He wanted to know how bad Griff was. He needed to know. His family wouldn’t tell him because they were trying to make him feel better—as though his beating the living shit out of his own brother somehow entitled him to feel better. They were all sure he was one eggshell-step away from losing his mind.
His brother had been unconscious when he was brought into the emergency room in Griffith, and had a broken nose, lacerations to the face and swelling. Luckily there’d been no internal bleeding and he was being kept for observation before being allowed to go home. I could have killed him. The thought continued to run through his head.
Linc had copped a concussion and his own fair share of cuts and bruises, but they’d sedated him because he had been so distressed on his arrival at hospital. A mental health worker would assess him before they decided whether transferring him to a hospital with a psychiatric ward was warranted. He didn’t even care anymore. Once he would have fought them—argued and bulldozed his way out of the hospital. Mental health worker? Psychiatric ward? He wasn’t a nutcase. But now, after the fight, he couldn’t hold on to the anger that’d been fuelled by fear for so long. There was something wrong with him. He was dangerous; he’d almost killed his brother.
Later, he wasn’t sure when as he’d been dozing on and off, Linc heard someone enter his room, but he didn’t turn his head. They all knew he wasn’t in the mood to talk. When he heard the chair beside his bed move, he frowned. He tried to ignore whoever it was, but they refused to leave. After a while, it got the better of him. Who the hell was so stubborn that they’d just sit there in silence and wait him out? He turned his head and felt his eyes widen slightly before he slammed them shut again. Oh. Hell no. He was not doing this. Not here, not now, not ever.
‘You can ignore me like you’ve ignored everyone else, but don’t think for a minute you’re fooling me with this act,’ Cash said, and the words washed over him like a smooth, aged port, warming him from the inside out.
Then her words actual registered. ‘Act?’ he croaked.
‘You may have your family bluffed into accepting this bullcrap silent treatment you’re giving them, but that’s not going to work with me.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Trying to work out what I ever saw in you,’ she said calmly, and her words stabbed at the already bruised and raw emotions inside him.
‘Jesus, don’t hold back, will ya,’ he managed through gritted teeth.
‘I don’t plan to.’
‘You’re wasting your time. Go home.’
‘The thing is. While you’re lying here feeling sorry for yourself, you don’t get to tell me what to do.’
Linc stared at her, dumbstruck. What the hell? ‘I almost killed my brother,’ he snarled at her, furious that she was goading him like this.
‘I know. I was there. And it seems to me you’re refusing to take responsibility for it,’ she said.
‘Refusing to take responsibility?’ He watched her sitting there with her arms crossed, looking at him with those knowing green eyes. Christ, she looked so smug … and freakin’ sexy. He closed his eyes briefly and gave a silent groan. Get a grip, Callahan. ‘Of course I take responsibility for it! I did it. I hit him so many times, he lost consciousness, and I would have kept hitting him if Dad hadn’t pulled me off him,’ he said, raising his voice. What was wrong with this woman?
‘Why?’ she asked, leaning forward in her chair.
‘Why what?’
‘Why were you hitting him? Why would you have kept going until you killed him? Why were you doing that to your brother?’ She shot the questions at him. ‘What made you hate him so much you were willing to beat him to death?’ she demanded, her voice rising.
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‘I didn’t know it was him!’ he yelled back. The words tore from him like a razor, slicing him apart. ‘I didn’t know … I thought it was … that I was back … there,’ he said, almost whispering now. ‘I didn’t mean to hurt him.’
‘I know you didn’t,’ she said softly, moving from the chair to the side of his bed to cup his face gently in her hands, forcing him to look at her. ‘We all know you didn’t,’ she said pointedly, and held him firmly when he went to turn his face away from her in shame. ‘Look at me, Linc,’ she said, her voice as sure and commanding as any drill instructor. ‘Your family loves you. They want to help. You have to stop shutting everyone out.’
‘I can’t,’ he jerked his head out of her hold, and winced. ‘I’m not who they think I am,’ he practically spat the words, filling them with all the self-loathing and disgust he felt inside.
‘Tell me,’ she said, refusing to budge from beside him.
Through the thin hospital blanket he could feel the heat of her body.
‘Tell me,’ she said again.
What did it matter what she thought of him after this? She was already lost to him. There was no way after all this he could ever have a future with Cash, not after all the pain he’d inflicted on Griff. If nothing else, he’d step up and be the brother he should have been in the first place.
‘We did a lot of close-contact work in Afghanistan, moving through villages and towns, clearing buildings and searching houses. It was always hard to tell the good guys from the bad ones—half the time they were the same people. You learned to trust your gut after a while. If something felt wrong, you stopped and listened.’ He paused, more to organise his thoughts than to catch his breath, although as he spoke he felt almost light-headed. It was a weird sensation, saying the words in his head out loud. He had never told anyone about his time over there—not like this anyway.
‘We were clearing this apartment building when a kid comes out of nowhere. He was carrying a rifle and had a vest strapped to him. He was running straight at us.’ He dropped his gaze, he couldn’t watch that disgusted look enter her eyes when she heard the truth. ‘I should have shot him.’ Her hands squeezed his tightly. ‘But I couldn’t … he was just a little kid. It happened so fast and I screwed up. He took out most of my unit. I’m responsible for the death of those men.’
‘No,’ she shook her head, ‘the people who sent that child out to kill you are responsible for their death.’
‘I failed them.’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
He’d heard the words a hundred times, but it was his fault. He failed to do what he’d been trained to do—Christ, he’d done it a thousand times during training over the years. It was instinct, the instantaneous decision to shoot or not to shoot. He saw the weapon. He saw the vest full of explosives, he saw a hand holding the trigger … but then … he saw the kid and he froze. His nephew was around the same age, for Christ’s sake. That fraction of a second was all it took for everything to go to shit. If he’d just squeezed the trigger, if he’d not hesitated for that one heartbeat, maybe he could have saved his men.
‘Is that the reason you left the army?’ she asked quietly.
‘Partly,’ he said. ‘I’d been thinking about it for a while, that was just the tipping point.’
In truth, there’d been so many other things that he’d forced to the back of his mind in order to get on with it the job. Everywhere you looked in the places he’d been there was so much that was incomprehensible to him. The loss of humanity, the abuse, the total disregard for life … He couldn’t understand how any of it could be made acceptable in the name of religion. How could someone strap explosives to a child, knowing they would be blown up in the process of taking out the infidels? How could the life of a woman be worth so much less than a man? How could it be lawful to punish a victim of rape?
He had seen things and been forced to look the other way unless it became a direct threat to him, but so much of it had worn away at his morale. After a while he had become numb inside. He’d lived with an empty, dirty, helpless feeling in the pit of his stomach for too many years to count. Even coming home, leaving the army far behind, hadn’t erased the emptiness. He carried it with him, no matter how hard he tried to scrub himself clean—it was imprinted on him, branded into his soul.
‘Just go, Cash. You were right before. I’m not good for you. You should stay away from me.’
‘Oh, now you tell me?’ she said in an attempt to lighten the mood, but he was too empty to respond.
‘Please just go. It’s over.’
‘Linc, we’ll get through this—’
‘There is no “we”,’ he said, raising his voice more in panic than anger. He couldn’t do this. He didn’t have the strength to fight her on this. He’d hurt his brother. He didn’t deserve to be happy with Cash, or anyone for that matter. ‘There never was. It was just a bit of fun on the side and now it’s over. You were right, I’m not the kind of guy who does relationships, and you’re kidding yourself if you think you’re going to change me.’
‘I wasn’t trying to change you,’ she said softly, and he steeled himself against the hurt he detected in her voice.
‘It was fun.’ He forced himself to hold her wounded look, relieved when she stood up and turned away. He closed his eyes when he heard her footsteps fade and only then allowed himself to open them, taking in the empty spot where she’d been sitting and knowing that being alone was the only way he could guarantee not to disappoint anyone ever again.
Three days later Linc stopped in the open doorway of his brother’s bedroom and knocked briefly.
The mental health assessment had been everything he’d imagined it would be—invasive, brutal and a waste of time. He didn’t need some kid fresh out of university telling him what he already knew, but hadn’t wanted to acknowledge. He’d spent the last few days convincing doctors he’d get treatment, but he’d be buggered if he’d do it out here. Nope, he needed to get as far away from this place as he could.
He didn’t wait for Griff to answer before walking into the room. Even though he’d been preparing himself for this all morning, nothing could soften the shock of coming face to face with the result of his actions. Inside, his resolve crumpled to a heap, but at least the army had prepared him in one sense—outwardly he remained composed.
There was a large gash under Griff’s eye that had been stitched, and tape was strapped across his nose. The hospital doctor had realigned it under local anaesthetic, but thankfully she didn’t think it would need any further surgery. The bruising spread from his nose around his eyes and along his lower jaw, although apparently the swelling around his eyes had gone down a little and at least he could now open them.
It was hard to tell what Griff’s reaction was, his face was so swollen, but Linc didn’t need to see an expression to feel the tension in the room. He opened his mouth to speak and then had to clear his throat when his voice cracked a little. ‘I know I’m the last person you want to see. I won’t stay long,’ he said quickly, lowering his gaze. It was too painful to look at the damage he’d caused, but then he forced himself to. This was his punishment—he had to face up to the consequences.
‘I just came to say sorry. It’s not enough …’ he said, shaking his head slightly. ‘There’s nothing I can say to make this right, I just wanted to let you know that I’m going to get some help … so it doesn’t happen again. It should never have happened to you. If I’d just gone and …’ He searched for the words to make things right, to explain how sorry he was, but nothing seemed adequate. If he’d stopped trying to be some tough guy, stopped worrying about what people would think of him and spoken up when he’d first noticed something wasn’t right, none of this would have happened. ‘I’m sorry, Griff, about this, and about … Cash. It’s over. Me and her, I mean. I’m leaving. I just wanted to see you … before I left,’ he ended, weakly, his eyes dropping to the bedroom floor. ‘See you around.’
He hadn’t expected
to be forgiven, he’d almost expected Griff to swear and curse and jump out of bed and hit him with the cricket bat that hung on the wall, the one he’d had signed by Steve Waugh when he was twelve. But the stony silence was worse. It ripped at his insides and hurt like a bastard.
The rest of the day went past in a blur. His mother cried as he kissed her goodbye, and his dad gave his usual gruff farewell, but he heard his voice break a little when he said, ‘Take good care of yourself, son.’ Harmony simply hugged him but didn’t say goodbye. He knew there’d be hell to pay once Hadley found out what had happened. She had already left the reception before the whole fiasco erupted and they’d decided not to tell her until after her honeymoon. He’d deal with that later.
He slowed down as he approached the front gates of Stringybark but he didn’t stop. He didn’t glance in the rear-view mirror like he usually did one final time before he left. He couldn’t. Seeing those gates disappear behind him was too painful to bear.
He refused to even glance sideways as he passed the driveway of the little white cottage further down the road. He didn’t say goodbye to Cash. He’d made a promise to his brother and he was going to keep it. He owed him that much.
Thirty-one
Cash took down a glass and watched as the amber liquid ran down the inside edge and filled to the top. The lunchtime crowd was slowly easing, which would give her time to catch up on cleaning and brace herself for the after-work crowd.
As far as jobs went, the money here was good and the hours okay. She’d only been planning on hanging around long enough to save up some money and figure out where she wanted to go next, but she’d been here three months and she still had no real idea. She missed the day spa, but she’d known straightaway that she wouldn’t be able to stay after Linc left. She felt partially to blame for everything that had happened and there was no way she could stick around town when everywhere she looked reminded her of Linc.