The house he’d grown up in always looked in imminent danger of being crushed.
Home,
he thought, the word foreign in his head.
The painkillers he’d taken once he got off the airplane in Los Angeles were still kicking around his system. The world felt thick and fuzzy, and he knew being here was dangerous. Dangerous in a way that Darfur couldn’t even dream of being.
“I’m fine,” Jack said. Though he wasn’t. Wouldn’t ever be again.
“Are you sure you won’t reconsider?” Devon asked. “You could stay with us. Claire would—”
Jack shook his head. His throat was on fire.
“It will die down,” Devon said. The young man leaned forward over the steering wheel. The bruises at his temple and across his face were yellowing. One of the explosions had tossed him into the air like a rag doll, throwing him headfirst against one of the fences. It was a miracle his neck hadn’t been snapped. “The papers, the university. It can’t go on like this.”
But his hundred-yard stare out the front window said he wasn’t so sure.
Their return from Sudan and their survival of the military’s brutal attack had put Devon and Jack in the papers from coast to coast. And it wasn’t just the media; the university was all over him, too.
The dean had been inside Jack’s house when he got home. As if he had the right, much less a key. And the way he demanded answers—Jack wouldn’t argue, the university had a right to those. But they didn’t have a right to him. He wasn’t his pump. He wasn’t the damn drill.
The university didn’t own him.
The attention was relentless. But for Devon, the attention would die down—innocence, after all, had its advantages.
For Jack, the questions would come at him for the rest of his life.
Do you remember the attack?
Why were you beyond the perimeter of the compound?
What happened to Oliver Jenkins?
Jack flinched and shut his eyes. The morphine burned in his pocket, a promise, a sweet whisper of how good forgetting could be.
“I can’t leave you here. I’ll take you back to the university,” Devon said. He put the car in gear and turned in the front seat ready to reverse down the long driveway.
“I’m staying,” Jack said, his voice a thin wheeze. The doctors had told him not to talk to keep from irritating his damaged throat. But Devon liked conversation. Another reason not to go home with him.
“But you’re pretty far away from a hospital, and with—”
Jack opened the door, and Devon shut up, putting the car in Park and hurtling out the driver-side door to help Jack out of the car.
It was hard with his knee and the broken hand.
“What about physical therapy?” Devon asked. “For your hand?”
Jack ignored him, swinging his duffel bag up over his good shoulder with his good hand.
“Jack! You need to talk to someone about Oliver, about what happened. You can’t just—”
“Thanks for the ride, Devon.”
Devon sighed, wiped a hand over his eyes. “Christ, you’re stubborn.”
Jack would have laughed if it hadn’t felt like swallowing glass.
“Fine. Is there anyone here who will take care of you?” Devon asked.
Jack looked at the brown house with the dark windows. It blended into the forest, the granite outcrop—a shadow in twilight.
No one had ever taken care of him here before.
Except Mia.
Anger burned through him like a gasoline fire, hot and quick and greasy. She’d left him on that hotel rooftop, run away like a child, didn’t return a single email or phone call for four damn weeks and then, after the bombings, after…Oliver, still nothing.
Where the hell were you, Mia?
he thought.
The only things he could count on were the pills in his pocket, the nightmares and that no one would find him here.
“You better go,” he told Devon. “The pass gets dangerous in the dark.”
Devon looked sufficiently nervous at the idea and Jack bit back a smile. He’d watched the man’s fingers get whiter and whiter on the steering wheel on the way over the mountains.
“If you’re sure?”
Jack nodded. He wanted a get this over with—walk through those doors, face down the demons and then sleep. For two months, until he was forced back to San Luis Obispo to answer the dean’s questions.
He barely heard Devon drive away as he took the gravel pathway up to the house. Why were the lights off but the fireplace going? It was getting close to seven o’clock and at least the lights in the kitchen should be glowing, with some traffic coming from the bunkhouse to the dining room.
The barn to his left was silent. One brown gelding was in the nearby corral.
It was spring and the place looked like a ghost town.
The front door creaked open under his fist and he helped his left knee up the front stoop and entered the house.
He found a weak fire, mostly glowing embers, in the living room fireplace, but the house was cool. The furnace was off. It was eerie.
A vicious snapshot, a horrific memory of the pump site, the compound, blackened to cinder. Nothing but craters and smoke where people and equipment used to be.
He shook his head, clearing the image, jarring it loose.
A light flicked on in the kitchen and he heard thumping in the mudroom.
“Damn it!” Unmistakably Mia.
He dropped his bag and stepped into the wide-open dining room, waiting for his reckoning.
It was seven o’clock. She was starving. Tired to the bone. And did not want to deal with the thirty-year-old furnace.
“Walter!” she yelled, coming into the dining room. She tossed her truck keys into the dish that had sat for years on the counter that divided the huge open kitchen from the dining area. One glance into the kitchen and she noticed that the guys had cleaned up after their dinner.
Thank God for small blessings.
The light on the slow cooker was still on so she had to hope there was some chili left for her.
“It’s freezing in here. Did the pilot light go—”
“Mia.”
She turned and froze.
In the shadows, like a ghost, stood Jack.
Her heart lurched and for a second she couldn’t breathe. Jack. Here. Shock emptied her head of any thought, any emotion.
But then the heavy load she floundered under lifted for a moment and she wanted to sag against the counter, relief making her dizzy.
He was here. When she needed him most.
“What…” She swallowed. “What are you doing here?”
He frowned. “Hiding out,” he said, his voice a harsh rasp. Painful sounding.
“What’s wrong with your voice?”
He blinked at her. “You…don’t know?”
The bubble of her relief popped and she truly saw him. He was so pale and thin. Too thin. His jacket hung on him. His eyes, his beautiful chocolate eyes, were dim.
His hand was in a cast and a sling, his fingers limp against the blue cloth.
“What happened, Jack?” she asked, unable to keep the panic out of her voice. She crossed the kitchen in a heartbeat and reached for those pale, still fingers, but he shifted away from her. Her hand hung in the air, useless.
“Attacked,” he said.
She staggered back, her hand banging against the chair before she got a grip on it.
Attacked.
Bile churned through her empty stomach.
Her eyes searched him for more injuries. Obviously there was something wrong with his throat, his arm. Was he holding his weight funny?
“Your leg?” she asked.
“Knee.” He watched her. “You didn’t know?”
“No,” she whispered, looking at him. “Oh, my God, Jack, I didn’t know.” She reached out again and ignored his flinch, pressed forward when he shifted back. Her fingers landed against his cool cheek, and his eyes, so cold and distant they could have been a stranger’s, didn’t leave hers.
That night in Santa Barbara blazed between them, a fire that separated them.
He was still angry.
“Jack—”
“Can I stay for a few days?” he asked.
“Of course,” she said. “Of course. It’s your home.”
His smile was bitter. Sharp.
A heavy thud echoed through the house and Mia dropped her hand. Another thud and a slide.
“Mia?” Walter called from the other room and Jack stepped away from Mia, something flickering in his dead eyes. Anger. What else?
“In here, Walter,” she called and Mia could see the panic on Jack’s face.
He’s your father,
she wanted to say.
And he’s changed. That man you hated isn’t here anymore.
But she didn’t say anything. Jack would see soon enough.
An old man, so frail and thin, so utterly diminished that he seemed nearly childlike, pushed a walker into the kitchen.
“Holy shit,” Jack breathed, turning away to face the far window. Tension so thick it was like acrid smoke rolled off him, choking the air out of the room.
“What the hell is going on?” Walter asked through lips that didn’t move in a face that didn’t move. The facial paralysis was part of his Parkinson’s disease. As was the tremble in his arms and hands. And the shuffling gait. All part of the disease that was ravaging his body.
But the smell of booze was his own stupid fault.
“Walter—” she said.
“The pilot light must have gone out on the furnace,” the sixty-four-year-old man said. “You need to go down and look at it.”
Mia bit her lip so hard she tasted blood.
“Who the hell is this?” Walter asked, turning to look at Jack’s back. “We can’t hire hands that are injured.”
“He’s not a hand, Walter,” she said, watching Jack stare out the window, his face harder than the granite cliff behind the house.
Finally, he turned, eyes blazing to face his father.
“Jack,” Walter breathed. He pitched, unsteady on his feet, and Mia leaned forward to keep him upright. She could feel him shaking so hard it was a wonder he could stand. Tears burned her eyes, for both these men and the pride that kept them so far apart.
“Son—”
Jack flinched at the word.
“You’re back,” Walter said, his words mumbled and thick. Hard to understand. “Your arm?” Mia could feel Walter shift, his hand lifting as if to touch his son and she wanted to stop him. Protect him. Because Jack was a land mine of hate and anger, and there was no telling what pressure would set him off.
Jack stepped back, away from Walter and Mia. His eyes empty, a foreign wasteland.
Without saying anything, he turned toward the hall leading to the bedrooms.
“Jack,” she cried.
But he was gone. Disappearing into the cool, inky darkness of the home he hated.
“Find out what happened,” he demanded, pointing a shaking finger toward the computer as if it were a pet he couldn’t get to obey.
She sat down and booted up the system, shoveling bites of chili into her mouth while the computer hummed through the start up.
Attacked.
There were so many varying degrees of how bad it could be, that she couldn’t actually wrap her head around it. And she didn’t want to guess. She’d played the worst-case-scenario game last year while Jack was on sabbatical, and she knew all it did was give her ulcers.
But in the back of her head, in the soft spot on her neck, she felt a chill. Whatever had happened, it was bad enough to send Jack, wounded and wasted, back to Rocky M.
She went immediately to the BBC website and typed in Darfur.
The last article was dated four weeks ago and she clicked on it.
The first headline exploded across the screen and she dropped her spoon: Scientist Killed In Crossfire.
“No,” she breathed, panic an animal clawing its way out of her body. “No, no, please, no.”
She scanned the article, piecing together information. Searching for Oliver’s name. Her brain barely able to process everything.
“Read it,” Walter demanded. “Out loud.”
“Ahh…” Her voice shook. “‘Three hydro-engineers working in tandem with Water for Africa were repairing a broken water well outside the Sudanese city of El Fasher when the Sudanese government broke the cease-fire between itself and rebel militia forces in the area.
“‘The area was bombed late last night.
“‘Oliver Jenkins, part of the engineering team responsible for the revolutionary drill and well system, was…’” She stopped. The next word, right there in horrible black and white, stuck in her throat. She couldn’t say it. Because it couldn’t be true. Couldn’t possibly.
Not Oliver.
“He dead?” Walter asked. “That Oliver guy?”
That last night, in Santa Barbara, Oliver’s laugh had filled the room. His eyes had picked her apart, found her pain and tried to help. He’d seemed, he’d always seemed, somehow larger than life. Larger than all of them.
“Yes,” she whispered, her entire body splitting with a grief so hard and horrible it felt like something else. Like anger. Like pain. “He’s dead.”
“What else does it say?”
Walter was worked up, his eyes damp, his skin red.
“The well was destroyed,” she said, finishing the last of the article. “And surviving engineers Devon Cormick and Jack McKibbon were evacuated to Kenya where they received treatment.”
She pushed away from the desk. Her emotions needed action. Her confusion needed answers.
“That’s it?” Walter asked. “That’s all it says?”
She nodded and before she could think better of it, she turned and headed down the hall toward Jack’s old room.
Oliver was dead and Jack had come back like some kind of ghost and she was just supposed to sit back and…what? What the hell was he doing here? What did he want?
She pounded on the door and waited but there was no answer.
“I know you’re in there, Jack,” she cried, her voice breaking with the tears she was swallowing like so much glass. When he didn’t answer she grabbed the knob and turned it. There were no locks on any of the doors, a little leftover from Victoria’s reign of terror, and the door slid open across the thick carpet in Jack’s old room.
It was bare now. All the posters and music, the science fair ribbons and rock samples, the stacks of books—all gone. He’d taken them when he left, erasing himself from this house as if he’d never been there.
But Jack sat on his single bed, staring out the bare window at a bright moon.
His sandy hair gleamed in the bruised twilight and Mia’s grief outran her, bringing her up short.
“Oliver?” she whispered, and Jack’s head bent.
She turned and faced the door frame, biting her lip until the tears drained from her eyes and she could speak.
“What happened?” she asked, pressing her thumb against the notches in the wood that had grown along with Jack when he was a boy.
Jack didn’t answer. He sat unmoving, staring at his hands. Silent as stone.
“What the hell happened, Jack!” she cried, circling the bed to face him. He didn’t look up and all she saw was the bone-white part in his hair. “He was my friend, too!” she yelled, her fists clenched against the emotions that threatened to tear her to pieces.
Finally, he glanced up and she gasped at the sight of his eyes. Dry as dirt, but wasted all the same. Ghost eyes. Empty.
“Mia,” he breathed, his voice damaged and raw. “Please—”
She saw something pull apart in him, a long string unraveling. And she remembered Oliver and Jack, brothers in a way. Conspirators and teammates. More than friends. As terrible as her grief was, she couldn’t imagine what he felt. The loss he carried. Not just his friend, but his life’s work. Gone.
“I’m so sorry, Jack. I’m sorry I wasn’t there when it happened.” She crouched down beside him, careful not to touch him, because she couldn’t tell where he wasn’t hurt.
His eyes met hers and she searched through those chocolate depths for a sign, a glimmer of the boy she knew, the man she’d loved.
You’re there,
she thought, all those old feelings she thought she’d banished after Santa Barbara surfacing.
I know you’re there and I know you came here for a reason.
You must feel something for me. You must.
“Leave me alone,” he said.
She blinked, rocked back on her heels.
Right. Of course. How could she forget? Jack didn’t need her. He never needed her. Happiness. Grief. Health. Injury. Jack did it all on his own.
“Screw you, Jack,” she breathed, and left him there to rot.