Oh God, she was so
sick
of this. Sick of herself. Sick of her weaknesses and uncertainties. Maybe if she had somebody to talk to, she could have an hour of peace in her head. But who?
She had nobody in Safety Harbor. She’d left when she was seventeen for college and had come back only for brief visits.
Her entire career had been spent traveling, living for a year or two at a posting, then moving on. The best friend she’d made at work had been Marie, and she was dead. By Claire’s own hand, according to Marie’s sister.
She’d spent the past year here, it was true, but three months of that year had simply disappeared into the maw of a coma. And when she’d finally surfaced, just learning to walk again and function at the most basic level had eaten up everything she had. No time or energy for making friends. Simply surviving had robbed every ounce of energy in her. So no, there wasn’t anyone to talk to.
The house was empty, and completely silent. It was on a street closed to nonresidential traffic and there weren’t even sounds of cars driving by outside.
The silence was oppressive, like a living, heavy weight pressing in on her chest. The large house was so still, it was the equivalent of an aboveground tomb. Exactly like her father’s coffin, only bigger.
The large band around her chest that had dogged her days since waking up from the coma tightened, making it hard to breathe.
It was so damned
quiet
. As if she were the last human on earth.
All of a sudden, Claire knew she needed to hear human voices the way she needed air. The silence was like a dark hole, waiting to gobble her up, pull her down into an endless, airless cavern. She couldn’t stand the silence for one more second. Even canned noise would be better than this emptiness.
With a shaking hand, she picked up the remote and cycled through the channels. Weather, rerun, a romantic comedy she’d already seen and which reminded her of how solitary and unfunny her life was, reality show, weather, reality show, cooking show, sports, weather, reality show . . . God, a reality show in a
convent
?
She shuddered and kept on flipping through the channels. Talk show, sports, weather . . . her thumb was growing tired. Finally, she found CNN. The music and logo for the news hour came up and she settled in, hoping to distract herself. It was no good. Israel, Palestine, bombing in Paris, possible serial killer in Portland, Oregon. This wasn’t distracting her, it was pulling her deeper into her slippery black hole.
She picked up the remote again.
Thank God for remotes
, she thought, not for the first time, because she didn’t have the energy to get up and switch the TV off.
A young woman came on, pretty, dark-haired.
Breaking News
glowed red at the top of the screen. On the chyron was written
Katie Maroney, Washington DC
, identifying the reporter.
An American Hero
tracked along the bottom in bright red letters.
Claire stayed her hand. Okay, a hero. That was good. Right now, she needed to hear about a hero.
It was snowing in DC, tiny flakes spinning in the wind. Claire shivered in sympathy. It must have been freezing in Washington but the reporter was wearing a low-cut jacket and, when the camera pulled back to reveal the smoky ruins of a townhouse behind her, a miniskirt.
Claire winced. She’d have frozen to death with that outfit on in the snow. How could the woman not be turning blue from the cold?
The camera followed as Katie Maroney walked over to a broad-shouldered man, back to the camera, a dun-colored blanket covering his head and pooling around his shoulders.
To one side, a fire truck was the center of activity for at least ten firefighters in gear and protective helmets. An enormous hose spewed a streaming silver arc of water into the townhouse, causing huge clouds of smoke to billow up.
“This is Katie Maroney for CNN. We’re reporting to you live from near Dupont Circle in Washington DC,” she announced breathlessly. “This afternoon an electrical fire broke out in a townhouse where Mr. and Mrs. Everett Hines and their children, Sally, three, and Michael, five, live. Mr. Hines had gone out for milk when a fire broke out on the ground floor, burning out the electricity and telephone lines. Mrs. Hines’s cell phone was broken and there was no way to call 911. Mrs. Hines leaned out of the third-story window and screamed for help. And help, miraculously, came. We have some video footage of the rescue filmed by an onlooker and we’re cutting to that right now.”
Claire leaned forward. A woman and two small children.
Oh God
, she prayed,
let this have a happy ending
.
The camera cut to shaky, grainy footage, like something out of
Cloverfield
or
Paranormal Activity
, probably taken from a cell. A woman leaned out of a third-story balcony, screaming for help, smoke billowing out from all the windows.
There were excited noises as onlookers shouted for help. Claire could hear one man calling 911. But nobody made a move until a broad-shouldered, dark-haired man dressed in jeans and a leather bomber jacket too light for the weather rounded the corner.
The phone camera somehow knew to follow him. The man in the bomber jacket took in the situation and in a flash ripped off his jacket, wrapped it around his head and plunged into the burning building.
Claire watched, riveted, breath caught in her chest.
Screams and cries of
Oh my God!
and
Will you look at that?
What felt like a million years later, but must have been only a minute, the man burst out of the front door with two screaming children in his arms. Live, red-gold flames were visible through the open door and the cell phone recorded the crackling sounds of the flames and the loud thump as part of a wall crumpled in a billow of fire and smoke.
The cell phone followed the man as he thrust the children into waiting hands and ran back into the building, ignoring the cries of
Are you crazy?
and
It’s too late!
and
It’s going to collapse, man!
Sirens wailed as the fire truck and several police cars finally arrived. A dozen people clustered around the fire chief, screaming that there were two people trapped inside the collapsing building. The jerky tape was catching the chief directing his men when someone screamed and the cell phone was whipped back to the building so fast it made Claire nauseous.
She watched the grainy, shaky footage, feeling time stop. It was as if everything were happening in slow motion. The broad-shouldered man appeared in the doorway, limned by the hellish fire behind him, holding a woman wrapped in a blanket in his arms. Fire licked greedily at his feet, climbed his trousers, but he didn’t seem to notice. He carried the woman forward until eager arms took her and she was placed on a stretcher, and only then did he fall to his knees.
The grainy footage cut off and the pretty face of Katie Maroney filled the screen once more. Her voice overrode all of the other voices, and a microphone was thrust into the man’s face. “That was an amazing rescue! What a hero!” she gushed. “What’s your name, sir?”
The man’s voice was deep, but weak with pain and exhaustion. His head was hanging down as he gasped in air. He was covered in black soot.
“Gunnery Sergeant Weston. USMC.” He frowned, shaking his head, wheezing for breath. “Not . . . Gunnery Sergeant. Not . . . in the Marines anymore. Daniel Weston.”
Claire frowned. That name . . .
“Well, Daniel Weston, what do you do for a living?” The reporter seemed to be totally unaware that the heroic man was in pain. Claire would have batted away the microphone and told the woman to go to hell, but apparently the man had better manners than she did.
“Have . . . security consulting business.”
“Well,” Maroney purred, smiling flirtatiously at the burned, exhausted man, “your wife is going to be very proud of you today, Mr. Weston.”
He shook his head again. Two paramedics lifted him up onto a stretcher. He took in a big gasp of air. Maroney’s microphone followed him for a moment. “Not . . . married,” he said as the paramedics put an oxygen mask on him then carried him away.
With a catlike smile, Katie Maroney turned to the camera. “Well, ladies and gentlemen, there you have it. Former Marine Gunnery Sergeant Daniel Weston, man of the hour. A hero who ran into a burning building twice to save a mother and her two children. And ladies . . .” She leaned closer to the lens with a conspiratorial smile and a wink. “He’s built, he’s a hero, he owns his own company and he’s single. What on earth are you waiting for?”
Marine . . . Daniel Weston. Claire blinked, the fog in her head parting for a moment. The name was somehow familiar. How could it be familiar?
A thumbnail photo in the upper left-hand corner, clearly taken from footage during the rescue, expanded until it filled the TV screen.
Daniel Weston
, the chyron said along the bottom.
Security consultant
.
Claire gasped, moving closer to the big TV screen, heart pounding. The dark hair was longer, the cheeks more hollowed, as if he’d lost weight. But she knew this man. Somehow she knew him.
And suddenly, she remembered how she knew him.
Frantic, Claire rushed into the library, feverishly pulling open drawers, pawing through paperwork until she found what she was looking for.
A big red folder with press clippings about the embassy bombing. She leafed through clipping after clipping, not caring that some fell to the floor. Finally, she found what she was looking for—a printout of the Laka Embassy staff as of November of last year. And on the second page, there he was.
Gunnery Sergeant Daniel Weston. Detachment Commander of the Marine Security Guard. He’d arrived a week before the bombing. The day of the French Embassy reception.
Claire had no memory of him at the Laka Embassy, none whatsoever. Somehow, the clouds in her mind had parted enough so that she’d known where to look for him. Was her memory returning? Had she had dealings with him in her lost week?
Ordinarily, the Marine Security Guards were just . . . there. In all her postings, the Marines had lived their own, separate lives. They lived in Marine House and though they were at all official functions as guards, they never socialized.
But somehow this Daniel Weston’s path had crossed hers.
The printout shook in her hand. She studied the photograph the way ancient seers studied runes. He looked much younger in the official photo than on TV, though of course during the interview he’d just rushed into a raging fire twice and doubtless had been suffering from smoke inhalation.
In the staff photo, he had the high-and-tight Marine haircut—they didn’t call them whitewalls for nothing—and a chest full of medals on his dress uniform jacket. She could read the medals as easily as she could read the newspapers. They weren’t medals handed out for showing up on time or having polished brightwork on his uniform. They were serious medals for serious acts of heroism. This Daniel Weston had been a good Marine, one of the best.
Brown. His eyes were brown.
Claire could hardly breathe as she held the paper with his bio. He had been there, in Laka at the time of the bombing, though she didn’t remember him.
In the past year, Claire had had no curiosity about the bombing itself. She’d barely survived it. Her life had been neatly divided into Before Bombing and After Bombing. And the After Bombing part of her life had left her broken and weak, half a person, almost a ghost.
A woman haunted by nightmares, horrible dreams so vivid she often woke up reaching for a nonexistent knife to defend herself.
Claire was as certain as she could be that this Daniel Weston, who’d been posted to Laka with her, held a key to something. Maybe he held the key to . . . herself.
And surely . . . surely her nightmares were trying to tell her something? Surely there was a
reason
she couldn’t sleep, and heard voices and gunshots? Surely there was some element she could understand and, by understanding, eliminate it?
It would simply be too cruel if this was to be her life for the rest of her days—reduced to rubble, a wreck of a woman whose greatest hope was to sleep through the night.
No.
No, she refused even the thought of it.
She was lost in a labyrinth, unable to find her way out. Maybe this man could help her. It was the first ray of hope since the bombing. Perhaps in some way he could help her help herself. Find a way out of the swamp of her nightmares.
Suddenly galvanized, Claire sat down at her laptop, logged on to Expedia and booked the first flight out from Tampa the next morning. Destination: Washington DC. When she finished, she sat back, folding her shaking hands in her lap.
Even the thought of getting onto a plane, flying a couple of hours, taking a taxi, confronting a man who would barely remember her if he remembered her at all, who would probably think she was crazy—it was all too much. She couldn’t do it.
What on earth could she say to him?
Can you help me? I think I’m going crazy. I hear voices and see men in my sleep.
Oh God. Maybe he’d call the cops, have the crazy woman escorted to the door. She sounded crazy even to herself.
Claire sat trembling in her chair, heart beating fast. Maybe she could get her money back if she canceled right away. She reached out a shaking hand to the mouse, then stopped.