was because he was right. It had started out as once or twice at a party, but then quickly became a bump after work. A little something to take the edge off. But she wasn’t about to acknowledge that now.
“It must be so easy for you,” she said. “Standing there, clean cut, Boy Scout, Army Ranger. CIA agent. Must be so easy to judge someone like me. You say you know what I’ve been through. But you don’t understand it. You can’t.”
Strickland nodded slowly. He stared directly at her, with those eyes that she might have found charming if he was anyone other than who he was. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. I wouldn’t know what it was like to be emancipated at seventeen—”
“I was fifteen,” Sara corrected.
“And I was seventeen. But you didn’t know that about me, did you?”
She didn’t. But she didn’t give him the satisfaction of reacting.
“I joined the Army right away. A lot of states will let you do that. I had my first confirmed kill two days before my eighteenth birthday. Funny thing about the military. They don’t call it ‘murder’ when you kill someone.”
Sara bit her lip. She knew what it was like to kill someone. It had been a mercenary with the black ops team called The Division. He would have killed them, her and her sister, so Sara shot him in the neck. And though the nightmares still plagued her, she’d never once thought of it as murder.
“At one point I was on four different prescriptions,” Strickland told her. “For PTSD. Anxiety. Depression. I abused them all. It was so much easier to be numb, to pretend that everything I did happened to someone else.”
He smiled sadly. “And man, I was a good addict. No one knew. Or maybe no one cared as long as I was a good soldier. Eventually one of my Ranger pals found out. He started following me, keeping close tabs on me. It was so damned irritating. He even took me to see a therapist. It was really hard. It’s so much harder to quit and deal with all your shit than to just take something. I still see a therapist, twice a week when I’m able.”
Sara stared at a small stone on the sidewalk to avoid looking at his eyes. After everything her dad had put her through, Strickland could have been lying. This could have just been a story. But he told it with a lot of conviction. Just like he was trained.
“I know that you’ve experienced some awful things,” he continued. “I know how hard it is to commiserate with normal people and listen to them whine about money or jobs or relationships when you’ve seen real, genuine horrors in the world. But don’t stand there and lean on your crutch and tell me that I don’t understand it. Because you’re lying to yourself right now. You’re heading down a path that’s going to lead to addiction. Homelessness. Death. Is that what you want?”
“What I want…” Her voice cracked.
You will not cry. You don’t do that anymore.
She cleared her throat and said as clearly as she could, “What I want is for you to leave me alone. I want to make my own choices and live with the consequences. I want to be free of any and all reminders that any of those things ever happened. That includes you.”
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