She gave another nod, a slow one. “I take it you don’t mean geographically.”
“No.” And leaving it there wasn’t going to get this part of his mission done. He could almost hear the vault doors creak as he opened the crypt of feelings he didn’t care to share. “I’ve done things, seen things, survived things most people can’t even imagine. I know what I’m capable of in ways most people never will, thank God. And I can’t talk about it. Partly because most of it is classified, but partly because no one will understand anyway.”
“I can see that.”
“The only people who truly understand are the people I served with. And we all have that sense of alienation. Some are proud of it. Maybe even most. But there’s a cost.”
“I would imagine so.”
“So we can’t make connections. We try. Then we watch it all go up in smoke. Our wives leave us because we can’t talk, our kids feel like we’re strangers who just show up from time to time, even parents look at us like they don’t know who we are. And they don’t. We pretend, try to appear ordinary, but nothing inside us is ever ordinary again. And finally we realize the only people we can truly connect with anymore are our fellow team members.”
He watched her eyes glaze with thought as she absorbed what he was saying. “I guess,” she said slowly, “I can identify with that just a little bit.”
He waited to see if she would volunteer anything more, but she didn’t. So he decided to forge ahead. “I’m not saying this out of self-pity.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
“I’m just trying to explain why I’m so difficult to talk with. Over the years, between secrets I couldn’t discuss, and realities I shouldn’t discuss, I got so I didn’t talk much at all.”
She nodded once more. “Did you have a wife? Kids?”
“I was lucky. I watched too many marriages fall apart before I ever felt the urge. That’s one closet without skeletons.”
“And now your only support group, the rest of your team, has been taken away from you.”
He hadn’t thought of it that way before, but he realized she was right. “I guess so.”
“So what do you do now?”
“I’m trying to work my way into a life without all that, but I’ll be honest, I’m having trouble envisioning it.”
“I’m...” She hesitated. “I guess I’m having the same kind of problem, generally speaking. I can’t seem to figure out where I want to go, either.”
He waited, hoping she’d offer more, but she said nothing else, merely sipped her coffee. So he tried a little indirect prompting. “Big changes can do that. You’d think, though, that since I knew I was going to retire I could have planned better.”
A perfect opportunity to say her changes had come without time to plan, or even any choices, but she didn’t say anything. Which left him to try to find another way in.
For the first time, it occurred to him that talking to him must be as frustrating for others as talking to Cory was for him. Okay, regardless of his reasons for preferring silence, that wasn’t going to work this time. If he was right, and he was rarely wrong about things like this, she had to learn to trust him.
But he’d never had to win anyone’s trust in this way before. Oh, he’d gained the trust of his team members in training, during operations and eventually even some of it by reputation. But none of those tools were available to him here. A whole new method was needed and he didn’t have the foggiest idea how to go about finding it.
Nor, if he was right, did they have months to get to that point.
Maybe he had to keep talking. He sure as hell couldn’t think of any other way. The problem was that most of the past twenty years of his life contained so much classified information, and so much that he couldn’t share with the uninitiated, that his own memory might as well have been stamped Top Secret. And what did you talk about besides the weather if you couldn’t refer to your memories?
But then Cory herself opened the door to a place that wasn’t classified but that he wished could be. She asked, “Do you have any family?”
His usual answer to that was a flat no. But given his task here, he bit the bullet. “None that I speak to.”
“Oh. Why?”
“It was a long time ago.” Which meant he ought to be able to elaborate. It had nothing to do any longer with who he was. In fact, he’d removed them almost as cleanly as an amputation.
Then she totally floored him. Before he could decide what to tell her, and what to omit, she said gently, “You were abused, weren’t you?”
Little had the power to stun him any longer, but that simple statement did. “What, am I wearing a mark on my forehead?”
She shook her head. “I don’t mean to pry. But just a couple of things you’ve said... Well, they reminded me of some...people I worked with.”
Still hedging her way around her past, while asking about his. The tables had turned, and he’d helped her do it. Didn’t mean he had to like it.
“Well, yes,” he finally said. “What things did I say?”
“It doesn’t matter, really. You’re not that child any longer, but there were just some echoes of things I’ve heard before. Most people wouldn’t even notice.”
The way most people wouldn’t notice her omissions. His estimate of her kicked up quite a few notches. In her own way, she was as observant as he.
She reached for the carafe between them, and poured a little more coffee into her mug. Then she added just a tiny bit of milk. “Sometimes,” she said, “I guess things stay with us, even when they’ve been left far in the past.”
“I guess.” How could he deny it when she had picked up on something he’d buried a long, long time ago? “Yeah, they were abusive.”
“Physically as well as emotionally?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry.” Her brown eyes practically turned liquid with warmth and concern. “Did that play a part in you becoming a SEAL?”
He was about to deny it, because he had, after all, been out of the house for nearly a year before he joined the navy. But then he realized something, and saw how it dovetailed into what was going on here, and he made a conscious decision to breach a barrier so old and so strong that he was hardly aware of it any longer.
“Yes,” he said finally. “In a way I suppose it did.”
“How so?”
Well, he’d opened the vault. “After I got out of high school, I couldn’t shake them off fast enough. I worked my way through a few jobs, feeling at loose ends. Confused.”
“Confused?” She repeated
