a blind man in his late fifties, counted on Sarah to listen as he told her about what he’d learned from books on tape. Her goal was to make their diets nutritious, as well as to keep them active and social. “I’m done in the middle of the afternoon.”
“Good. I’m off to Eugene in the morning for a weekend cop conference. Want to have dinner tonight?”
“Sure. I’ll fix something for Jack.”
“He’s planning a Blue Bloods marathon.”
“Wouldn’t you rather stay with him? You’d probably love a Blue Bloods marathon. We can have dinner another time.”
He leaned over to kiss her gently. “We haven’t had an evening alone together in two weeks. Prime rib special at the Farmhouse tonight.”
“Okay, I’m in.”
“Seven o’clock.”
“It’s a date.”
“It is,” he said, a different note in his voice. “We have things to talk about. I’ll pick you up.”
“No, I’ll stop by to deliver something for Jack’s dinner. What do we have to talk about?”
He narrowed his gaze on her, as though looking for something in her eyes he wasn’t finding. “A lot,” he finally replied.
His tone put her on alert. So far, theirs had been just an easy, romantic friendship. Today, though, he looked very serious. She hoped he wasn’t thinking what she suspected he was thinking. He’d make a wonderful husband and father, but while she’d like to have the one, she didn’t intend to ever have the other.
* * *
JACK WALKED INTO the kitchen, doing his best to look well-adjusted despite his earlier freak-out. That was just a small indicator of his serious problem. Behaving in a normal way in the kitchen he’d grown up in since age eight, in the small-town life that had been all about fishing and building and girls, when just two weeks ago he’d carried an M4 carbine and jumped out of helicopters, was harder than it sounded. Bullets had whistled by his ear, people around him had died or suffered unspeakable injuries; he’d exchanged gunfire and felt a time or two as though he might die. And somehow he had to dial down the adrenaline that pulsed into his blood and figure out how to live again in this kitchen, in this life.
“A step at a time, Jack,” his shrink at Fort Polk used to say. “A step at a time.”
Sure. Easily said. But even if he managed to cope with old memories, what did he do about new ones? Like waking up with his brother’s girl straddling him? He could still feel her knees pressed against his hips, smell the floral-vanilla fragrance of her clinging to his T-shirt.
He shook off the sensory image and took the plate of buttered toast from Ben, put it in the middle of the table, then went to get utensils. He smiled reassuringly at his brother and Sarah as he passed them. He took the opportunity to keep thinking.
Why in God’s name had he seen his mother’s face in his dream? Images of his little sisters had haunted him for years, ever since they’d all been separated when their mother had gone to jail for manslaughter after murdering her boyfriend. He’d had nightmares since then of himself running away through a dark, blurry night, the girls screaming and footsteps right behind him, gaining on him. But he’d always been very much alone. What was his mother doing in his dreams? And in Iraq? He scowled fiercely.
“Jack?”
He looked up at the sound of his name and saw Sarah holding up an egg. “You okay?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Good. Two or three eggs in your omelet?”
He smiled. “Two, please.”
Ben put the jam down in front of him. “You’re starting to scare me, bro. You sure you’re okay?”
Jack kept smiling. “Thanks, I’m good. You know how real dreams can be. I’m just having trouble putting it out of my head.”
“Afghanistan?”
“No, Iraq. For whatever reason, it was the Humvee explosion in the middle of my first tour that keeps coming back to me.”
“You can talk about any of that, you know. I’d be glad to listen. I know I wasn’t there, but I kind of understand war.”
“Thanks.” Jack knew cops saw ugly things all the time. But terrible memories of war entangled with ugly childhood memories made for an awful hybrid.
It would be hard to explain to Ben what was going on in his head. He and Ben had been friends as children, then brothers when the Department of Human Services had allowed Ben’s parents, Gary and Helen Palmer, to adopt Jack. At the same time, his younger half sisters had been sent to live with their respective fathers.
“I’m going to be fine,” Jack insisted. “I just have to get my head together.”
Ben looked him in the eye, clearly trying to read what Jack wasn’t saying. “You know it’s more than that. No one can survive such things without venting it to somebody.”
He’d been doing that to his shrink at the fort, and although being home again was gradually pulling him away from the past six years, the sharply revived memories of his childhood and the big-time return of his dreams were driving him toward the only solution he could think of to get his life on track again.
“Actually,” he said, “I have an idea about how to help myself.”
Ben put down his fork. “What’s that?”
Jack met his waiting gaze and said, as though it was going to be easy, “I’m going to find my sisters.”
BEN SHOOK HIS head and stabbed his fork into a bite of sausage. “Jack, it’s been too long. You have no idea where they are, and they have different names.”
“Yeah. But technology puts the world at my fingertips. I’m going to find them.”
Sarah saw the zealous light in Jack’s eyes and the defining caution in Ben’s. They were two very different men with one very strong connection. They weren’t brothers by birth but by the courage that brought them together as boys and now defined them as men—the soldier and the cop.
“I hate to see you get hurt, Jack. And you’re kind of...vulnerable right now, don’t you think? You’ve had about all the pain you can deal with.”
Jack shrugged as though he had no control over his need to reconnect with his sisters. “I have to do this.”
“Why can’t it wait until you’re...adjusted?”
“Because ‘it’ has waited so long already. And this is as adjusted as I’m going to get until I find them. I promised our mother that I’d work on the carriage house out back. That’ll help me regain my carpentry skills, hopefully, so I can get Palmer Restorations
