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Chapter 1
Navy SEAL HarperCunningham sometimes came back from his SEAL Team 3 deployments and stayed a couple of days in the Coronado area with his best friend and fellow SEAL, Hamish McDougall. Hamish was on SEAL Team 5. The two were on opposite rotations, so Hamish was usually home, getting ready to do a work up for their next tour, when Harper returned. Both teams worked the same field: the Mediterranean and Northern Africa to the bulge, parts of Spain, and the Canaries.
Today, Harper wanted to go straight home—a long ten-hour drive up California’s valley interior from Coronado to Sonoma County. He frequently made it in less than nine hours, reaching speeds of over 100 MPH.
Today, there was some urgency to his trip. He’d gotten a message from his father’s doctor that his dad was having some difficulties in the hospital where he resided. Harper had sent him to live there when he became too difficult to handle, especially while Harper was on deployments.
The message was somewhat cryptic, yet Harper knew better than to try to reach the doctor.
When his wife, Lydia, had been alive, she would’ve gladly taken care of his dad and known exactly how to handle his outbursts stemming from his fears while losing his memory. Dementia ran in their family, Harper had learned by doing some research. He knew the signs of dementia were increasing every day, and there probably had been some kind of an incident—not life-threatening or the doctor would have said so. Nonetheless, it needed his immediate attention.
Putting it off a day or two—even though his body, his mind, his heart, and his eyes desperately needed rest and mindless beach time or buddy brews, anything other than focusing on solving some problem or emergency while running onto the battlefield—wouldn’t work. Duty and guilt at not being there when his father had one of his meltdowns, now becoming more frequent, required he do everything humanly possible to protect his dad and restore his dad’s world to calm and peace.
It was a battle of another sort, one his father was eventually going to lose, and probably soon.
Harper was full of pride at always being at the ready, no matter what. He didn’t spend a second feeling sorry for himself or wishing it wasn’t his lot in life. He reminded himself it was an honor that he had his dad, his only living relative after his mother’s suicide ten years ago.
He churned in his seat, allowing his back to pop then slowly flexing and releasing his thighs one at a time. He drove through cities and both tiny and large rural farming towns, where cowboy boots were used for work and not for looks, where hats were always dirty unless attending church or walking into the bank for a loan, which he’d done with his father many times. The farmlands were dusty. The old orchards, now brown and twisted, looked like the dark forest in theWizard of Oz, holding boarded-up farmhouses and old childless swings hanging by one chain from a large tree in the front yard.
It was evidence that life either moved on and survived elsewhere or didn’t survive at all. Either way, it was sad to watch it spinning by his windows.
He felt sorry for the demise of the farming industry in California, felled by the politics of the Colorado River dispute, when the farmers lost to the development needs in LA and to the environmentalists in the North.
They never had a chance.
He stopped for fuel along the way, his four-door three-quarter ton diesel pickup getting almost twenty-five miles an expensive gallon. He munched on burgers he’d sorely missed on their last deployment to Africa, thick chocolate milkshakes, and, of course, coffee. He always loaded up on two or three tumblers of coffee, doctored with about a half pint of cream between them. He always ran out of cream and snap pickles or olives between fill-ups.
In those days, back when he had a wife and experienced three miraculous years he thought he’d never have, he never had problems with his dad because she knew how to charm the pants off the old guy, even though he was known for being fresh with the staff. It didn’t matter how many times they told him, due to his dementia, he never remembered and most everyone laughed it off. He was never mean, just inappropriate. That was a constant problem.
But Lydia could handle it all. She had never complained. She was an angel in every sense of the word. His dad had no long-term cognition she was gone, just kept drifting off into space more and more frequently—his way of dealing with anything he didn’t know how to take care of. He retreated more to his room and, of late, more to his TV while in bed.
“It’s not fair to blame Lydia. Not fair at all. You stop that, Harper,” he whispered to himself.
The love of his life and his only reason for living had been dead now nearly two years, shot by a sniper in Africa. And although Harper had been itching to go overseas on deployment at the same time as her, where they could share some of that time together, her nursing mission to a small village in Benin had popped up ahead of time. He had been nowhere near where she was to rescue her.
It was one of the biggest regrets of his life.
Four months later, as luck would have it, he got the opportunity to take down the guy who took that fatal shot. That in itself was satisfaction.
But it no way stopped the pain or regret. He’d failed to protect her. He’d known she shouldn’t have gone by herself. The medical staff who accompanied her were not even shooters, and they only used local police for protection.
Still, it was his fault, because he couldn’t convince her not to go. He didn’t have the conversation skills Lydia had. Oh man, she could talk him into anything. She was so good.
That round should have hit his chest, not hers. It should have ended his life. His dad would be better off with Lydia, anyway. Harper knew that even his dog, Venom, had liked her more, and Venom had been so highly trained and was so loyal to Harper to begin with. It mattered little. Lydia wrapped them both around her little finger, and she’d always got her way.
He’d tried everything he could to get sent over early, but the Navy wasn’t having any of it.
Yes, the world would now be a much better place if he could have Lydia back. He’d have given his own life if he could save her. But that wasn’t to be.
He thought about Hamish and his little family, happily married, with children and grandchildren overrunning his quaint house he shared with his wife of thirty years. They had more dogs than Coronado allowed, and he was always getting in trouble for it. Harper envied him.
But Hamish was a different man. Every bit as courageous as Harper. He could settle down and be that kind of a family man. Harper was so discriminating he usually sent women screaming in the opposite direction, calling him all kinds of names he didn’t like to hear and knew were untrue.
He was just unlucky with women. Until he met Lydia.
She’d been one of his dad’s pretty nurses at the hospital after he’d fallen and injured himself in the care home. She stayed up with him and tended to him, probably wiping his butt and changing his diaper, although Lydia never told Harper that. She looked in on his dad so when Harper came to visit she had a full report ready for him without him even asking.
Hadn’t taken long before he realized Lydia was sweet on him. Harper hadn’t known what to do and figured she’d just talk herself out of it, like all the other ladies who came before. It was only going to be a matter of time. But, and as miraculous as it was, she finally approached him in the hallway one evening after she tended to his dad and his visit was concluded. It was late, very few staff on hand to overhear her soft whisper.
