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“It was hard,” he said, a note of pain in his voice. “More than hard. I lost my entire crew, Amara. They stuck me in a safety box I had installed when I bought the jet. It saved my life, but there wasn’t enough room for everyone. When I was making my way out of the wreckage, I saw the section of the plane where the crew had remained was completely ablaze and … they were all there. None of them were as lucky as I was.”
Amara flashed on an image of the attorney who had handled the contracts for their agreement. He would have been one of the poor people ablaze. She shuddered at the thought.
“They had no chance,” Quint said, his voice hollow and far away. “I managed to make it out of the side of the broken fuselage, and thankfully the fire was mostly contained near the nose of the plane. Still, I have some scars on my forearms from pushing through and shielding my face.”
Amara knew she couldn’t see those scars in the dark car, and knew he wore a jacket regardless. But nonetheless, she glanced over at his arms. He had scars. And she was sure he had scars beyond the basic definition of the word. It sounded to her like he had serious survivor guilt.
“I’ve never had an experience like that, you understand,” Quint continued. “A local shepherd, Marduk, eventually saw me wandering around the mountainside and decided he ought to check on me. He said he thought I was probably just drunk, but he tracked me down anyway. I was lucky, in more ways than one.”
Amara wove through traffic on the freeway, trying to be smooth in her maneuvers so as not to jerk her injured passenger around too much. “Not luck, though. I mean, you made it so far away from the crash, even being as hurt as you were.”
Quint had been looking out the side window, but he turned toward her now. “Yes, well, the will to survive has inspired men to greater feats than a long stroll through the mountains, I assure you.”
She wondered why he was being so modest about the Herculean effort it would have taken to travel on foot in his condition. She admitted to herself that the man she’d met two years ago would never have downplayed such a heroic feat.
Perhaps he actually had changed as much as he claimed.
He shuddered and continued. “Marduk took me in his donkey cart to a village that was about ten miles away. It had a field hospital that had been abandoned by some foreign-aid workers several years before. The locals had maintained it as best they could.”
“That’s amazingly lucky. You were way out in nowhere. If you’d had to get to an actual hospital —”
“A lengthy trip might have killed me, I was told later.”
“So they took care of you there, in the field hospital?”
“There were two nurses who ran the place. No doctors. And I’m not certain of the nurses’ qualifications, either. But I’m alive, and it’s thanks to those two women, so that’s all the qualification I need.”
“Absolutely,” Amara agreed. A shiver ran down her spine. What if that field hospital hadn’t been there? What if those nurses hadn’t known what to do to save Quint? What if … so many what ifs. So many ways everything could have gone so horribly wrong.
Quint began speaking more briskly. “I don’t remember much of my stay there. You may think I’m not moving well now, but this is a huge improvement from where I started. They did the best they could. I was in a bad way, too injured to move for a long time.”
“I’m not sure if they did any sort of surgery,” he continued, “because I picked up more than a few scars on my trek toward the village. I didn’t think to ask the one nurse who spoke a little English. I had more important things to worry about.” A slight flash of his white teeth in the darkness, illuminated by the dash lights. “She’s the only reason I made it back as soon as I did, honestly.”
“Is she the one you told your name? The news said she recognized your name.”
“The press actually got that part right. Yes, she was the one who got me rescued.”
“It’s an amazing story, Quint. You being here, it’s like a miracle.”
“It is,” he said. “And I’m grateful for it. I’ve never known gratitude like this.”
Amara nodded, not knowing what else to say. Her heart was warmed to see Quint begin to open up, hints of his shining personality and pride showing through the haze of illness and hardship that must have consumed him.
Although he was far from out of the woods where his trauma was concerned, he genuinely seemed like he was going to be all right. The more she spoke with him, the more it became apparent that he was telling the truth about being different than he was when she first met him.
While the attraction was real and raw at the conference two years ago, it was shallow. Physically, they were drawn together almost magnetically, but they weren’t compatible on any other level. She sensed it was different now, and she was drawn to him in more than that one, simple way.
Whether it was the crash that humbled and focused him or the intervening years between the conference and where they were now, she was overjoyed to get to know the new Quint. As for herself, she wasn’t the same woman she’d been. She had also changed, thanks to Hampton.
Streetlights flitted across Quint’s handsome face. He breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly. “I’m happy to be alive. And I’m about to meet my son. Life, Amara, can be very, very good sometimes.”
She smiled. A flicker of worry passed over her that they still hadn’t worked out all the details of sharing custody of Hampton. But they would. It would be fine.
“Yes,” she said. “Life can be very, very good.”
AMARA PULLED THE CAR TO A stop several houses down from her mother’s home. She stared intently down the street.
/> “Is there something wrong?” Quint turned to look at her, his head tilted slightly.
