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The university didn’t own him.
The attention had been relentless. But for Devon, the attention would die down; innocence, after all, had its advantages.
But for Jack, the questions would come at him for the rest of his life.
Do you remember the attack?
Why were you out past the perimeter of the compound?
What happened to Oliver Jenkins?
Jack flinched and shut his eyes. The morphine burned in his pocket, a promise, a sweet whisper of how good forgetting could be.
“I can’t leave you here. I am going to take you back to the university,” Devon said. He put the car in gear and turned in the front seat ready to back up down the long driveway.
“I’m staying,” Jack said, his voice a thin wheeze. The doctors had told him not to talk, to keep from irritating his damaged throat. But Devon liked conversation. Another reason not to go back to his friend’s house.
“But you’re pretty far away from a hospital and with—”
Jack opened the door and Devon shut up, putting the car in Park and hurtling out the driver’s side door in order to help Jack out.
It was hard with his knee and the broken hand.
“What about physical therapy?” Devon asked. “For your hand?” Jack ignored him, swinging his duffle bag up over his good shoulder with his good hand.
“Jack! You need to talk to someone about Oliver, about what happened. You can’t just—”
“Thanks for the ride, Devon.”
Devon sighed, wiped a hand over his eyes. “Christ, you’re stubborn.”
Jack would have laughed if it hadn’t felt like swallowing glass.
“Fine, is there anyone here who will take care of you?” Devon asked.
Jack looked at the brown house with the dark windows. It blended into the forest, the granite outcrop a shadow in the twilight.
No one had ever taken care of him here before.
Except Mia.
Anger burned though him, like a gasoline fire, hot and quick and greasy. She’d left him on the roof of that hotel, run away like a child and hadn’t returned a single email or phone call for four damn weeks. And then, after the bombings, after…Oliver…still nothing.
Where the hell were you, Mia? he thought.
The only things he could count on were the pills in his pocket, the nightmares and that no one would find him here.
“You better go,” he told Devon. “The pass gets dangerous in the dark.”
Devon looked sufficiently nervous at the idea and Jack bit back a smile. He’d watched the man’s fingers get whiter and whiter on the steering wheel on the way over the mountains.
“If you’re sure?”
Jack nodded. He wanted to get this over with—walk in those doors and face down the demons and then sleep. For two months, until he was forced back to San Luis Obispo to answer the dean’s questions.
He barely heard Devon drive away as he took the gravel pathway up to the house. Why were the lights off but the fireplace going? It was getting close to seven o’clock and at least the lights in the kitchen should be glowing, with some traffic coming from the bunkhouse to the dining room.
The barn, to his left, was silent. One brown gelding was in the close corral.
It was spring and the place looked like a ghost town.
He helped his left knee up steps of the front stoop. The front door creaked open under his fist so he walked through the front door of his house.
He saw a weak fire, mostly glowing embers, in the living room fireplace, but the house was cool. The furnace off. Christ. It was eerie.
A vicious snapshot, a horrific memory of the pump site, the compound, blackened to cinders. Nothing but craters and smoke where people and equipment used to be.
He shook his head, clearing the image, shaking it loose.
A light flickered on in the kitchen and he heard thumping in the mudroom.
“Damn it!” Unmistakably Mia.
He dropped his bag and stepped into the wide-open dining room, waiting for his reckoning.
Good God, can no one do anything around here but me? Mia wondered, toeing off her boots. The left one stuck, a reminder she needed to get some new ones, and she bent over, pulling it off with her hands, leaning against the cold wall of the mudroom.
The furnace wasn’t on. It had to be the damn pilot light, and Walter either hadn’t noticed or hadn’t bothered getting someone to check.
It was seven o’clock. She was starving. Tired to the bone. And did not want to deal with the thirty-year-old furnace.
“Walter!” she yelled. She tossed her truck keys into the dish that sat and had sat for years on the counter that split the huge kitchen from the dining room. One glance into the kitchen and she noticed that the guys had cleaned up after their dinner.
Thank God for small blessings.
The light on the Crock-Pot was still on, so she had to hope there was some chili left for her.
