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ChapterTwenty-Five
Reese
Then
Six weeks.
One thousand hours.
Sixty thousand minutes.
A long time to saw myself apart.
I’m drained dry. Worn flat. Exhausted, too, because even at night, I’m not really sleeping. My hands slide through my sheets to the empty space beside me. Fitful dreams claw at me, and after a few hours, I wake curled on my side, drowning in the memory of Brennan’s eyes and his touch.
Brennan Walker took hold of me, and now that I’ve torn him out of my life, it’s like the rest of my existence has collapsed. Like the fires that fueled me have gone out, and the reasons I had for pushing through these days no longer mean what they once did.
I did this to myself. I kicked open these doors to my private hell.
Shame rubs me raw from the inside out.
I watch the White House when I can’t sleep. It’s a meditation at this point, or maybe a compulsion. More than a habit.
I play out the days and nights I could have been at Brennan’s side. Evenings we could have spent together, moving from the kitchen to the West Sitting Hall. Would he teach me more yoga? Would we have watched the rain from the windows of his bedroom? Made love at midnight? Danced on the balcony to aching blues again while we watched the roses wilt?
I imagine the life we could have lived while I haunt my memories of Brennan.
True to his word, Brennan hasn’t spoken to me again. He is nothing if not a man of honor and integrity.
Of course, the burner phone is gone. It’s nothing but smashed fragments at the bottom of the Potomac now. Not even the Service could reconstruct those shards.
I’m a ghost at the White House. I’ve given Henry the presidential-facing duties, and I’m running the command center and training the junior agents. They’re a good bunch. Sheridan, thanks to Henry’s shepherding, is leagues above the rest. He’ll be a team lead soon.
Sheridan is one of my only bright spots in these days of desolation. After New York, he took three days off and came back a new man. He said, “Good morning, sir,” and grinned at me, and every day since, he seems like he’s on a personal mission to make me smile. His unstoppable good humor buoys me, keeps me going.
There are days when he alone is the reason I am not overcome.
Sometimes he reminds me of Brennan, or a younger version of him. I watch him when he doesn’t realize it, and I see a deeper side to him. More serious. Fewer goofy smiles. I can’t tell if the darkness that wreathes him in those moments is something fleeting or if there’s something to excavate. If I had more bandwidth, I’d dig. Spend more time understanding Sheridan.I want to understand him.
It’s all I can do to put one foot in front of the other. Grief alone is all-consuming, and when grief drowns in shame, every thought, every memory, every moment, becomes a shard that slices at your ravaged and flickering soul.
I have committed myself to this dark pit of my own making, and it’s a world that seems to shrink each day. Or maybe I’m the one that’s shrinking. One day I may open my eyes and discover there’s nothing left.
I should transfer. During my first years in the Service, I made a name for myself in the cyber squads. I should go back there. I should do whatever I can to get away from Brennan.
I’m extra maudlin tonight. Brennan has left Washington for the weekend and gone to Camp David. If-onlys scratch like spiders moving across my brain.
I could be there with him. We could steal these days and wrap ourselves around each other, ignore the world and just be. Be in love, be together. We could—
My hands scrub over my weary face. Trying to escape my own mind is like trying to run from the devil. He’s always right in front of you.
Autumn is on its last gasp, and the world runs riot with the change of seasons. The sunset was a like a dying fire on the horizon, rouge red and lines of orange streaking the dome of the sky. Now the stars are hot in a windless night. The monuments at the Mall look like they’ve been painted on velvet.
I’m walking the track around the South Lawn. Reliving moments and replaying memories like they won’t exist if I don’t bring them back to life each day.
Slap, slap.Footsteps shuffling. Another series of quick slaps, rubber on pavement. The lonely sounds of a solitary dribbler alone on a half-court.
Halfway down the track, when you’re heading toward E Street beyond the south end of the Eisenhower Building, there’s a winding little piece of pavement that leads into a cluster of towering trees. At first, it seems to go nowhere, but take that path and the pavement spits you out at the White House basketball half-court.
