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“Decker, you okay?” said a voice.
He felt something grip his arm and his shoulder. He opened his eyes to see Jamison’s hand on his arm, and Mars clenching his shoulder. Jamison was looking at him anxiously. Mars the same.
He blinked rapidly, and, thankfully, the images vanished.
“I’ve been having…some issues.”
“What kind?” asked Jamison.
He drew a long breath. “The memories of finding my family dead have started to just empty out of my head, over and over, the colors, the images, the…” He rubbed his temples. “I don’t know when it will happen, and I can’t seem to make it stop.”
“But it has stopped now, right?” asked Mars while Jamison looked on with a horrified expression.
Decker glanced at her but then quickly looked away after seeing her tortured features. “For now.”
“When has it happened?” asked Jamison quietly.
“Once when I was in my room.” He glanced at Mars. “When you fell asleep in my room. I barely made it to the toilet. Then I went outside in the rain. I thought…I thought I was really losing it. Then, other times.” He thumped the side of his head painfully.
“Had it happened to you before you came back to town this time?” asked Jamison.
“I know what you’re going to say, Alex. I know I can’t live in the past.”
“Knowing is one thing. Doing something about it is another.”
Decker didn’t respond.
“What makes you come back here, Amos?” asked Mars. “I mean, Burlington, I get. But why come back to the house where it happened?”
In his mind’s eye, Decker saw himself climbing, bone-tired, out of his car after an exhausting shift at work. It was nearly midnight. He was supposed to have been home hours before. But he had decided a case he was working on might get a breakthrough if he put some more time into it. He had called Cassie and told her. She hadn’t been happy about it, because they were supposed to go to dinner with her brother, who was in town staying with them. But she told him she understood. She told him she knew his casework was very important to him.
My damn casework.
And then she told him that they would just go out to dinner the next night. Her brother was staying over, so they’d have another opportunity.
Another opportunity that never came to be.
Those were the last words that Decker had ever spoken to his wife. He had gone into the house with the intention of slipping into bed without waking her, and then taking her, Molly, and his brother-in-law out to breakfast the next morning. As a surprise, to make up for that night.
And then he had walked into his home and entered a nightmare.
His life had never been the same. Not in any conceivable way.
And the bottom line was clear to him.
I was not there when my family really needed me. I failed them. I failed myself. And I don’t know if I can live with that.
“Decker?” prompted Mars.
“I guess I keep coming back here,” began Decker. “To imagine how it could have been…different.”
The light in the upstairs bedroom winked out. For some reason that made Decker withdraw even further into whatever hole he had mentally dug for himself.
His head was throbbing. It was like his brain was melting.
Something tapped on the window.
“Who the hell else did you bring?” snapped Decker.
