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“No, thank you.”
“Do you want to play a board game?”
“No, thank you.”
“Do you want to rent a spaceship and fly to Mars?”
“No, thank you.”
“Hayley,” he said, exasperated. Ever since she’d found out that Jay Turner had tried to kidnap her sister, she had been walking around in a daze. Other than her initial meltdown she hadn't cried again, just flitted around the house if he asked her to help with dinner, set the table, or anything else or sat stiffly in a corner of the couch and stared into space. He wanted to snap her out of it, but he didn't know how.
“What?” She turned her head slowly to look at him.
“You’re not listening to a word I've been saying.”
“I was,” she protested.
“Okay then what was the last thing I suggested we do to hang out tonight?”
“Umm …” She looked at him helplessly. “Okay, maybe I was a little distracted.”
“A little?” he teased, jabbing her in the ribs.
“Okay, more than a little,” she acknowledged with a small smile. “I don’t care what we do tonight, whatever you want is fine with me.”
“What about a game?” His family had been big on board games when he was growing up. They’d had a family fun night at least once a month, even when he was a teenager, and although at the time he would never have admitted it out loud, he had actually enjoyed those nights. Sitting around the kitchen table, laughing, talking, eating snacks, bickering good-naturedly, the competitive levels of those nights were off the charts, put four siblings together and they couldn’t be anything but.
“Sure,” Hayley agreed without a lot of enthusiasm. That was okay he knew just what game to play to finally get a spark out of her.
“Be right back,” he told her as he headed down the hall to his room. When Uncle Ryan and Brady were organizing this place for them to stay in there were a couple of things he’d asked them to pack for him. The sewing machine and the gifts Hayley had been making was one, his Christmas gift for her in case they ended up spending the holidays here was another, and this particular board game was the third.
When he returned to the living room, he saw that Hayley had sunk back into her daze. Her back ramrod straight, her hands clasped tightly in her lap—so tightly he could see her knuckles were white—her gaze blank as she stared at the TV without seeing what was on it.
“Time to play,” he said, forcing some cheer into his voice to push away the worry. He didn't know how Hayley was going to get through this. So far Jay had continued to slip through the cops’ fingers, and he had to proceed under the assumption that that could continue to happen for days or weeks, possibly even months. As her bodyguard—and her friend—it wasn't just his job to keep her alive and in one piece, it was also his job to make sure she made it through this intact psychologically as well. Or at least come out of it as okay as she could be after living through someone’s attempts to kill her.
Brian had expected to repeat himself several times before Hayley realized he was in the room, but she immediately looked over, her eyes falling to the box he held in his hands.
“Is that what I think it is?” she asked, shocked.
“Sure is,” he said, joining her on the couch and setting the game on the coffee table.
“I can't believe you still have it.” Hayley was still staring at the box like she couldn’t believe it existed.
“Of course I do. I wouldn’t throw this away.”
A little color brightened Hayley’s cheeks. “I spent so long choosing that. I second-guessed myself so many times. I thought you probably would have thrown it away the next day, not kept it for ten years.”
“This was the sweetest, most thoughtful gift I've ever been given,” he told her, and he wasn't lying. Hayley had given him this game of Operation as a Christmas gift when she was fourteen, and he was twenty. Their families always did a Secret Santa and that year she had gotten him, the limit was ten dollars because the idea was to be creative and thoughtful, not spend a lot of money.
“You were pre-med. At the time you wanted to be a surgeon like your dad, and I knew how much you loved board games, so I thought you might have liked it. But I was so nervous about giving it to you, I didn't want to look childish or stupid, and I didn't want to give away that …” Hayley trailed off, but he knew what she had been going to say.
“It was a great gift, Hales. This was my favorite game as a kid, I would spend hours playing it.”
“Then let’s play,” she said brightly, a little too brightly, like she was trying to hide something.
He didn't push her on it, and they put all the little white plastic Funatomy pieces into their spots. They shuffled the two sets of cards and dealt out the Specialist ones, setting the Doctor cards beside the Operation board. “You want to go first?”
“Sure.” Hayley picked up a Doctor card. “I got the butterflies in Cavity Sam’s stomach,” she announced. Picking up the tweezers, she positioned them carefully over the butterfly piece and slowly lowered them down into the small hole. She clamped them together, clutching the plastic butterfly between them, then began to bring them up. She almost had it out when she bumped the side, and Cavity Sam buzzed, his nose lighting up. “I didn’t get it.”
