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When he died and it came out that it was Barrett’s fault—the pussy couldn’t shoot some desert rat and so the operation that day went to shit, with John covering for Barrett—it made more sense to me. There, the type of man who drove intoxicated, hit a woman, ran.
Barrett—not me.
I told myself that it made sense, the way fate played things. Up until the time when Barrett tracked his victim down in Gatlinburg, it all made so much sense to me. And after that, the nervousness. The fear. The fury.
I tried hard to keep tabs on them. I tried to get Gwen to talk to me. I even used the fence-jump trick John taught me. I used his sed dart concoction. I failed, but things were still okay until she told Jamie about her dreaming. She remembered things about that night.
The team I’d hired to watch Gwenna and Barrett came in contact with another team of snoops: this one far superior, a team of ghosts. As it turns out, they had an agenda, too. They were working for General Broomfield, Michael’s father, who was trying to keep an ACE scandal at bay.
Those men told mine that they weren’t authorized to shoot and kill, but that’s what they thought their boss wanted. A tragic accident.
Something awful.
What’s worse than a veteran who’s lost his mind, who kills his girl and then himself?
THIRTY ONE
GWENNA
March 30, 2016
It’s something that I couldn’t think about. Not didn’t want to. Couldn’t. It wasn’t possible for me to think of Barrett as a murderer.
He was mine. I’d stamped my love on every inch of him. Even the damaged parts of him, I wanted. Needed. I was damaged too, living a pseudo-life, and loving Barrett made me real again. It made me me again.
How could I hate him? How was I to label something he’d done unforgivable?
Maybe in a moment I did. I attacked him in the snow. And in that moment, maybe the deepest part of me, the animal, wanted to take him out—the way he took me out. Wanted to get him back: life for a life. But conscious Gwen? Thinking, feeling Gwen? She could never, ever hate him. I just loved him. Kept on loving him. Because it’s all my heart could do.
Love doesn’t give choices. It’s like an avalanche. It just happens. When it does, all you can do is hope you’re strong enough to live through it.
Dove told me that Barrett tracked me down because he felt that we were linked. Like, karma. Somehow, ours became entangled.
What he did to me, he felt, was done to him in turn. My life was wrecked. I couldn’t sing. I couldn’t act. I couldn’t even pursue Taekwondo semi-professionally. So, no shred of my former life remained.
And same for Barrett. His life as an Operator: over after Syria. His best friend: gone.
He tracked me down as penance. It would be the ultimate atonement. He could confess everything, release his awful guilt. He’d planned to let me decide what should be done to him. If I wanted him to turn himself in, if I didn’t object to him doing so, then he would. He’d come completely clean, and maybe then, he’d feel clean too.
Except, he fell in love with me. And so it’s funny, how wrong I had it at first. He traded absolution, traded guiltless living, he traded a fresh start to be with me. He wasn’t with me because he thought he had to be. Being near me put his life at risk, it risked his friends’ lives. But he did it until he was worried it would risk my life. And then he had to tell me. Had to let me go. That’s what he thought, Dove told me.
It’s a fucked-up story, this one. Hard to understand and even harder to accept.
There were two hit-and-runs that night. One mine, and one that of an elderly Arapahoe woman. She died and stayed dead. Breck hid her body underneath snow, so the local paper didn’t report her death until a month and a half later.
I died and came back.
Another curve in the tracks: Breck telling Barrett, Dove, and Blue that the woman that he’d hidden was alive. Was me.
Breck thought this would make it easier for Bear to live with what had happened. He didn’t know that Bear and I had talked that night at the bar. That we’d connected. Bear had called me “snowflake,” given me his scarf. We smoked our cigarettes together, and I loved his handsome face, his pretty eyes. I remember just that one thing: smoking with him outside. In my memory, I even loved his sadness.
Sweet Barrett.
Mine.
I look at Barrett, and I want to hug him. Want to touch his hair and rub his scratchy cheeks. I want his lips on mine, his strong legs intertwined with my soft ones. I want him beside me at night so I can hold him, he can hold me.
It’s the little things. That’s all life is, when you really start to think about it. Little things that are your story. No one knows them—no one but you and yours—but they’re what make a life. The twinkle lights I strung up on the ceiling for him. Him smelling gardenia petals. The flying pig bird bath.
