Twenty-Four
Cam stared at Nic’s slowly seeping head wound, the blood a thin trickle that Nic wiped away every few minutes. Right then, it was the only thing holding Cam together. Worrying about something small, an incidental injury easily cared for, not life-threatening or life-shattering, was easier than thinking about the injury that couldn’t be fixed. And the news of it he had to deliver to his family.
The hospital elevator continued to climb, and when next Nic lifted his hand, Cam intercepted it, slipping free the wad of tissues and cleaning the wound himself. “We should’ve gone by the ER to get you checked out.”
“It’s just a scratch.” Nic wrapped a hand around his, lowering it and prying the tissue from his fingers. “And you need to tell your mother while there’s still time.”
He was right of course. They’d called Bobby from the field, and while his mother’s condition hadn’t worsened, she hadn’t woken up either. Every minute her coma stretched on, the less likely she would wake. But if some part of her was still in there, still here with them, she needed to know.
He’d promised.
“Thank you,” he said, then glanced across the cab to his best friend. “Both of you.”
“Sometimes the answers hurt,” Jamie said. “But it’s better than the not knowing. Your family will see that now.”
“I hope so.” He took Erin’s necklace out of his jacket pocket. It would be as sure a sign as any to his family if they hadn’t already realized why he’d had Bobby call them all here.
The doors opened, and Cam claimed Nic’s hand again. “No hiding,” he said, repeating his pledge from last night. “More than that, I need you.”
Nic’s blue gaze didn’t waver. “Then I’m here.”
After that, his hold didn’t waver either. Not when Jamie came to Cam’s other side, hand clasping his shoulder. Not when the three of them turned the corner and found all of Cam’s family gathered in the hallway outside his mother’s room. And not when their eyes darted first to his and Nic’s clasped hands, then to the topaz medallion hanging from his other.
The reactions were varied and each one pummeled Cam.
Bobby’s “Oh God,” as his wife Josie gathered him into her arms.
Quinn’s dark eyes glassy with tears, before he buried his face in his wife Elena’s hair, their teenage kids hugging him from the other side.
His dad lumbered toward him. “You found her?”
Cam nodded, and the next instant his father crashed into him, heaving.
Hands wrenched apart, Nic stepped back beside Jamie but still close enough Cam felt his presence. Knew they were both there for him.
But it was Keith that Cam needed to be there for most.
Over his father’s shoulder, his younger brother stood shell-shocked, unmoving and pale. “She’s not coming back?” Voice thin, trembling, he sounded closer to eleven, the age he’d been when Erin disappeared, than the thirty-one-year-old Marine he was today.
Cam untangled from his father, handing Ken off to a waiting Jamie, and moved to stand in front of Keith, lightly grasping his biceps. He vibrated in Cam’s hold, wrought thin by emotion, a glass on the edge of breaking.
Cam understood. A little of him had died today too when they’d opened the grave Nic had found and saw the tiny skeleton clutching the familiar medallion. The last shred of hope that maybe Erin was out there somewhere had vanished. And that same little bit of Keith, though a bigger piece for all that his big sister had meant to him, was dying too, right here in the hallway.
“I’m so sorry, brother.”
The trembling became full-on quakes, and Cam drew his brother all the way into his arms. Cam felt every hiccuping breath, every tear, every shudder, right down to his soul, which was shattering too, but he had to hold it together. He’d been the one to bring this down on them. He had to be the strong one as he delivered the news he’d so relentlessly pursued. Including to the person who’d set him on this path, if he wasn’t too late.
Later, after he took care of his family, he’d fall apart in the arms of the man he trusted to hold him together.
Eventually, Keith’s tremors subsided and he quieted, breaths evening out. He pulled back, blue eyes damp, but without the daggers of long-held resentment. “I know I didn’t make it easy on you,” he said. “But thank you for finding her.”
“Thank Nic,” Cam said, taking another step back and extending an arm toward the man with his chin ducked, clearly not wanting to draw attention to himself. But he deserved it, deserved all their gratitude for bringing peace where it had been missing for so long. “He risked his own life to go with the culprit and find where Erin was buried.”
“Why would you do that?” Ken asked.
Nic glanced up, looking first at Ken, then at Cam, a question in his eyes that Cam answered with a nod and an outstretched hand.
No more hiding.
