“Tom, I’m fine,” she said gently, understanding the reason for his concern. At least, she was fine physically. Her brain was freaking out so much it might well catch fire.
He checked his phone again, his jaw tightening. “We can usually get faint wi-fi coverage this close to the house. Not even the wi-fi name is showing up.” He looked in the direction of the abbey. She could just trace its monstrous outline in the gloom beyond the trees. “Either the power is out or just the wi-fi.”
“Could I have taken it out in the crash?”
“The phone and DSL line comes in along the service driveway, so probably not.”
“The landline would still work even if the power was out, right?”
“I’m not keen to cross open ground to get to the abbey. We’ll try Duncan’s cottage. There’s another landline there, and the wood comes in close, so we’ll have better cover. Plus, we can check on Duncan again. Hemusthave heard the crash, if he’s still… He must have heard. That sound would have carried for miles.”
Amelia pressed her lips together. For Tom’s sake, as well as Duncan’s, she hoped they’d find him happily watching TV in his cottage—not that he seemed like the type to watch TV in work hours.
“I’m sorry, Amelia,” Tom said, scanning the territory around them. The Tom she’d known up until now, the laidback charmer—she hadn’t been able to reconcile him with being in the military, but now she could see it. The tight jaw. The quick decisions. A calm intensity in his eyes. “I have no idea what’s going on here, but you shouldn’t be caught up in it.”
“None of this feels real. In fact, I’m not sure how tight my grip on reality is right now, even before hitting my head,” she added, as he frowned at her cut. If she were to trace it back, she’d entered a parallel universe the moment Tom had knelt before her in his Darcy costume. “It’s probably not a bad thing. Sometimes it’s best not to think too much about what’s happening. Act now, panic later, that’s my motto. Well, it’s not, but it should be.”
Still checking their surroundings, he reached for her hand again and pulled her close, and that simple act eased the tightness in her chest. Reaching out and connecting really was his default setting.
“Thank you,” she said, and he startled slightly, looking down at her. “For this.” He looked more puzzled. “For the comfort! For holding my hand.”
He gave a slight, asymmetric smile, showing his dimple. “Literally costs me nothing.” He tilted his head. “You might be in shock, so give me a heads-up if you feel it catching up with you, okay?”
“I will.”
A car engine became audible. He pulled her into a dip, and she crouched beside him.
“Could that be someone passing by along the road?” she said. “Could we wave them down?” She went to stand, but he pulled her back, shaking his head. “Maybe someone heard the gunshots and called nine-one-one, or whatever it is in this country.”
“Gunshots are nothing unusual around here. More likely, it’s whoever was shooting at us. And even if it wasn’t, by the time we got back to the road, they’d be gone. Come on, let’s move.”
They doubled back through the glade and crossed the drive, Tom gripping her hand as if he intended to fuse them together. Amelia was hyperaware of rustlings in the bushes—too small to be human—plus the occasional bird call and the trickling of a nearby stream. Deadened, wintry sounds. The crash must have been crazy loud. It already felt more like a vivid dream than a memory. How could she be sure any of this was actually happening?
“Amelia?” Tom said quietly.
She realized she’d slowed. Their hands were still linked but their arms were at full stretch. She shook her head, and caught up to him.
This was what the robbery had felt like—as if it couldn’t possibly be happening to her, so it wasn’t happening. An out-of-body experience. “Disassociation,” her therapist had called it. It had been less than thirty minutes of a terror so primal she hadn’t been able to comprehend it. But the worst of it, emotionally, came in the aftermath. And that phase had lasted many thousands of times longer, and was still going. The fear of it happening again wasworsethan the fear when it had actually happened—the nights she couldn’t sleep because her pulse thumping in her ear sounded like footsteps, the days she couldn’t shake the sensation of being watched. People kept reassuring her that the worst was over, but she was starting to think it would never be over.
She blinked fast. This was all too much to process, so she wouldn’t process it. Plenty of time for that afterward. Way too much time. Meanwhile, she could use the instinct to remain in denial as a shield—narrow her field of vision to the solidness of the earth under her feet, the constancy of the trees around her, and Tom’s strong, certain grip on her hand. Especially Tom’s grip. She would simply leech some of his presence of mind and calmness.
“You had a nightmare last night!” he whispered. He wasn’t even puffing. “I just remembered. You screamed. You said something about a claw.”
“I remember. I woke to a scraping noise outside. Waking in the night is the worst. I usually leave a light on.”
“I’m sorry. If I’d known…”
“I don’t even remember going to bed last night. Evidently, I felt perfectly…”
“Safe?”
“Ironically.”
He grunted in sympathy.
“Wait, what kind of scraping noise?”
“Metallic. Rusty. I remember thinking it was creepy. But then, creepy isn’t a high bar, for me.”
