“Guess John’s right,” she said, shaking her head.
“John?” Aberlour asked. The name was familiar, like he should have known who it was.
“The owner. He says he’s never seen you miss,” she said, as she finished with her pour, stepping back to stare at him.
“I don’t,” Aberlour agreed.
“And that you’re cocky.”
Aberlour shrugged. He picked up the other dart and threw it at the board. It flew in a perfect arc and hit dead center.
Scella chuckled and went over to the board, as though to check both darts were really in the center. She plucked out both darts and brought them back to him, holding out her hand for him to take them.
“Like I said—cocky,” she teased, before winking at him, spinning on her heels and heading back to the bar.
Was it cocky to believe what you knew to be true without being apologetic about it?
He took a sip from his glass, and while staring at the bottom of the glass, threw one of the darts again. Even with the warped view of the board through the bottom of the glass, he could tell he hadn’t missed.
Chapter 30
October 2014
She had a cuckoo clock. An ugly thing that had definitely been passed down from a previous generation. There was no other reason why that particular eyesore should be on display in the otherwise modern office. It was broken too, apparently. It went off at the most random moments. And to add insult to injury, it wasn’t even a bird that came out, but a fucking clown holding a bouquet of balloons. The first time, Aberlour had tucked and rolled right off the couch. It had been 11:23.
Maybe the cuckoo clock was a test. If you flinched, you needed treatment for trauma. He wondered what it meant if you tucked and rolled out of the way.
It was procedure, his CO had said. Aberlour was going to be discharged, but the particularsituationleading to his discharge required a psych eval.
“For your own good,” the man had said. Aberlour was well versed in seeing right through the government’s line of bullshit. In this case “for his own good” was actually, “we have to know if you’re of sound mind enough not to be a tattletale.”
The whole thing was pointless. There wasn’t a single sane neuron left in his brain. He still wouldn’t tell a single living soul about it.
No one deserved that.
“Tell me about the dreams,” Dr. Lydia Galloway said gently, waiting expectantly, like an owner does when trying to get the family dog to do a new trick.
She was petite, and firm but fair. Aberlour didn’t mind her. As far as shrinks went, he’d lucked out. It was their fourth session. He’d spent most of the first one just sitting there silently. She’d spent the next two slowly pulling at invisiblestrings, so he’d give up—well, anything, really. He’d given her less than a shrug so far. She hadn’t seemed bothered at all, but today she seemed more determined than ever to get him to talk.
“What dreams?”
“The ones that keep you up. You look like you haven’t slept very well in weeks.”
One month and four days, to be precise.
He slept. He was too tired not to sleep, but he woke up in the middle of the night, sweating like he’d been running a marathon, and convinced he was covered in blood, clutching at a nonexistent wound on his neck.
“No dreams,” he answered, shaking his head. He wasn’t lying about that. If he ever dreamed, he didn’t remember them. Maybe it was a blessing, since there wasn’t much up there in that black hole mind of his that would make for peaceful dreams.
“So you sleep eight hours every night. Peaceful, unbothered,” she replied, calling his bullshit.
“No dreams,” he repeated, not wanting to deal with the eight-hour part.
She wrote something down in that notebook of hers but didn’t argue.
“When you wake up, who’s there with you?”
“I’m sorry?” he blurted, startled by her question.
