“Can’t seem to find anything missing,” he replied, shaking his head. “So probably not, but I wanted to check in with Sheriff Willis anyway. Especially after the generators were taken out the other night.”
“You think there’s a connection?” she wondered aloud.
“Could be,” he replied. “Better to be safe than sorry.”
“Does anything ever go smoothly at Warrior Peak?” she remarked, only mostly joking.
Xavier turned one of the heating vents toward her, apparently noticing she still felt chilled. “It will,” he assured her.
She couldn’t help but notice how tense he was right now, the way the tendons in his arm flexed when he palmed the wheel. He was clearly anxious, and she wondered how much was going on that she had no idea about. She got it, she really did. Hannah wasn’t involved in the big decisions of the day-to-day running of the sanctuary, and she didn’t need to know every little detail. After the fire, though, she felt as if she should have been kept alittle more in the loop with whatever went on around the place. She did live there, too, after all.
But she knew it went deeper than that for Xavier. Of course it did. She knew what he had lost when he was in the army. His little brother had followed him into active service and had died out there—right in front of Xavier, from what Lawson had told her. She couldn’t even imagine what that must have been like.
And that would have been bad enough, but when he came home, his parents blamed him for the loss. The funeral had been a mess—his mother jumping on the coffin while Xavier tried to hold her back, only for her to turn around and blame him publicly for Max’s death. Hannah hadn’t been there, but she’d heard about that from Lawson, too, and it made her chest ache to think of what that must have done to him.
Xavier had been grieving, too. She didn’t know why his family had a hard time seeing that. She understood that it was normal for grieving people to look for someone to blame, but he had needed their support instead of their guilt and accusations. He was the one who had to watch Max die, after all.
The family went to pieces after that.
His parents passed away one after another—first his father, then his mother. She was hardly speaking to Xavier, even when she was on her deathbed, and Xavier had been left alone to bear the brunt of everything that had happened, all the pain and suffering that his family had struggled through.
Hannah had no idea how he even kept his head up sometimes. She couldn’t imagine carrying on in the face of losing so many people close to her, let alone knowing that most of them blamed her for kicking off the chain of events that led them down that path. All of it just felt utterly sick and twisted, but here he was, still standing.
Even if sometimes it looked as though he wanted to fall apart entirely.
But he didn’t. He held himself together, and Hannah knew a big part of that was because he felt so much responsibility to the people at Warrior Peak Sanctuary. He had worked hard to make it as safe a space as he could for those who were going through so much of the same trauma as he had.
If it hadn’t been for his dedication, she was certain there were those who wouldn’t have made it through at all. The struggle they faced was so unique, sometimes they needed people around them who really got it, rather than some expert who only had a distant understanding of what it must have been like.
But Hannah wondered why he couldn’t extend the same kindness to himself. He must have needed the support, especially after what he had been through, but he always seemed to reject it. Maybe he didn’t feel as though he was worthy of it, given the way his parents had turned on him when he lost his brother. It wouldn’t have surprised her.
He must have taken some of their blame to heart, even if it was wildly misplaced. She had heard a little about his brother from Lawson, and she knew that Xavier would have done anything to look out for him. Like he did now for the guests of Warrior Peak.
As they wound their way down the mountain into Blue Ridge, Hannah watched Xavier out of the corner of her eye. She had tried to talk to him about getting help before, when they were doing the dishes, but he seemed to just brush her off without really taking any of their conversation to heart.
And she understood that. It had to be painful to bring all those memories back to the surface again. But he couldn’t keep living like this—torturing himself, treating himself like the perpetrator when she was sure he did everything he could to protect Max. Hannah knew Xavier would have given his own life in Max’s place if he could have.
Though, if what he was saying about the break-in was true, she understood why he felt like he had more important things than his mental health to focus on. There could be someone targeting the lodge again.
The thought of that happening, their safe space being violated again, spooked the hell out of her. She knew it worried Xavier and Lawson, too.
She focused her gaze on the road ahead of her as they pulled into town and Xavier took a turn to head to the police station. She silently promised herself she was going to do everything she could to help keep the sanctuary—and the people who relied on it—safe.
Chapter Nine
“Be sure to reach out if there’s any other disturbance,” Sheriff Willis told Xavier as he walked him to the door of the police station.
Xavier nodded. “Anyone looks at me funny, you’ll be the first to hear about it,” he assured him.
Willis nodded and reached out his hand to shake Xavier’s. “Thanks for coming in,” he told him. “We’ll file those reports today, make sure there’s a paper trail if anything else happens.”
Xavier shook his hand in appreciation. Having the local cops on their side, at least, was something. Willis was a good guy, and they’d had a positive relationship with the local police with him as sheriff. Warrior Peak had done a lot of work with former police as well as former military, and Willis appreciated the work they did to get them back on their feet.
“You think it’s going to help?” Hannah asked Xavier as they stepped back out on to the street.
“I don’t know,” Xavier admitted. “But at least we have a case open if something else does happen.”
“Yeah, I guess that has to count for something,” she agreed, but she sounded pretty doubtful.
