Reid had been there. I couldn’t pin the dream to one memory; it had been the convoy and the rooftop and the firefight that lasted an entire afternoon, all of them running together the way they did when my brain decided to play the whole catalog at once.
But Reid had been in it. His voice was the last thing I’d heard before the ceiling replaced whatever sky I’d been under. He’d been alive and real and close enough to reach, and now I was in a cabin in Montana and he was eight months dead and there was nothing in the room except the dark and the sound of my own breathing.
The nightmares weren’t the same every night. Some nights, it was just the convoy. Other nights, a building in Helmand or a firefight that ran all afternoon with no end or a face I couldn’t save that shifted, depending on which deployment my brain decided to pull from. A decade of combat on shuffle, every night a different cut from the same reel.
Reid was in all of them. He’d been there for every deployment, every firefight, every door we’d kicked in. He waswoven through everything because he’d been standing next to me for ten years.
Fighting the battles had been easier than remembering them.
When the fight was real and in front of me, my body knew what to do and my mind stayed in the present because leaving the present would get me killed. But the battles were over. I’d survived them, and now the only thing left was to lie in the dark at three in the morning and let them replay while I fought nothing at all.
I got up. Changed to a dry shirt. Pulled on pants and boots. Went outside.
The property was still. The barn was a dark shape against a sky full of stars. Lark’s farmhouse a short distance away showed only the porch light she’d left on. The mountains were black outlines pressed against the horizon.
I walked. The paddocks first, along the fence I’d been working on. The posts I’d set that afternoon were solid, the concrete cured. The horses were standing at the far end of their pasture, shapes barely visible in the dark. One of them huffed as I passed.
I thought about getting Tova out of her kennel but decided to let her sleep. Surely Lark’s request to keep an eye on her didn’t mean waking her up and dragging her into my mental hell.
I kept moving, going nowhere in particular. I eventually ended up at the east side of the property, past the equipment shed, down toward the back edge where the land sloped to the tree line and the access road ran along the boundary. A dirt road, barely maintained, that connected to a county route half a mile out. Lark had mentioned it once and said nobody used it.
I stopped.
Tire tracks. Fresh ones, cut into the soft dirt at the edge of the access road. Two sets running parallel, deep enough that whoever made them had been driving heavy or fast. They camein from the county road side and stopped about thirty yards onto the property before turning around.
I crouched and looked. The edges were clean, the tread marks sharp. A day or two old at most.
I stood and looked toward the south fence. The gate down there was visible in the starlight, a metal tube gate on a chain. I’d latched it two days ago when I’d walked this section.
The chain was loose. The gate was closed but unlatched.
My brain started running. Scenarios, angles, the automatic architecture of threat assessment that built itself whether I wanted it to or not.
I deliberately stopped myself before I spiraled further.
Less than an hour ago, I’d mentally been in a convoy in Afghanistan, pulling a dead man out of burning metal. My heart rate had barely settled. This was what my brain did at three in the morning: it scanned for threats because threats gave it a job, and a job was better than lying in the dark replaying things I couldn’t change. Hypervigilance wasn’t instinct. It was a symptom, and I knew it.
PTSD. I didn’t like to say it. I didn’t even like to think about it. But it still hung over me like a cloud. No one specific event. Just one loss after another over the course of a career in the military.
So, tire tracks on a rural property? A gate I probably hadn’t latched as well as I’d thought? My brain interpreted both those as an imminent threat.
But the truth was, there was nothing here except a man who couldn’t sleep, looking for something to be wrong because wrong was the only frequency his brain could find in the dark.
I turned and walked back toward the cabin. It was a long walk across open ground, the stars unchanged above me, the property silent around me. I let myself in, sat on the edge of the bed, and didn’t lie back down.
Sleep wasn’t coming. It never did.
Chapter 7
Lark
“There is absolutely no universe in which purple is an appropriate color for a feeding card.”
Logan held the laminated card between two fingers as if it might bite him. He’d found it wedged behind the top shelf in the feed room, where it had been hiding for at least six months.
“That’s fuchsia,” I said.
“It’s an assault on the eyes.”
