“Full moon,” Sommer called over her shoulder as her goodbye.
Now all Sommer needed to do was get herself home, get a thorough scrub in the shower, and fall into bed.
Wouldn’t that feel marvelous?
Chapter Seven
Gabriel
Gabriel pulled into his driveway.
With the porch lights off and no streetlamp out front, Gabriel’s yard was black as pitch when he turned off the engine, and the headlights faded.
His neighborhood was quiet.
Gabriel’s hands slipped from the steering wheel and landed in his lap.
He just sat there in the dark.
His body felt heavy, and though he kept thinking words like “tired” and “exhausted,” he wished he had synonyms to put in their place. “Grief-stricken” was too bulky.
Lately, Gabriel’s runs were shortened, his time at the gym was forced.
Without an appetite, he made himself eat three meals and a protein shake a day so that when he pulled himself out of this chapter, he’d be OK.
Mostly, he did it because Cathy had an eagle eye. She watched him closely for any sign of ill health.
Cathy couldn’t separate out the dangers. In her mind, Daniel and Gabriel had been in the sandbox at the same time.
Parallel lives.
Because Gabriel had been an Army Ranger, he’d rarely, and only briefly, slept in a fort with a burn pit. At the same time, Daniel worked exclusively at the forts, keeping the vehicles in tip-top shape and protecting “his soldiers” from the dangers of sand in the mechanisms.
It was the burn pits that did Daniel in.
One of the first signs of cancer for Daniel was exhaustion, and the other was unintended rapid weight loss.
Now that he and Cathy were the last in their nuclear family, Gabriel felt pressure to keep his sister from worrying.
He could force down the damned hamburger.
Selfishly, Gabriel didn’t want to consider going through what Daniel had.
He wanted to go fast—a car accident, a stray bullet, a quick drowning.
Whiskey sat patiently on the floorboard in the passenger side, her chin resting on the seat.
“You didn’t distract me even once. To be honest, your being there helped me keep my stress in check and my brain working. It’s wild, you know, that I can find most any place anywhere in the world by just knowing what to look for and having good research tools. But a lost dog poster of all things. A phone number. A lady who was willing to answer her phone so late at night and let me know which area her doggo went missing. A three-dimensional map search, and bam, a search party was en route.” He bit at his lip before adding quietly, “I hope I was fast enough. I hope it helped.”
Cold fear ran through Gabriel’s system as he mentally put himself in the victim’s situation. This was why he wanted to work with images of buildings rather than human faces or situations. He’d had too many days and nights with the stench of human desperation in his nostrils. He’d seen too much, heard too much; his nights were already filled with those desperate images.
Gabriel didn’t want to become one of those professionals who became numb to the pain. It was dehumanizing to the situation.
But at the same time, he was full.
Gabriel needed to stop thinking about it.
“Dogs are the absolute best, you know that, don’t you?”
