Page 109 of PSYCHOlogical

Chapter Forty-Eight

Val

Iawoke to the smell of freshly-brewed coffee. I rolled to my side and peered through the bedroom’s sliding glass doors. With the setting sun as his backdrop, Vincent’s silhouette was sitting on the deck, drinking a cup of coffee.

I poured a cup and joined him. “I needed that nap.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “I was exhausted.”

With my coffee cupped in my hands, I leaned against the handrail and gazed at the watery horizon. “I can’t believe this is our life.”

“I can’t believe I found what I was after.”

I tilted my head to the side. “Which was…?”

“Tranquility.”

“Oh. That. Yeah.” I sipped my coffee. “We found it, alright.”

We watched our first sunset as homeowners—and lovers—in silence. Both completely stricken by the beauty of it all, we simply sipped our coffee as the miracle took place before our eyes.

As the sky darkened from orange to indigo blue, I took a seat at Vincent’s side. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

If we were going to succeed as lovers, I had to be completely honest with him. Doing so was undoubtedly a risk, but it was a risk I knew I had to take.

With his eyes fixed on the horizon, he let out a sigh. “I’ve got something to tell you, too.”

“You first,” I said.

He glanced at me. “I was R.P. McMurphy.”

I nodded. “I know.”

He turned to face me. “What do you mean, you know?”

“I knew.”

He chuckled. “Bullshit.”

“I really did.”

The light from the bedroom cast shadows on his face, but his look was clearly one of disbelief.

“I tried to hint at it,” I said. “We were talking on that Monday, after Martin read the article about Wallace and Pike. You mentioned McMurphy, so I took the conversation to Jack Nicholson. I told you I’d seen all his movies. I mean, that would include One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. You didn’t bite on my lure, so I just left it.”

“I’ll be damned,” he said. “You figured it out.”

“I know everything wasn’t easy for you,” I said. “The dismantling of New Dawn. But I also know it was necessary.”

“Shep was necessary because of the risk he posed to the program,” he explained. “He was a loose cannon. A broken cog. At that juncture, I wondered just where the killing would start and stop. I hoped the men in New Dawn would deny the order to kill him, and I could continue the program. They proved their allegiance was to killing, not to their fellow Marines. That was the deciding factor for me.”

“You ordered the men that came to your house?” I asked. “The night Jack kidnapped me?”

“I ordered one. I knew if anyone accepted the mission that I’d be alerted long before they were a threat to you. That’s why I waited as long as I did to leave. At the time I decided to go get Trevino, I was convinced no one accepted the mission. Then, I found out Trevino decided to send three instead of one.”

“So, you killed New Dawn’s operators because you felt they couldn’t be trusted?”

“Correct. After we talked that night about Shep, I worried that they were all as bad as he was. Sociopaths hell bent on killing that lacked the devotion to their fellow Marines, and to the Corps. Men like that have a place on earth, I’m sure, but not in a program where I’m calling the shots.” He looked right at me. “I didn’t kill Martin, though.”