Chapter Nineteen
Sunday
ANNIE SAT IN the emergency staff meeting, numb. Last night’s car crash was nothing compared to this morning’s terrible news. She’d be willing to roll off the road all over again to have Trevor back.
Her phone pinged with a weather update. Hurricane Rupert was moving up the East Coast, but staying out at sea. She flipped the phone facedown. She didn’t care.
Dan Ambrose reached for her hand on the conference table and gave it a gentle squeeze before pulling back. “You shouldn’t be here. You’re not well. Go lie down.”
“I want to be here.” She couldn’t sleep if someone offered her $1 million for ten minutes’ rest.
Trevor was dead.
She looked around the table. They all had failed him. She had failed him. She felt the crushing weight of personal responsibility.
“We are going to offer emergency counseling, free of charge, to everyone who needs it, for as long as they need it,” Murphy Dolan, the program director, said. “Staff and patients alike. The police are coming to interview everyone before they officially rule it a suicide. I’m going to request that if a patient asks, the officers let a therapist sit with that patient through the interview session for support. I hope they’ll let us do that much, at least. Detective Chase Meritt is lead on the case.”
Dan began to rise, then sat back down. “This is going to be devastating for our patients. Hope Hill is supposed to be their safe space. I hate to say this, but Trevor’s suicide may trigger other suicide attempts. Statistically speaking.”
Annie nodded. Dan was only saying what they were all thinking.
“Let’s head that off at the pass,” Murph told them. “That’s our number one priority. Number two priority is to figure out how Trevor got his hands on enough meds for a fatal dose.”
“Do we know what he took?” Libby, the reflexologist, asked. The young black woman had the most amazing intuition of anyone Annie had ever met. Somehow, Libby always knew exactly what to say to a patient. People at Hope Hill loved her, and she loved them back. The news of Trevor’s death had hit her hard. Her eyes were red from crying. She looked heartbroken.
Murph’s response was tight with tension. “Not until the autopsy comes back.”
Annie squeezed her eyes shut at the thought of sweet Trevor on a cold stainless-steel table at the morgue, but she couldn’t shut out the image.
Murph cleared his throat. “There’s something else. I found out something last night that I was going to share with staff and patients today, but now I’m not sure if we shouldn’t wait telling the patients.”
The people around the table fell silent.
“I do a one-week follow-up with patients postdischarge,” he said.
They nodded. They all knew that. Part of the Hope Hill aftercare.
“I haven’t been able to reach Mitch Moritz. I finally caught up with his wife. Mitch was in a fatal car accident on his way home from here. Apparently, he fell asleep and drove into oncoming traffic.”
Annie gasped.
Libby clutched a hand to her chest. “Where?”
“Maryland. Maybe half an hour after he left here.”
For a moment, everyone was too shocked to speak.
“Under the circumstances,” Dan said, “I think we should hold this information back for now unless someone specifically asks after Mitch.”
The rest of them nodded.
Annie felt too numb to say anything.
Murph kept the meeting short, and then everyone left to focus on the patients, to help where they could.
“I’m officially back at work,” Annie told Murph as she headed out. Her vacation was over. “I can put in as many extra hours as you need. And I’m going to carry my cell phone all day, so anyone who wants to talk to me can reach me.”
She definitely expected Detective Meritt to call her for an interview at some point, since she’d treated Trevor. But when, at midmorning, her cell phone buzzed with a call from the police, the caller was Harper.
“I have an update for you, although it’s not exactly progress,” the detective said on the other end. “Joey Franco has no alibi for last night. But neither can I find any proof that he was involved in your hit-and-run. No damage to his truck, no damage to his mother’s SUV, none of the neighbors heard him come or go in the middle of the night. He says he was home alone, sleeping. I don’t even have enough to bring him in.”
“Thank you for checking.” She didn’t know what else to say.
She was relieved, because she didn’t want to think that Joey hated her enough to want to kill her. But she was also disappointed, because she wanted the guy who ran her off the road caught so she could feel safe again.
Annie headed back to her room to grab a couple of painkillers from her purse. Her headache was gone, but her body was even more sore than it’d been last night. She walked through the rec room and for a minute studied the half dozen guys there. The TV was on, but nobody was paying attention to the game, and a grim mood filled the room.
They asked how she was. They’d all heard about the car accident. She told them not to worry.
Then, on impulse, she asked, “Anybody want to go for a walk?”
Brett, an army colonel who’d lost a kidney and half a lung to an IED, asked, “Like group therapy?”
“Just a walk.” Whether they called the walk official therapy or not, it’d still help.
She wished Cole would go with them. As soon as they’d found out about Trev this morning, Annie had to run off to the emergency meeting. But she was worried about Cole. What happened to Trev had to bring back memories of Cole’s father’s suicide. She wanted to seek Cole out to make sure he was all right. But she had other patients.
Brett stood. “Sure. I’ll go.”
Three of the other guys stood with him.
As the group crossed the courtyard, Cole jogged up, joining them, nodding a greeting, which all the guys returned with obvious respect. Despite his disabilities, every time she saw Cole in a group setting, the other men were always deferential to the Navy SEAL.
He had incredible presence. The first time she’d seen him, she’d been scared of him. But then she’d gotten to know him. And now, she never felt as safe as when she was with him.
She was glad he’d come. A hard knot inside her relaxed at his presence.
He looked shaken but OK. He was dealing with Trev’s suicide, but she wanted to talk to him about it anyway. She needed to catch him one-on-one later.
The man who watched the small group from across the courtyard wasn’t pleased. His gaze settled on Annie. She refused to learn her lesson. And catching her on her own was increasingly more difficult. She was never alone these days.
The Navy SEAL, especially, had appointed himself her constant companion. He was a big guy. It’d take a lot of drugs to eliminate him. And he wouldn’t go as easily as Trevor had. The SEAL was always alert, never let his guard down for a second, not even here.
The man in the window watched as Cole maneuvered himself so he’d be walking next to Annie.
Another suicide would be suspicious right now.
Car accident? The SEAL did drive.
No, that’d raise questions too. Mitch Moritz’s car accident had just been discovered by the staff.
The man thought carefully and considered sedatives, something that would knock Cole out just long enough to drown him during his morning swim.
So much to do. Both at work and at home.
His mother wasn’t doing well. Was she dying at last? Dark fury sliced through the man at the thought. His mother could not die. She still had a lot to atone for.
He wanted Annie to meet her. He needed to set that meeting up sooner rather than later.
Annie didn’t take her sneakers off as they reached the path. Neither did anyone else. The ground was still soggy from the rain the other day.
They walked in silence. The wind in the trees, the birds, even the sound of squirrels darting around in the underbrush were all an instant balm to her soul. That Cole didn’t benefit from any of nature’s song saddened her.
They walked in a loose formation. After about two miles, she steered them off the path to a spot she’d discovered only a few weeks before, a spot that would be new for everyone.
The clearing was tiny, maybe twenty feet across, nearly a perfect circle framed by seven oak trees. When she’d found it, her first thought was that it was a sacred place.
“You think someone planted the trees like that?” Kevin asked.
She sat at the foot of the nearest oak. “It looks pretty natural.”
Thick roots protruded from the earth, keeping her off the damp ground. “I’m guessing there’s rock under the topsoil. Maybe even one giant rock. The trees couldn’t grow on top it, so they grew around it.” She leaned back against the trunk.
The others followed her example, some folding their legs, others stretching and opening them, Cole crossing his ankles.
Annie hadn’t planned it, but there were six of them and seven oaks. One solitary tree was left without a human, almost as if waiting for Trevor. Maybe his spirit was here and they just couldn’t see his body.
“Why did he do it?” Brett asked, and everyone turned to Annie for the answer.
Probably none of them would think about much else. Her heart ached for the pain on the faces around her. The wound of Trevor’s loss was too fresh, too jagged, still bleeding.
Annie told them the truth. “I don’t know. I wish he had asked for help.”
“Maybe for a second he didn’t see the way out,” Kevin said. “But you don’t make a decision based on your worst moment. You ride out the worst. Then you work on making the next day better.”
Annie offered Kevin a watery smile for having listened during their previous sessions. He’d clearly internalized what they’d talked about. Trevor’s death filled her with despair, but Kevin’s remark made her feel as if, in some small way, she was making a difference.
Brett bumped his fist against his solar plexus as he looked at Annie. “It hurts in there. You got an exercise for that?”
Liam groaned. “Don’t get her into therapist mode, man.”
“We can certainly do a meditation,” she said, ignoring the subtle rolling of eyes around the circle. “Since you guys are begging for it.”
That drew some half-hearted protests. Truth was, they liked to resist ecotherapy, but almost as if for form’s sake. They all identified as tough, unbreakable warriors. Needing medical help—surgery or PT—was one thing. But the men felt they shouldn’t need alternative therapies, especially therapies that worked on thoughts and feelings. Some believed needing that kind of support meant they were weak.
“It takes a strong man to ask for help,” Cole offered. “The weak can’t. All they have is ego. They have to play it tough. The real tough guys, they don’t have to play anything.”
That pretty much ended any resistance. If the SEAL was on board, everybody was on board.
“So just lean against the tree behind you,” Annie began, shooting Cole a look of appreciation when he looked at her at last. “You can close your eyes or not, as you wish,” she said for the others. “Draw a deep, cleansing breath through your nose. Hold it. Let it out through your mouth.”
She made a point to relax her own shoulders. The kind of energy she projected would make a difference. She waited until everyone got in a couple of nice, calming breaths. “Good. Now let’s do that again.”
They breathed silently for a minute.
Cole was watching her mouth. Since he’d kissed her, she’d been more aware of that gaze than ever before.
“Obviously,” she said, “we all have feelings and thoughts about what happened this morning. I am sure we all have things we wish we could tell Trev.”
Several of the men murmured their agreement; others nodded.
“Let’s do that.”
A couple of the guys stiffened. In general, they didn’t like talking about their feelings in a one-on-one setting, let alone in a group situation. Most of her group therapy consisted of simply working or walking out in nature together. Her main goal was to make her patients feel better. She tried to do whatever it took to achieve that.
“Let’s all silently talk to Trev for a couple of minutes. Visualize the words you’d like to say as swirling lines of letters, flowing around inside your chest. The words flow, not out of your mouth, but out your back and into the tree behind you. They travel up the tree trunk, into the branches, into the leaves. From the tips of the leaves they will rise invisibly, like the breath of the tree, up and up, all the way to Trev.”
She fell silent, closed her eyes, and sent her own words.
Oh, Trev. I wish you’d come to me. I am sorry I didn’t pay more attention. I am sorry I was caught up in my own nonsense. I wish you’d felt all the love everyone had for you. I know that in that dark moment, you couldn’t see the light, but I wish you had waited just another minute to see the clouds part. I wish you peace, my friend.
She did a few more cleansing breaths as she wiped away her tears.
Then she said a prayer for Mitch Moritz too. He’d been so excited about going home to his wife and kids. Annie couldn’t even image how devastated they must be at his loss.
For a moment, she thought about whether Murph was right not to tell the men that Mitch had died. In the end, she decided she was glad it was Murph’s call to make and not hers.
When she opened her eyes, she saw that about half the men were still doing the exercise. The other half, including Cole, were finished, eyes open but not looking at anything in particular, the men lost in thought.
She let another few minutes pass before she said, “You all know that there is help available, right? I am available. Around the clock. I’ll be actually staying at Hope Hill for the foreseeable future.”
Kevin said, “Yeah.”
Then Liam said, “Thanks.”
“Things are good,” Brett told her.
Even Rob—the most taciturn of them all—chimed in. “Not gonna do anything stupid. You can have my word on that. Don’t spend all your day worrying about us.”
Annie smiled at him. Three complete sentences were more than she heard out of Rob sometimes in a whole therapy session.
Cole just nodded.
Annie wasn’t sure whether he’d come along because he truly wanted the walk and talk, or because he’d appointed himself to be her protector. Either way, she was glad he’d joined them.
She pushed to her feet and brushed off her pants. “How about we go back to the path and finish the loop?”
Brainlessly putting one foot in front of the other while soaking up the silence of the woods was a meditation in itself.
All five guys decided to go with her.
Once again, they were walking in a loose formation, in a single line, since the trail was narrow in most places. For the most part, they walked in silence.
Annie moved up next to Cole. “How are you doing?”
“OK.”
“This must bring back memories of your father.”
“I was chained to the wall in a cave when he died. I didn’t find out about it until we escaped and I got back home.”
“That had to be difficult.”
“More difficult for my mother. She had to deal with the funeral, and everything else, alone.”
“If you want to talk about it . . .”
“Not right now.”
He hadn’t ruled out later. She hoped he would come to her.
She hadn’t figured out yet how to handle what was happening between them. Ignore? Discuss? Avoid all contact?
She didn’t want to avoid him.
She wanted to . . .
God help her, she wanted to walk into his arms and ask for another kiss. She wanted to comfort him, and she wanted to be comforted by him. She was smart enough to know that she was in trouble.
Cole walked the path, staring at the ground in front of his feet. He wanted to be alone in the woods with Annie. He wanted her in his arms. He wanted to kiss her until the hurt and pain disappeared from her eyes.
Trevor’s death had shaken her.
It’d shaken Cole too. He should have paid more attention to the kid.
He swore under his breath.
He’d almost talked himself into believing that the treatment was working. But it wasn’t, was it? Nothing they did at Hope Hill had helped Trevor, and he’d been there for some time. Trevor had not been helped.
Maybe Cole could have helped the kid, if Cole hadn’t been so focused on his mission and Annie. Those hadn’t worked out either anyway.
He hadn’t been able to protect Annie. And he was letting his mission down too. Failing to achieve his mission objective burned him.
Except . . .
He might not have a clue about the traitor, but he was beginning to have a terrible suspicion about the op in general. What if his mission was fake?
Maybe there was no traitor. Maybe his CO had invented the texts to make sure Cole entered rehab. Maybe Cole had been tricked into therapy.
Maybe that was what he needed to investigate.