Chapter 14

Making the decision to tell Logan the story, while hard enough, was only half of it. Actually telling him was something else altogether. She’d never told it before. Never needed to. All of her friends, family, even her therapist had seen it covered on television. Read the news reports. She’d filled in details, but never had to share everything from scratch. Which meant she had no idea where to begin.

Brooke sucked in a long breath. The air all of a sudden seemed much muggier. Thicker. Harder to actually drag into her lungs. Cicadas buzzed rhythmically in the bushes ringing the structure. She bit her lip. Toyed with a stray piece of hair that had worked its way out of her braid. Contemplated pulling off the elastic and rebraiding the whole thing just as a means to postpone starting the story by even one minute.

“Escarlata?” Logan let the endearment hang in the air for a moment before prompting her, “Just talk to me.”

Right. This wasn’t like lying on the therapist’s hard black couch—and she’d done that only once because it felt so stupidly clichéd. This was a simple conversation with an old friend. A friend whose presence gave Brooke the idea for a starting point. “Back at the airport in Dominica, I convinced you to come with me because my parents had paid for the super swanky hotel.”

He gave her the same look she gave her students when they couldn’t remember that two cups equaled a pint. The This is so simple, how could you possibly get it wrong look. “I went with you because you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

Logan might not always rock romance in the conventional way. But when he did pop out a compliment like that, it put a quiver in her heart. “Either way, the resort in Dominica wasn’t a vacation I’d planned. My parents sent me on it to jolt me out of a kind of funk. I was stuck in a rut. I’d freeze-framed on a single day, a single event in my life, and I couldn’t move past it. They hoped getting me away from that environment would do the trick.”

Sitting on the fountain, sitting still at all, didn’t work. Brooke wouldn’t be able to get this out unless she was moving. Moving kept the words, the feelings, from weighing on her chest. She’d paced God knows how many miles since April. Circles around her living room. Laps up and down the condo hallway. In a square around the desk, chairs, and coffee table in her therapist’s office. So now, even though it deprived her of Logan’s touch, she paced the inner perimeter of the hexagonal folly.

“On the island, you told me that you needed an escape. To work through some things,” Logan prodded.

“Just one thing, really.” Okay. This was it. “Last spring, one of Roosevelt Prep’s students committed suicide. She was one of mine. In my class. Second year of being on my cheerleading squad.” To Brooke’s surprise, the words came out evenly. Steadily. “I know we’re not supposed to ever admit it, but Sarah was one of my favorites. She was always helpful setting up for practice. Never complained if we stayed late to nail down a routine. She made a point of helping people who were lagging behind, or saying something positive when a girl messed up a formation.”

Rather than chasing after her, Logan eased into one of the green bench seats built into an alcove. “Sounds like a sweet kid.”

“Sarah Jamison was sweet to her core. She was so busy sharing that sweetness that none of us ever looked any deeper. We never looked behind the quick smile and the cheerful tone.”

“You saw what she wanted you to.”

Yes. And that was what was so galling. What was such an epic breech of responsibility. Brooke whirled to face him. “Sarah was only seventeen. It’s my job to see through a seventeen-year-old.” She stabbed her fingers into her sternum. “But I missed it.” Another stab. “I missed everything.”

Brooke started pacing again. Faster this time. The words rushed out faster, too, in keeping with her pace. “All the warning signs of abuse, that were right there to be seen, I missed. I chalked her bruises up to the rigors of being on the squad. Chalked up the sudden dip in her grades—which I questioned three of her other teachers about, and we all came to the same conclusion—to hanging out with a different group of friends. I didn’t bat an eye when she was always the first to show and grabbed at any excuse to help to be the last to leave. Even though it happened so often that I should’ve wondered what she was trying to avoid at home.”

“I don’t think so.” He stretched his legs, crossed them at the ankles. “Everything you laid out sounds reasonable.”

“Sure. Reasonable.” It all flooded back. The pain. The shock. The fear. The utter helplessness. And that physically hit her like a cannonball to her stomach. Brooke’s muscles tightened. Her hands fisted.

“Let me tell you, Logan, there’s nothing reasonable about the way you feel when you walk into your gym fifteen minutes before practice to discover the sweetest girl on your squad hanging from a basketball hoop. There’s nothing reasonable about the panic when you know you can’t get her down. Or about choosing between taking the time to call 911 or running into the equipment room for the ladder, because what if there’s still time to save her, since her legs are still swinging a little? It wasn’t reasonable to climb that ladder and pull all her weight onto me so I could untie the rope. It was even less reasonable when we overbalanced and I put out my arm to cushion the head of an obviously dead girl as we fell to the basketball court. And reason flew out the window when I kept doing CPR on her with my broken wrist until the paramedics showed up and pulled me off of her.”

Then the tears came. Like burning lava, they choked her throat even as wetness made fat trails down her cheeks. It hurt to try and hitch in a breath through it all. It hurt so darned much to relive all those moments.

This time, though, Logan was there. He folded her into his strong arms and said nothing. He didn’t try to calm her with platitudes. He didn’t offer absolution, or try to talk her into forgiving herself. He just held her. Let her soak in his strength and calm her breaths and her racing heart until its pace finally slowed to match his own steady beats beneath her ear.

When she lifted her hand from his chest to scrub the tears from her face, Logan asked, “That’s why you took that job in North Carolina?”

“Yes.” North Carolina had made sense as a place to apply because her parents had moved there to retire. Honestly, though, the where didn’t matter. Brooke would’ve moved to Oklahoma or Alaska or even started a cheer squad at the research station in Antarctica just to escape. “I wanted to get away from the memories. To get away from the grief hanging over the campus. To get away from wondering how things would’ve been different if I’d gotten there five minutes earlier.”

He tucked her head back into the notch below his collarbone and smoothed slow circles on her back. “What if you’d gotten to the gym ten minutes later? And a student had found her instead? What if some freaked-out freshman had to deal with everything you just laid out for me?”

Talk about making a nightmare scenario even worse. She couldn’t believe Logan would even think of it. “That would’ve been horrible.” Her tone came out half-shocked, half-accusatory at the mere mention of the possibility.

“Go with me on this for a minute. Maybe being the one to find her was all you were supposed to do. It’s how you made a difference that day. Sounds like Sarah couldn’t have been saved. You saving another kid from being traumatized—it matters. Let it be enough.”

Brooke had never once looked at it from that angle.

True, her squad should’ve started trickling in the door for practice scant minutes after she’d discovered Sarah. The campus security guard Brooke had literally screamed at to block the door until the police and ambulance arrived was all that kept them away from the grisly site.

Nobody blamed Brooke. Not the other teachers, who had also missed all the clues. Not the principal, not a single one of the local or national news reports. Not even the police. Not when during the autopsy the coroner found evidence of longtime abuse on the poor girl’s body.

And she didn’t truly blame herself anymore. Getting there five minutes earlier might have stopped Sarah from making the attempt that day, that moment. But she probably would’ve just waited for the next opportunity. Brooke had spent the last few months working through her feelings, and she’d finally realized that what haunted her wasn’t guilt. It was regret. Regret for a life lost, a life wasted. Regret that she hadn’t been in time, hadn’t noticed anything was wrong. It was regret that had kept her frozen in place. Fixated on what would never be. Unable to appreciate what was in her own life…until Logan. Until the inescapable fun of being with him opened up her eyes once more to life.

But the theory Logan offered her helped mitigate whatever pain, guilt, and, yes, regret were left. Those feelings would never go away. Not ever. The possibility that she’d saved some other student from years of those same feelings, however, from struggling with the horror of finding a friend like that…well, that was a balm over a slowly healing wound.

Brooke stood on tiptoe to press a kiss on his cheek. “Thank you.”

Surprise flashed, widened his melted caramel eyes. “For what?”

“For not judging. For pushing me to talk to you. For saving me. For opening my eyes, yet again.”

“That’s a lot. I sound like quite a guy.”

“You are, indeed, Logan Marsh. Quite a guy.”

“Hey.” He thumbed one final tear from her jawline. “You’re quite some woman, too.” Brooke automatically opened her mouth to contradict, but he moved that thumb to cover her lips. “Don’t shoot me down. You’re compassionate beyond words. Do you know how rare that is in the world? And you’re brave.”

She twisted away from him. Sank onto the green bench. “Not a bit. I was petrified. Shaking the whole time.”

This time he did follow her. Logan crouched, grabbed her hands and held them on her knees. “Brooke, most people would’ve stood there, frozen at what you found. Or run away. Bravery is doing what needs to get done, no matter how scary it is.”

“I’ve been a mess ever since,” she admitted. Because it felt safe admitting that to Logan. He’d just heard her deepest, darkest secret. Well, a secret that much of D.C. knew about, but it felt like a major confidence nonetheless. Nothing was worse than that.

Logan traced the tip of his finger from her wrist to between each knuckle. Despite the mugginess of the air, his touch left a row of goose bumps in its wake. “Did you stop teaching?”

“No. Of course not. The kids needed me. They needed the touchstones of normalcy to work through their own issues with what happened.”

A little slower, he repeated the wrist-to-knuckle lines on the other hand. “Did you get medicated?”

“No. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I didn’t want to postpone working through everything by being numb.”

“All of that took incredible strength and bravery. Don’t you dare sell yourself short.” He shot out his arm, rotated his hand back and forth. “I broke my wrist, too, you know.”

Working in disaster zones, with undoubtedly less-than-stellar equipment in precarious situations, Brooke had no doubt a broken wrist was but one of the injuries he’d collected. “When? Where?”

“In the Alps. The Sesto Reggimento Alpini wanted to call off the search for Griff, Knox, Ry, and Josh. They said they’d haul me back to a comfortable bed, where I could get a full belly—while my friends slowly froze to death God knows where. Which was bullshit. So I jumped off a small cliff to get away, to force them to follow me and keep going.”

Quick thinking, especially for a teenager facing off with a company of trained soldiers. Half of her couldn’t believe that after all this time, Logan was finally sharing the details with anyone outside the ACSs, let alone her. The other half of her didn’t want to risk showing him her shock and shutting down the story. So Brooke winked and wagged her finger side to side teasingly. “You went rogue.”

Logan shrugged. “It felt like the only option. I didn’t factor in the snow, though. So my jump turned into me falling off the cliff. Not too far. Only far enough to knock the wind out of me and break my wrist. I stood up and kept walking. Maybe stumbling a little, but I didn’t stop. Right after that was when I found the ACSs.”

“That was how you rescued them?”

“We think of it like a relay.” He stood and mimed passing off a baton. “They rescued themselves most of the way. I just took the final lap. The point is, the doctor told me that when you break a bone, it actually heals to be twice as strong.” Logan bent his wrist back and forth. “The same thing happened to you.”

Brooke rotated her wrist and waggled her fingers. “It feels the same.”

“Not just your wrist, Brooke. You fractured a little on the inside from what happened to Sarah. And now you’ve come back, twice as strong.”

Everything he said was another layer of soothing balm. Brooke wasn’t entirely sure she believed his last statement, but it eased more than a little of the residual tightness around her heart. Enough so that her other massive problem popped to the surface. “I may be strong, but I’m not back to normal. What am I going to do about a job? It’s too late in the summer to hope to find anything else. Schools start in a few weeks.”

Logan sat next to her. Then he laced their fingers together with an automatic ease that made her heart swell at its rightness. “Roosevelt Prep won’t have you back?”

“Oh, they would. Seeing as how the principal wouldn’t accept my notice. He didn’t want to tell anyone I was leaving until I had the signed new contract in hand.”

“Hang on—you do have a job?”

Less of a job, more something to stress over. “Technically, yes. Not one I want to keep, though. Not one I can bear to keep. I’m not sure I even want to keep teaching at all.”

“What do you want to do?”

As if snatching an answer from the universe were as easy as plucking a leaf off of a tree. Maybe because, in Logan’s world, everything was black and white. Life and death. If an entire village crumbled around you, having any job was probably worth celebrating. And suddenly Brooke felt too selfish, too entitled to be blithely dismissing a perfectly good career—one she both had and enjoyed.

“I don’t know what I want to do. Aside from the fact that I should officially resubmit my resignation first thing next week to give the school time to find a replacement. Running the cheer program was a full-time job heaped on top of teaching all day. It kept me burning the candle at both ends. So emotional trauma aside, I think I’m pretty burned out. My friend Katrina convinced me to take a couple of weeks and try to have fun.”

“A summer of fun, huh? Sounds like you should’ve stayed on that island.”

“I don’t think so.” Dominica—or, more to the point, Logan’s presence there—had served its purpose to reboot her. As soon as that happened, she’d been ready to move forward. “D.C.’s a great town. Now I have time to enjoy it.” A little frantically, Brooke tried to come up with something summery and fun and relaxing. “I can go to the zoo.”

“With all the tourists?” Logan reached over to pinch her nose closed as he shook his head. “Smelling steaming zebra shit on a hundred-degree day? I don’t think so.”

Fine. There were other things. Things besides unpacking, and maybe steam cleaning her carpet. “I need to help Katrina think of a business opportunity. Trust me, that’s going to take up oodles of my free time.”

He made a buzzer sound. “Nope. That’s doing something for her. What are you going to do for yourself?”

Brooke grabbed at the obvious. Because this was too much to think about after an emotional revelation, in the heat, and massively distracted by the way Logan’s dark brown chest hair peeked out the top of his shirt. “I’m pretty happy with this hot date I apparently have lined up for tonight.”

“It’s got potential,” he intoned solemnly. Then he slid one arm beneath her knees, one behind her back, and picked her up, twirling her in a circle until she laughed breathlessly.

That was all it took to dislodge a real idea of fun that’d been percolating for years. “I want to take tango lessons,” she said. “Café Centro offers them for free every Wednesday night. I’ve been wanting to for a while, but I couldn’t find a partner.”

“I learned to tango in Argentina.”

Wow. Logan casually dropped that awesome personal trivia as if everyone got to fly around the world to take lessons. “The real deal? With a rose clamped between your teeth and everything?”

“Not the rose. But definitely the and everything.” He waggled his eyebrows again, like he had at the start of the evening. It brought them full circle out of the dramatic trough she’d accidentally dumped them into. Their date was salvaged after all. “I’d love to dance with you. An ex-cheerleader? I’ll bet you’ve got moves, Escarlata.”

“There you have it,” she announced with a flourish of her arm as Logan set her back on her feet. They started out of the Summerhouse and toward the Mall. “We can go Wednesday night. A nice, normal summer vacation activity.”

Instead of congratulating her for coming up with something, Logan’s hand tightened on hers. He walked a little faster and stared straight ahead. “I can’t do Wednesday. That’s soccer night with the ACSs.”

“I’m sure we can maybe alternate weeks or—”

He cut her off. “Brooke—you know what I do. How my life works. I don’t do normal. And I don’t ever stick around.”

Right. She knew that. She wasn’t asking him to stay for her sake or anything. Logan was the one who brought her out tonight and slapped the date label on it. She didn’t need the warning.

Okay, maybe her heart needed the warning, but her mind knew for certain that he’d walk out of her life again sooner rather than later. Guaranteed. “I know,” she snipped a little more shortly than intended. “I don’t want you to commit to a semester or anything. If you’re here, if you’re free, we can dance. Nothing more complicated than that.”

“Okay.”

But as they kept walking toward the throng of people and their romantic picnic, Brooke wondered, Was it?