“No.” His voice was rough with sleep, maybe with something else too. But if she’d learned anything from raising Jack and a lifetime of working with men, it was when to push and when to back off. She had nothing to gain from giving advice, offering suggestions, interfering any more than she had. Only Keenan could decide to make that final journey, the one that would bring him home.
She patted the bag. “Give it a try. Thanks for everything, Keenan. Good-bye,” she said, and let herself out, trotting through Beyo?lu’s silent streets, empty but for street sweepers and delivery vans. She climbed the stairs to the lobby, containing only a yawning night clerk. “Oh,” Rose said when she let herself into her room to find Grannie struggling with a bulging suitcase. “I thought you’d still be asleep.”
“I forgot to stop by a florist and pick up some of those tulip bulbs we saw yesterday. Oh well. I don’t have room for them anyway,” Grannie said distractedly, tugging on the expansion zipper. “I thought it would be easier this morning, but it’s not. Did you have a nice evening?”
“Yes,” Rose said as she crossed the room to lean on Grannie’s suitcase. Except for the end. The end hurt more than she thought it would, more than it should for a vacation fling. But she’d watched Jack struggle with his mind, his nerves, his future. Warriors had to find their own way home, she reminded herself. The best thing she could do for him was to be there, if he wanted to make that journey. “Don’t … mention this to Jack, okay?”
“Mention what?” Grannie said, but the concern in her eyes belied her lighthearted response as she closed the zipper. “What happens in Istanbul stays in Istanbul. It’s not like he’s going to move to Lancaster. Can I put some of this in your suitcase, dear? I went a little crazy in the Spice Market yesterday.”
A taxi took them and their bulging suitcases to the airport in plenty of time for their flight. Once on board, Rose purchased the inflight WiFi and spent the ten-hour flight cleaning out her inbox, reading through all the email, filing what the efficient Hua Li had handled, answering what needed to be answered. Then she settled in to read the resumes for next month’s hiring committee meeting, and tried not to think about Penelope, Odysseus’s wife, or what it would be like to wait for weeks, months, even years, for the man she’d fallen for to come home to her.
*
A negotiator from the State Department defused the hostage situation, leaving Keenan at loose ends in Istanbul. It took him a minute to identify how he felt when the call came through. He felt relieved. So he took Rose’s copy of The Odyssey and sat in cafés in the spring sunshine, drinking cup after cup of Turkish coffee and reading the other Homeric epic, about Odysseus’s journey home. Thoughtful, he closed the book at last and sat back in the metal chair warmed by the sun to think about the examples he’d followed as a young man. But at Troy, he’d come face-to-face with the reality that wars came and went, cities rose and fell, and everything he’d built his life on would be buried under the layers of earth and time. His father’s way was one way of living. It consumed Hector, Achilles, Patroclus, Paris, Agamemnon, and the men who fought with them. But Odysseus, the wily trickster with a strong, smart woman waiting for him, found a way home.
If Odysseus could do it, so could he.
He checked Field Energy’s website. The job for Director of Security was still open, interviews happening on an ongoing basis. He spent the day updating his résumé and letters of recommendation, the ones he’d drafted when he applied for the job with Grey Wolfe Security. Maybe he’d get the job. Maybe he wouldn’t. Either way, he’d show Rose he was ready to come home.
TWO WEEKS LATER
Rose slipped into the only empty seat at the far end of the conference room table, right next to Patrick Field, the company’s founder and CEO. Anticipating a long afternoon of interviewing final candidates, she nodded to the other hiring committee members and took the lid off her coffee to add a couple of sugar packets. Kelly, the VP of HR handed her a packet of paper on her way out to collect the first candidate.
“We got a good one for Director of Security,” Patrick said with a wink. “Last-minute thing, but the best we’ve had so far.”
The candidates had to have either cyber security experience or law enforcement experience, and there was no way Rose could cram any pertinent details from the CV into her head, so she didn’t even bother. Coffee adequately sugared up, she set the paper aside and opened her laptop to take notes. As the newest member she functioned as the group’s secretary, recording the candidates’ specifics answers to compare with other members’ impressions. She had just a moment to spare to look out at the blue spring sky. She was beginning to wonder if any sky could compare to the almost royal blue of the days in Ephesus and Troy, or if that color was unique to that particular spot on earth.