Currant Creek Valley

chapter EIGHTEEN



SHE WOULD MISS these quiet walks along the creek, just her dog and her thoughts and the silvery water rippling in the moonlight.

Friday evening, nearly two weeks after Caroline’s death, Alex headed out on her usual path to the fence where the Forest Service land began, with Leo sniffling along just ahead of her.

She no longer left him on the leash when they walked along this trail, confident now that he would return to her. He never moved far ahead of her and would circle back frequently, almost as if he felt the need to protect her.

If the trail curved in a way that took them out of sight of each other, she would round the bend and he would be there with his haunches planted in the dirt, waiting for her to catch up.

Tonight he seemed content to pad along beside her, probably as happy as she that she had managed to leave the restaurant before midnight, for once.

Nan, the sous-chef she intended to train as her replacement—though she didn’t know that yet—wanted to practice closing the restaurant and Alex had left her to it. She had been able to leave before it was even 9:00 p.m., something of a miracle.

Nan would do fine, she told herself. She was creative and organized, a rare combination, and a natural leader. The staff already listened to her. Brazen would do well with her at the helm—assuming she agreed to take over. Alex had talked to Brodie about it and the two of them planned to approach her sometime midweek about the transition.

Everything was coming together. She had a family interested in renting her house and was already scouting online to find a place in Park City that would allow her to have a dog.

Her family thought she was crazy to leave right now, just as the restaurant was taking off. Maybe she was. The thought of leaving everything she cared about behind terrified her but she knew she had to do it.

She wondered what Caroline would have said. She probably would have shook her head sadly and told Alex she couldn’t escape herself, no matter how hard or how far she ran.

Caroline was gone and she had taken her wisdom and her strength with her. Alex missed her terribly. Without her guidance, Alex had to rely on her own decisions and this one seemed inevitable. She couldn’t stay in Hope’s Crossing while Sam was here, moving on with his life.

It sounded melodramatic, even to her, but it was easier to leave than to face everything she had turned her back on.

The moon was high overhead when she reached the Forest Service gate. She leaned on it, looking up at the wild mountains in the distance while Leo headed down to the bank to drink from the cold waters of the creek.

She would miss this splendor, but she reminded herself Utah had mountains, too. Beautiful peaks, alpine valleys, creeks. Park City wasn’t all that different from Hope’s Crossing, actually.

The restaurant she would be taking over was already well established and successful. She didn’t expect to have any problems adjusting—other than missing her family and her friends and her home.

And Sam.

She rolled her eyes at herself. How could she miss someone who had barely been in her life a few months?

She hadn’t talked to him in weeks, not since the Giving Hope Day, though she knew he had been trying to reach her.

She had seen him at Caroline’s memorial service and had drawn undeniable comfort by just the sight of his big, solid strength, but she couldn’t face him.

He had called a couple times and she had only listened about a dozen times to his messages asking her to call him before she forced herself to delete them. Once she had been at home when he rang the doorbell, and had hidden away in her home office with the door closed, feeling stupid and immature and weak. Finally he had given up and left.

She never did have a chance to see Ethan’s bedroom finished or the tree house that had begun to take shape in their backyard. Things were probably better this way. Less messy. She would slip out of town and move on and he would continue dating Charlotte and maybe marry her someday.

They would move here to Currant Creek Valley and have a few more kids, easing seamlessly into the fabric of life in Hope’s Crossing.

Leo returned to her side and stuck his wet muzzle into her hand, sensing in that uncanny way of his that she needed a little love right then.

The dog had become a wonderful companion. She had cared for him for two months now, had put ads up everywhere she could think of, had checked regularly with the Humane Society shelter to see if anyone had come looking for him. So far, nothing.

Sometime in the last month, she had gone from thinking of him as a temporary guest to wondering what she had ever done without him. She loved him and refused to give him up.

“We belong together now, don’t we?”

The dog gave her that wise look he wore sometimes, as if he understood everything she said and agreed with her.

He licked her hand and then moved back down the way they had come. After a few feet on the darkened trail, he turned back with a “hurry up” sort of look.

She smiled, despite the melancholy that clung to her like a dusting of flour after a long day of baking.

“All right, all right. I’m coming. Let’s go home.”

The dog gave a cheerful little bark and started off. She walked behind with the flashlight.

When the trail reached the houses on Currant Creek Road, the path ended and she moved onto the road. Sam’s house was dark, she saw. Good. On the way past it earlier, she had seen lights and shadows moving around inside and had just about had to reach up a hand and physically yank her face around to keep from staring.

She quickened her pace and had just reached the edge of his lawn—neatly mowed now and beginning to green up—when his voice rang out.

“Alexandra!”

She closed her eyes. A few more seconds and she would have been safe. Damn it. She opened them and turned to find him trotting down his steps toward her.

Her heart gave one quick burst of joy at seeing him again, big and strong and wonderful, before her head reminded her how foolish a feeling that was since she wasn’t the one for him.

She had a couple choices here, none of them pleasant. She could sprint to her house and slam the door or she could muster her nerve and talk to the man for a few minutes.

Sprinting won out by a long shot but he reached her before she could put that particular plan into action.

“Lovely night for a walk.”

“It was. We’re heading home now. And yes, I have bear spray.” She held up the canister attached to her flashlight.

“Smart girl.”

Oh, no. She was very, very foolish. “Is Ethan in bed?”

“Yeah. He has been for the past few hours. He runs pretty hard all day. By bedtime, he’s ready to drop.”

She forced a smile, ignoring the pang in her heart. She still owed Ethan some brownies. Maybe she could fix them for him before she left.

“Well, good night,” she started to say, intending on a quick escape, but he spoke at the same moment and missed her words.

“I had a very interesting conversation with your friend Claire this afternoon,” he said.

Her stomach clutched and she wondered what Claire might have told him. “Did you? She’s an interesting person. You should ask her about the time Riley fished her out of Silver Strike Reservoir in the middle of a blizzard. He saved her life. The kids, too.”

“Fascinating. We didn’t cover that particular story but I’ll be sure to ask her about it next time. No, today she was busy telling me some other disturbing news.”

She couldn’t meet his dark, intense gaze. “Oh?”

“She told me you’re leaving.”

Darn it. Why couldn’t Claire have kept her big mouth shut? And why would she feel the need to discuss the subject with Sam, of all people?

She shifted her weight, wondering just how much of her feelings Claire might suspect. Probably all of them.

“Care to tell me why?”

She wanted to tell him it was none of his damn business. But a heated response like that would only make him suspect that perhaps it was.

“I was handed an unbelievable opportunity. One of those chances you have no choice but to grab when they spin your way.” She tried to make her voice cheerful and excited, though it took all her limited acting skills.

“My sister Rose has a friend who owns one of the top-rated restaurants in Deer Valley, with great visibility,” she went on. “He’s looking for a new chef, heard about Brazen from Rose and stopped by to check things out when he was in Colorado a few weeks ago. He was impressed enough to ask me if I would consider moving.”

“And you said yes.”

Not at first. She had initially turned him down flat. After taking a few hours to think about it, she had realized this was her best chance to leave Hope’s Crossing. Maybe it was a sign, coming as it did at this particular juncture in her life.

Though it scared her to death and she was very much afraid she was making a terrible mistake, the alternative—staying here with the status quo—was worse.

“How could I say no?”

“I don’t know. It shouldn’t be that tough for you. You’ve had plenty of practice saying it to me.”

She blinked but his expression was unreadable in the light from the moon and the streetlights.

“I can’t believe you’re leaving only weeks after opening Brazen. Shouldn’t you be savoring the challenge of making your own restaurant top rated, not taking over what somebody else has already accomplished?”

His words sliced right to the bone. It was ridiculous, really. She knew it was. Giving up her hopes, her dreams, her life, because of a man.

Why did he have to come to her town and ruin everything?

“This way has a great deal less pressure. Brazen is doing well right now—”

“Amazingly well, from what I’ve heard. People are driving up from Denver just to say they ate there.”

Pleasure spiked through her but she tamped it down. “That could change in a moment. The dining public can be capricious. In the early days of a restaurant, one bad night or one bad review can be disastrous. The Park City restaurant has a track record and a fan base. All the glory with none of the pressure.”

She said the words with a flippancy she didn’t feel.

“So that’s why you’re leaving. Because this was an opportunity you couldn’t pass up.”

She forced a smile. “What other reason would there be?”

“I don’t know. You tell me. Two weeks ago, you were the damn poster girl for the Chamber of Commerce, full of all the reasons why Hope’s Crossing is the perfect town. Utopia with a ski lift. Now you’re ready to just walk away from all of that.”

She didn’t owe him any explanations. She should tell him good-night and walk the few hundred yards to her own house, just take her dog and go. As tempting as that was, she didn’t want him to think she was running away—from this discussion or from anything else.

“Just because I love Hope’s Crossing doesn’t mean I can’t be happy in Park City. Maybe I just need a change. Plenty of people start over somewhere new. You did.”

“And that’s the whole point, isn’t it?”

She frowned. “What do you mean by that?”

He fell silent, his gaze troubled as he absently patted Leo. “I’ve been running this through my head ever since talking to Claire today,” he finally said. “It sounds crazy. Completely crazy. But I have to ask. If I weren’t here, living down the street, would you still be all ready to throw your life away, everything you’ve worked so hard to build here, and move to another state? Away from your family, the home you just bought, the restaurant you’ve always wanted?”

Those nerves in her stomach now clutched so tightly she couldn’t seem to draw a breath. No. Oh, no. She couldn’t let him think that. While she managed a shaky little laugh, she was very much afraid she didn’t fool him for a second.

“Wow. Talk about unbridled conceit.”

“Yeah, maybe. But right now, listening to you talk about opportunities you couldn’t pass up and taking the easy route to success, my bullshit meter is spinning off the charts.”

“Maybe you ought to have somebody take a look at that.”

She couldn’t do this, lie to him, with any hopes of convincing either of them. And the truth was, she didn’t owe him any explanation. Why should she bother to try? She gripped Leo’s leash and took off blindly in the direction of her house but only made a few steps before he caught her, reaching for her arm.

“Alexandra.” The troubled sincerity in his voice stopped her progress more effectively than the fact that he was a six-foot, one-hundred-eighty-pound former Army Ranger, and she froze.

“Tell me the truth. Please. Does your decision to leave have anything at all to do with me?”

He still had his hand on her arm and she could feel the heat of him radiating through her muscles, her nerves, straight to her center. How could she flat-out lie to him? Her decision to leave had everything to do with him, but she certainly couldn’t tell him that.

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She tried to sound dismissive and composed, hoping he didn’t hear the shaky note to her voice. “You really think I’m the kind of woman who would completely change my life because of a man?”

“Classic diversionary tactic. Answer a question with a question. Which was really no answer at all. If you can look me in the eyes and tell me straight up that your decision to leave has nothing to do with me, I’ll back off.”

She gazed at him solemnly, drawing on every ounce of deception and subterfuge she might possess while she prayed he couldn’t see the truth in her eyes. “My decision to leave has nothing to do with you.”

“Liar.” He said the single word softly, damningly.

She shrugged her arm away. “I’m too tired for this right now. Go to bed, Sam. Why don’t you take that colossal ego with you?”

She took a few more steps down the street, Leo beside her, trotting obediently along. Poor, confused dog.

Again Sam followed after her. This time he moved in front of her to block her way. They were now directly under the streetlight in front of Mr. Phillips’s house and she could easily see his expression. For once it was open and clear. He didn’t look angry. He looked upset, his eyes dark with concern and with something else. A soft, warm tenderness that terrified the hell out of her.

“What if I were the one to leave? Would you stay then?”

She stared at him, oddly aware of the light glowing around him and the bright spangle of stars above that. “You’re not leaving.”

“But what if I did? Ethan and I have only been here a few months. It would be easy enough for us to make a new start somewhere else. Easier than it would be for you.”

She felt cold, suddenly, as if all the heat in the world had been sucked away, and then it rushed back, scorching through her like a brush fire. He would do that, for her? Pick up his son and walk away from the life he had spent these past months building so carefully?

She didn’t know what to say, what to do. Suddenly she was angry at him, furious that he would even make such an offer.

“You...you can’t just leave. You have a business here. A house.”

“You have a restaurant. And also a house,” he pointed out. “That’s not stopping you from running away.”

“It’s not the same. I don’t need you to be some kind of martyr for me. How pathetic do you think I am?”

He stared at her. “Where the hell did that come from? I don’t think you’re pathetic at all, but I do think you’re running from me, from what we could have together.”

How could he know that? She closed her eyes, gripping Leo’s leash to keep from bursting into tears. “We don’t have anything together, Sam. We kissed a handful of times. That’s it. For heaven’s sake! You really think I would pack up and change my whole life because of a few kisses?”

“Maybe not. Maybe I’m crazy.”

He was silent and she thought for one blessed moment he was going to give up and return to his house and his son and his life, but he shoved his hands in his back pockets, a funny little smile playing around that expressive mouth.

“No maybe about it. I’m definitely crazy. By the way,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “I’m in love with you. Does that make any kind of a difference?”

All her bluster and bluff seeped away and she could do nothing but stare at him, feeling as if the street beneath her feet had just sunk into Currant Creek. “You are not.”

He laughed roughly. “I’m pretty sure I know my own mind, after thirty-eight years on the planet. I’ve known I loved you for some time now. I’m sorry if it comes as a shock to you.”

Just for a moment, joy bloomed through her like Caroline’s flowers, bright and sunny and glowing with color and life, but harsh reality was a chilling wind that shriveled it like frost-kill.

“You’re not in love with me,” she said through lips that felt as frozen as the rest of her and didn’t seem to want to cooperate. “You might think you are but it’s all part of this fantasy you’ve built up in your head, that once you move to this perfect little town, you’ll have everything you ever wanted.”

“Oh. Is that what it is?”

“Yes! But you’re wrong. Hope’s Crossing isn’t perfect. People leave. They cheat on each other, they lie, they drink and steal and walk out on their families. They die.”

To her horror, her voice broke on the last word and the tears she had been fighting forever threatened to burst free.

“Oh, baby. I’m sorry.” He looked so wonderful there in the streetlight, big and strong and steady, and she wanted to sink into his arms and never leave. Instead, she forced herself to straighten shoulders that ached with strain.

“It’s not real. You’re not in love with me, Sam.”

“Will you stop saying that? I love you, and I’m not about to stand here in the street and argue about it with you! If I were going to daydream about the perfect woman to fit into this Hope’s Crossing fantasy you think I have, you really think I’d pick a smart-ass chef who fights me at every step and who’s too damn stubborn to see what’s right in front of her?”

He was angry. Heat flared in his eyes, and his jaw had hardened. He looked every inch a soldier—big, tough, scary.

“I love you,” he said once more, and she could see he was fighting to tamp down his temper. “Maybe if I say it enough times you’ll finally believe me.”

She had no choice, she realized, gripping Leo’s leash so tightly she could feel the imprint of it on her palm. She had to tell him. Everything. Every terrible detail. Then he would finally see she wasn’t the kind of woman who deserved him.

“You can’t love me, Sam. You don’t even know me.”

“I think I know you better than anybody.”

“Not this.”

She drew in a ragged breath that seemed to slice her lungs and blurted out the words she had never spoken aloud.

“I had a baby. I had a baby and he died. Because of me.”

* * *

THROUGH THE EDGES of the temper he rarely let get away from him, Sam heard her words as if from a long distance away. A baby. She had given birth to a baby who had died.

He hadn’t expected that one. Shock froze him for just a moment but then he forced himself to speak.

“What happened?”

“I don’t... It’s ugly. So ugly.”

He didn’t need to hear—didn’t want to hear, but he sensed she needed to tell him, for reasons he didn’t quite understand.

He glanced back at his house and then at her. “Ethan could wake up. I need to be there. Will you come back and tell me? We can sit on the porch.”

“I don’t talk about it. Ever. To anyone. Not even... My family doesn’t even know.”

How could she have kept something like that a secret from her big, boisterous, loving family? His heart ached that she had carried that burden alone.

“It’s your choice. Tell me or don’t. Nothing you have to say will change the way I feel about you anyway.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Not unless you tell me.”

This was the reason she didn’t let him close. Somehow he knew it. Just that afternoon, Claire had told him Alex kept part of herself separate. This. This was the part she didn’t share with anyone.

He wanted to scoop her up and hold her close and tell her his shoulders were strong enough to help her carry any burden.

“Come on up to the porch, so I can hear my son if he wakes up. I can keep the light off if you want.”

Confidences always seemed easier in the dark, something he had learned in some pretty dark and ugly places in the desert.

She drew in a breath that sounded shaky and hollow, as if she wasn’t drawing air deeply enough into her lungs. “Yes. I...need to tell you.”

They walked up his sidewalk without talking or touching, her dog leading the way. She stood for a moment on the porch, her hands tightly clasping the dog’s leash.

“Can I get you something to drink?”’

She shook her head, her features in shadow. She didn’t seem to quite know what to do, what to say, so he made the first move, taking the ladder-back chair and leaving her free to sit on the porch swing.

After a moment’s hesitation, she sat stiffly. The chains rattled a little with the shift in weight then stilled.

She unhooked the dog’s leash and Leo immediately moved to Sam for affection. He petted him for just a moment then surreptitiously pushed him to Alex, sensing she needed the dog more than he did right now.

“This must have happened during your time in Europe,” he finally prodded.

In the dim light, her eyes were huge against her shadowy features as she stared at him. “How did you know that?”

“You said you hadn’t told your family. The way I see it, as close as you all are, as much as they love you, the only way you could have kept something like a pregnancy from them would be by living across the world.”

“Yes. I...I was in culinary school.”

She was quiet for another moment and then she pulled her knees up onto the swing and wrapped her arms around them, drawing into herself. “I was so stupid. From the very beginning.”

He let the silence linger. When she spoke, her voice was crisp, almost as if she had detached herself from the story.

“As part of my training, I worked in various restaurants in France and then Italy, learning different techniques. It was a wonderful adventure and I loved every minute of it. About a year into it, I started work at a restaurant near Florence when I...fell in love. Or thought I did. Marco was the chef and he was...brilliant. In the kitchen and out of it. Just this...irresistible force.”

She drew in another breath. “We had to keep our growing relationship a secret, of course. It would cause friction among the staff if people knew about us. Resentment, petty jealousies, that sort of thing. The political games played in a fine kitchen are as complicated and cutthroat as the Borgias.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“Maybe that was part of the excitement, the forbidden aspect of it. For several months we lived that way, with him sneaking into my little flat in the middle of the night or taking me away for weekends in the countryside.”

She paused. “And then I discovered I was pregnant.”

She was silent for a long moment while a breeze blew through, rustling the leaves of the tree beside the porch.

“I was thrilled,” she finally said. “Beyond thrilled. I had all these ideas that we would marry, I would move to Italy permanently and we could run this wonderful restaurant together. It was a magical time. In my head, anyway. I didn’t tell him right away. Even then maybe I sensed something wasn’t quite right between us, but I told myself I wanted to wait until the moment was perfect. He could...have these moods sometimes, which I told myself was all part of his passionate, creative genius.”

Sam figured he had left his violent days behind him when he took his discharge, but right now he was struck by a fierce urge to rip a certain passionate genius into tiny, creative little parts.

“Finally, when I was three months along and starting to show—six or seven months after we began seeing each other—I set the stage. I cooked him my very best meal, I spent a week’s salary on a new dress, I even had the pastry chef at the restaurant prepare Marco’s favorite dessert. Semifreddo with grappa-poached apricots. You’ll never see that in my restaurant, by the way.”

An owl hooted somewhere on the Currant Creek but other than that, it felt as if they were alone in the night.

“You can probably guess what happened next. I finally told him about the pregnancy over dessert. He...wasn’t happy. Said I was a stupid American girl and why did I have to ruin everything. He said all manner of things about me, worst of all that my alla bolognese was bland.”

This would have made him laugh under other circumstances but right now he couldn’t find anything about this story funny.

“Only then did I realize he was right. I had been incredibly stupid. As he finally so clearly pointed out, we would never be together. All this time while I had been dreaming of the time we could make our relationship public—when we could start our happily-ever-after together—he had been going home every night when he left my bed to sleep beside his wife. The wife I had no idea existed until that night.”

He remembered that first day he had met her at Brazen, when she had grilled him so intently about whether he was married or not before she would consider dating him. The pain of that treachery and how she had unknowingly betrayed another woman must be etched deeply inside her.

“I have no excuse. I should have seen it a million times over, I just... I guess I didn’t want to see. I wanted to blame the language barrier, since my Italian was terrible and he refused to speak English, but really it was my own stupidity.”

“You were a young woman living in a foreign country and you made a mistake.”

“I wasn’t that young. Twenty-five. Not some naive teenager. I was certainly old enough to suspect something when the man who claimed to love me would only see me in secret.”

He was willing to bet the charming Italian son of a bitch was probably older, with worlds’ more experience. She had probably transferred all her pain over losing her father to him, but he wasn’t sure she would appreciate that insight right now.

“That’s not the worst of it,” she said, her voice small.

“What happened?”

“He fired me. Well, technically I quit before he could, but he told me he didn’t want me to come back to his ristorante ever, with much dramatic gesturing and throwing things around. And since the apartment was owned by the ristorante, of course I had to leave there immediatamente.”

Now he really wanted to find the bastard. Anybody who could throw a pregnant young woman out into the street deserved the full force of an angry ex-Ranger trained in hand-to-hand combat.

“I couldn’t see any other choice in the matter so I packed my things and I left Florence. What else could I do?”

“You didn’t come home to Hope’s Crossing, though.”

“No. I couldn’t. I... My older sister Maura had had a baby on her own when she was a teenager, my niece Sage, and I saw how hard that was for her. I heard the whispers and the way certain people looked down on her for it. Call me selfish, but I didn’t want to go through that or put my family through it. I didn’t want to tell my family what an idiot I had been and I certainly didn’t want the baby. My heart was broken and I didn’t want any part of Marco in my life.”

“Completely understandable.”

“I had some vague idea of giving the baby up for adoption, maybe, but I needed to work to survive, so I took a job at a restaurant near Bologna. A terrible place, with a horrible little man for a chef.”

The breeze sighed through the treetops and she sighed along with it. “I worked sixteen-hour days, six days a week. Some days I forgot to eat. I didn’t go to a doctor. I just wanted to pretend the whole thing hadn’t happened. I had loved him so much and I still couldn’t believe he didn’t want me. That he could hurt me like my...” Her voice trailed off abruptly.

“Like your father did,” he finished, wishing he could reach out and touch her. An arm around her shoulder, a hand on her arm. Anything.

“Claire does have a big mouth,” she said after a moment.

“She cares about you.”

“Yes. I couldn’t believe he could hurt me like my father. He abandoned us, and Marco basically did the same.”

This was why she was so careful to keep her relationships light and casual. The men in her life had been a*sholes, all of them, and she wanted to remain in control so she didn’t have to risk being hurt.

He had no idea how he could heal a lifetime of disappointments.

“You should know,” he said carefully, “nothing you’ve told me makes me suddenly discover I can’t possibly be in love with you.”

She looked at him, her face pale and lovely against the shadows around her and completely solemn. “Oh, just wait.”

The dog moved closer to her, resting his chin on her leg, and her hands absently moved through his fur.

“When I was about six months along, still working sixteen-hour days on my feet in a hot, crowded restaurant kitchen and not taking any kind of care of myself or the baby, I started having pain under my rib cage. Severe pain.”

He ached for her, for what he sensed was coming.

“It went on for two days. I didn’t go to a doctor. In fact, I continued working and told myself it would pass. On the second day, I fainted just before the dinner rush while I was slicing tomatoes for the insalata caprese and I started hemorrhaging all over the floor.”

His own blood ran cold thinking of her, a young woman alone in a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language well in dire need of medical attention.

“I was rushed to the hospital where it turned out the pain I had been so stubbornly ignoring had been a placental abruption. The baby didn’t survive. I nearly didn’t.”

He could feel his insides tremble at the thought of how close she might have come. “But you did.”

“Yes. More or less intact. Well, less, actually. They had to take out everything to save my life. All the girly parts, I mean.”

She said the words as if they had some great significance, but he was just a big dumb carpenter and didn’t understand why she thought that would matter to him.

“And where is the part where you killed your baby?” he asked.

She stared. “Haven’t you been listening? If I had taken proper care of myself, seen a doctor, stayed off my feet for five minutes, maybe, the baby might have survived. Instead, I was so busy hating myself for my stupidity and naïveté and hating Marco for being an ass and even hating the baby for ruining everything that I let an innocent child die because of it.”

Again he chose his words carefully. Everything—everything—hinged on him not screwing this up. “Sorry, but I’m not seeing it. You made poor choices, but you didn’t kill your child.”

She made a strangled noise as if gearing up to argue and he purposely hardened his voice. “I served three tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. I know what it means to kill someone, defending myself or my platoon or the mission. I also know the difference between that and an emotionally battered young woman alone in a foreign country neglecting her health while she tries to survive. Trust me, there’s no comparison.”