“It was my job to protect her. It should have been me.”
“I’m sure you did the best you could.” There was worry in her green eyes.
He buried his face in his hands. “Jesus.”
“The floor can’t be comfortable.” She helped him to his feet, led him to her bed, and sat down beside him, her hand holding his, her touch an anchor.
Still shaking, he told her. “Her name was Christine Brown. She was a first lieutenant, part of a Cultural Support Team. CSTs we call them. Her job was to talk to the women in a community. We’d go out on a direct action, take one or two of the women with us. After we’d secured the place, they would go in, talk to the other females.”
“I think I’ve heard about CSTs.” Ellie still kept up with military news.
“She hated being called by her last name, said it was part of the army’s stupid macho culture, so I called her by her first name. We hit it off. I was a staff sergeant, and she was an officer, so it was nothing like that. She was young—only twenty-three. She felt like a little sister to me.”
He told her the rest of it. How Christine had gone in to do her job after he and his element had cleared the farm, not knowing that bad intel had set them up for an ambush. How the place had exploded with gunfire moments before an IED had knocked him on his ass. How Christine had been badly wounded. How he’d done everything he could to keep her alive. How she’d died in his arms while he’d run through the sand toward Crash’s waiting bird.
“They pinned a medal on my chest, but I’m no hero. I left the army after that—resigned, went home, fell the fuck apart for a while. Then I came out here.”
“Oh, Jesse.”
Don’t let me die.
“It should have been me.”
Chapter 20
“I’m sorry, Ellie. I dumped my shit on you again.”
It hurt Ellie to see him in so much pain. “Please don’t apologize. I don’t think of it that way at all.”
She’d watched him slip away, watched one emotion chase the next across his face—shock, terror, desperation, anguish. She’d realized right away that he was having some kind of flashback. What he’d described would have been enough to leave anyone traumatized, the desolation he felt coming through in every word as he’d described Christine’s death.
“I’m not a therapist, but I’ve had some psych training. It’s not hard to connect the dots here. Three times you tried to save a woman—or girl—and three times you couldn’t, despite doing everything in your power. You watched your mother take punches for you. It would be the most natural thing in the world for a child to believe that it was his fault. You tried to save Kayla Fisher, too, but the water was too strong. You tried your best to save Christine but couldn’t. You’re carrying a lot of guilt that doesn’t belong to you, and I’m willing to be that most of it goes back to your parents.”
It made Ellie want to cry, but she didn’t. For his sake, she couldn’t.
“It was my job to keep Christine safe.”
“Was it your job to keep your mother safe? Or was it her job to keep you safe? She wasn’t a child, Jesse. You were.”
She watched his face and knew he was listening, his brow furrowed as if he were thinking over what she’d said. She gave him a moment to sit with that. “How old were you when that man started beating you?”
“I don’t know—three or four.”
“Daniel is going to be three soon. Would you expect him to be able to defend me if an adult man started beating me?”
Jesse stared at her as if she were crazy. “Of course not. He’s too little.”
“You were too little, too.”
Something in his expression changed, and she knew she was reaching him.
“Think of Emily, Nate’s little girl. She’s eight. Would you expect her to protect Megan? No? Then how can you expect that of little Jesse?”
When he said nothing, she went on. “As for Kayla—you tried. You did everything you could do. You went above and beyond, risking your life. It’s not your fault that you couldn’t reach her. You shouldn’t have gone into the water in the first place.”
The furrow on his brow deepened.
“While it might have been your job to protect Christine, you were ambushed in a war zone. The fact that any of you got out alive…” Dan had been there. Dan had seen all of this happen. It had been part of the life he hadn’t been able to share with her. “They wouldn’t have given you a medal if they’d thought you’d failed in your duty. You hold yourself to an impossible standard.”
“She died a terrible death.”
“It would have been a lot worse without you. In an impossible situation, you gave her reassurance. She was suffering, and you dulled her pain. She was scared, and you held her. She drifted into unconsciousness knowing she wasn’t alone.”
“Yeah. I guess.”
“Somehow, you buried her death in your mind, and the Fisher girl’s drowning dug it up again.” No, it wasn’t only Kayla. He’d had the flashback when he’d been telling her about Dan. “Her death—and talking about Dan.”