Rocco told him about Kadisha visiting the doctor. “I don’t know where the medical camp was located, but it was a day’s ride from the village. Just about a week before the explosion.”
“Fuck. Me.” Max turned and headed back into ops. “Those camps were mobile, Rocco. Sometimes they had to bug out fast. Doctors came and went. Who knows if they kept a record of her visit? And even if they did, those records might not have survived the war.”
“I need to know, Max.”
“Rocco, the docs saw countless—faceless—villagers…”
“Kadisha wasn’t a faceless villager. She was the daughter of the infamous warlord Ghalib Halim. She would have been treated with deference. Her visit would have been recorded.”
Max set a hand on Rocco’s shoulder. “I’ll do what I can.”
Rocco nodded. “Thank you.”
Chapter Eleven
Rocco was sitting on the patio the next afternoon when Max came to see him.
“Hey, bro,” Max said.
Rocco read the tension on his friend’s face. “You have news?” Rocco stood up. Max handed him a printout of a fax. It was the log of Kadisha’s visit. Rocco grinned and looked up at Max. “You got it.”
Max nodded. “What does it mean to you?”
Rocco read the doctor’s notes. It said Kadisha was four months pregnant when she went to see him. Not the two she’d told Rocco. “Everything.” He looked at Max. “Where’s Mandy?”
Max checked the locator on his phone. “At the stables.”
“Thanks.” Rocco hurried across the patio.
“Should I call Kit?” Max asked.
Rocco walked backward as he answered. “No need. I’ll explain this later.” He jogged down to the portico leading to the gym building, then along the walkway around the gym and over to the stables.
“Mandy!” he shouted. “Mandy!”
She stepped out of one of the stalls and looked at him, then hurried toward him. “Rocco—what is it?”
“I need to talk to you.” He pulled her into a hug, squeezing her as tightly as he did his eyes. He’d almost lost her, lost himself, to Kadisha’s lie.
“You’re scaring me, Rocco.”
“It was all a lie.”
Mandy huffed a sharp breath, her eyes questioning his. “What was?”
“I almost died because of Kadisha’s lie.”
Mandy covered her mouth with the fingers of one hand, but couldn’t stop her tears. “Rocco—”
He led her over to a bench near the opening of the big stable. He was silent for a minute as he gathered his thoughts. “I think Kadisha cared for me the first couple of years of our marriage. But somewhere between the second and third years, she seemed to change. She grew critical of me, of Zavi. I didn’t put two and two together until yesterday.” He looked at Mandy.
“Kimble said the chokehold I had on my memories was not only keeping the painful ones at bay, but it was also keeping the answers I sought always out of my reach. Yesterday, I opened up to my memories.”
“Oh, Rocco.” Mandy reached over and held his knee. “I wish you had come to get me before doing that. You shouldn’t have been alone.”
“I remembered overhearing a couple of village women doubting her due date or speculating that she might be having twins.”
“Do twins run in your family?”
He shrugged. “I don’t think so. I asked my mom about that one time when I was a kid. I didn’t understand what twins were”—he smiled at her—“but I was hoping there was another of me out there somewhere. She said she didn’t know of any twins in her family. I don’t know if that’s true of my dad’s side. I never knew him.
“Anyway, I was worried that Kadisha might be having twins and might need better care than she was getting in the village. I sent her to a mobile medical camp run by an international group of volunteer doctors.” Rocco handed the paper to Mandy, forgetting that it was in French and she couldn’t read it.
“What am I looking at?”
Rocco pointed to the field where the doctor listed her pregnancy as four months along. “She told me she was only two months pregnant. I had been gone the three months prior to that.”
Mandy’s jaw dropped. Her green eyes were huge as she looked up at Rocco. “She wasn’t carrying your baby.”
Rocco shook his head. “No, she wasn’t. It was only a week later that she blew herself up and leveled the village.”
“Oh. My. God. That poor woman. How terrified she must have been. How desperate.”
Rocco shook his head. He reached for her hand and lifted it to his mouth to kiss. “This is why I love you. Only you would see it from that angle, feel her fear, despite the heinous way she chose to cover her infidelity.”
“Do you think she was raped?”
“No. Her first fiancé had come back into the area. Ehsan Asir.”
“The guy who kidnapped me?”