My younger sister scoots closer to me on the edge of the bed, wrapping one arm around my shoulder. I immediately flinch when she touches me, looking up from my hands to see tears pooling in her eyes when she nervously jerks her arm away and clenches her hands together in her lap. My baby sister. The one I used to take care of and provide for after our parents died when we were teenagers and the responsibility fell on my shoulders, is all grown up. She’s a wife and a mother and now she has to take care of me. She has to listen to my screams in the middle of the night, deal with my shitty attitude and my refusal to talk about what happened. I want to scream and rage at the unfairness of it all, but that would make things worse. It would just make Kat sadder and want to do even more than she already is trying to help me.
Three months since I was pulled out of that hellhole. Three months of interviews and debriefing and countless sessions with enough military headshrinkers that if I wasn’t crazy already, they sure as shit would have pushed me right over the edge with their endless questions and need to know everything I went through for five years. I used to love going to sleep at night. It was the only time Shelby and I were ever left alone and I could dream about her without the memories being tarnished. The dream I just had was one of my favorites. The day she came back into my life with an attitude and a backbone that made me finally wake up and see her for who she really was. She burrowed her way under my skin and never left. And now that’s ruined, too. I can’t even dream about her anymore without the hell I lived through coming back to haunt me and taint the only good thing I still have inside me.
“I thought the dreams were getting better,” Kat says softly.
They’ve never gotten better; I’ve just gotten better at keeping my screams to a minimum when they wake me up in the dead of night.
“They have. They are,” I lie, giving her a tight-lipped smile. “I’m fine now, Kitty Kat, go on back to bed.”
Kat smiles when I use the nickname I gave her when we were kids. She leans forward, probably to kiss me on the cheek, but quickly thinks better of it and pulls herself away from me and slides off the bed.
“Get some sleep. We’ll talk in the morning, okay?”
I nod, even though we both know that talk will never happen. I’ve been back in Charleston for two weeks, staying with my sister and her family until I can figure out what the fuck I’m going to do with my life. I can’t stay here any longer. I can’t keep putting her through this night after night. I only came back here for one thing. The only thing I know that will help me heal and keep the nightmares away. I know she’s probably long gone, living her dream far away from this town, and I know it’s shitty of me to burst back into her life after what I did to her, but I have to try. All my shrinks have told me I need to find a hobby. Something to focus on other than the torture and the pain, something to keep me grounded to the here and now and not stuck in the past, reliving every moment of hell. It’s probably not healthy that I’ve decided finding Shelby and convincing her to love me again is the perfect hobby for me, but that’s too damn bad.
I’m broken and scarred and half the man I used to be, but if she’ll let me explain, I hope to God she can put me back together again.
Chapter 3
Shelby
I jerk awake with a scream dying on my throat and my body covered in sweat. Taking a few deep, calming breaths, I stare up at the slowly turning ceiling fan above my bed, wondering if I’ll ever get a good night’s sleep again. I haven’t been sleeping well since the night I fainted, making up a lie about low blood sugar so Landry wouldn’t know my mind and my heart had shattered into a thousand pieces as soon as I heard that name. In the three months since the story broke, I can count on one hand how many hours I’ve been able to close my eyes and not see him, feel him, or hear his voice.
Knowing I’ll never be able to get back to sleep, I slide out of bed, wrapping a short, silk robe around my body as I open the door to the guest house where I live, and head out for a walk across the grounds.
Sitting down on a bench under a particularly large oak tree on the front lawn, I stare up at my family home with the moon shining bright above it and a chorus of cicadas chirping all around me. Located on sixty acres in South Charleston, it was once a cotton plantation before the Civil War. The 10,500-square-foot historical home is your typical updated Southern plantation home. It’s a two-story white wood-framed house with black shutters, a sprawling front porch, and an expansive terrace on the second floor that extends the length of the house. With a pecan grove, saltwater marshes, two ponds, orchards, a 35,000-square-foot horse stable, and numerous live oaks draped with Spanish moss around the property, it really is one of the most beautiful places to live.
If only the beauty on the outside could make up for the ugliness on the inside.
Checking the face of my silver watch, which I haven’t taken off since Meredith gave it to me for my birthday a few months ago, the perfect gift to hide the markings on the inside of my left wrist from prying eyes, I realize I’ve been sitting out here for two hours. Ever since I woke up from a dream and couldn’t fall back to sleep. In the daylight hours, I can put on a brave face, don a happy smile, and push away the thoughts that have been plaguing me since that night in my room a few months ago when I listened to the news report and collapsed to the floor in front of a completely shocked Landry. At night, when the sun goes down and darkness fills my room…that’s when I forget how to shut everything off. That’s when my mind and my memories take over and refuse to let me forget, and it’s only gotten worse in the last few weeks. My best friend, Meredith, has been checking on me nonstop ever since the news broke. She’s the only person in my life who knows everything about Eli. Well, everything that happened before, at least. No one knows about after, especially not Meredith. I’d never be able to handle her disappointment and anger about what I’ve done and the choices I’ve made.
For three months I reassured Meredith I was fine, happy with Landry, and couldn’t care less about what was happening on the news, but Meredith knew me better than that. It was easy to pretend my life hadn’t changed when I didn’t know where he was. When I’d only caught one grainy glimpse of him on the news and didn’t even recognize the man they claimed was him. He was too skinny, had too much hair, and didn’t smile. It wasn’t the Eli I remembered. Maybe they were wrong. Maybe they misidentified him and it was all one big joke. They screwed up once before, claiming he’d been killed in action, what’s to say they couldn’t do it again?
When I found out he’d come home, when I heard he was living with his sister, a few miles away, breathing the same Southern air as me, walking the same streets I frequented, I couldn’t pretend anymore. In the midst of a panic attack the other night, curled up into a ball on my bedroom floor, I called Meredith and begged her to come for a visit. I needed my friend. I needed my rock to get me through this.