Chapter 20 #2
When I come to again, I can tell it’s much later. The room is dark, aside from the television’s glow. My head feels muddled, and my body still aches, but at least I feel safe. That’s because, as promised, Catcher kept his promise.
When I turn my head, I catch sight of him sitting in the chair beside my bed.
Our eyes meet, and for the longest time, neither of us says a word.
I watch as several emotions cross his face before he speaks.
His gaze drops to his hands for a second, like he has to make sure they’re steady before he lets the words out.
When he looks back up, the bruising on his face can’t hide the weariness in his eyes. “I met Hannah when we were kids,” he says. “High school.”
Why does that name feel similar to a punch in the gut? He says it as if it carries pain. I don’t interrupt. I listen because the way he says her name sounds like something he’s carried for too long.
“After we graduated, she went off to nursing school,” he continues.
“A couple of hours away. Not far, but far enough when you’re broke, eighteen, and you’d think it’s a million miles away.
” A faint, almost-smile tugs at his mouth and doesn’t last. “I stayed in our hometown to help my dad at his shop. Took on a few construction jobs too. Whatever I could get my hands on.” He shifts in the chair.
“Whenever I could scrape the money together for gas, I’d go see her on the weekends.
I’d drive up after work, show up at her dorm like I didn’t have a care in the world.
” His eyes go distant, looking past me, the hospital bed, and the dark window.
“It was that… stupid kind of young love. The kind where you’re so sure of everythin’. ”
I picture it without wanting to, Catcher younger, softer around the edges, smiling like he doesn’t have anything to prove. It doesn’t match the man I know, the one who has built a wall around himself.
“When Hannah graduated, she moved back home,” Catcher says.
“Back to me… back to us. We didn’t waste time gettin’ married.
” He says it with a smile like it was yesterday.
“We bought our first house not long after. It was small and needed a shit ton of work. Neither of us cared. It was ours. I spent months fixing it up,” he says.
“Every spare second. I’d work my shifts at Dad’s shop, come home, change clothes, and start tearin’ things apart…
floors, cabinets, and the porch steps. I poured myself into makin’ it a home.
Every nail, every board, every cabinet… it all had my touch.
I wanted Hannah to walk into our home and feel the love I had for her. Like we belonged there.”
Something heavy settles in my gut with each word Catcher speaks.
Catcher swallows, throat working. “Not long after that, Hannah got pregnant.” His gaze snaps to mine, quick, measuring, checking whether I’m still okay to hear this.
“It wasn’t planned. Hell, we were barely figurin’ out how to pay bills without eating ramen every night.
” A rough chuckle breaks free and dies immediately.
“But we were over the moon. I was over the damn moon.”
The bad feeling in the pit of my stomach intensifies. Catcher is telling me this for a reason. People don’t open old doors unless something is waiting on the other side.
“We worked on the nursery together,” he says, and for the first time since I’ve known him, there’s a flicker of something almost bright in his face.
Not happiness, but more so the memory of it.
“Picked out paint colors together, decorated the walls with pictures. Hannah would sit on the nursery floor with a list of things we still needed, reading them off while I hung shelves. His voice goes quieter. “I built the crib by hand. Took me months.” Catcher’s eyes go glossy, not with tears, but with the strain of holding them back.
“I was on top of the world, Ruby. I had a woman I adored and a baby on the way. A house I built into somethin’ worth coming home to.
” He slowly shakes his head once. “I thought… I thought that was it. That was my life. My whole damn future.”
I don’t move, I barely breathe, but I listen, as if my silence is the only thing keeping him talking and from locking this back up inside himself.
The television murmurs in the background, throwing blue light over the side of his face, the bruises, and the hard set of his jaw.
Something tells me I’m not going to like where this story is heading.
The silence stretches on forever. I feel his energy shift.
My stomach tightens, and I know, in the quiet certainty of instinct, that what comes next is going to hurt.
When he finally speaks, his voice is lower, flatter, as if he’s rehearsed a thousand times what he’s going to say.
“I came home from work one night after pickin’ up some extra hours.
With a baby on the way, I was pickin’ up as much overtime as I could.
” Catcher’s eyes look almost vacant as he recalls the events.
“I pulled into the driveway, and I knew right away somethin’ wasn’t right.
The porch light was off. Hannah never forgot the porch light.
Not once. She’d leave it on even if she were just runnin’ to the store, just in case I got home after dark. ”
He shifts forward in the chair, elbows braced on his knees. “I reached behind the seat, grabbed my rifle, and went inside.”
My hand presses hard against my stomach as Catcher’s throat bobs. “It was quiet,” he says. “Too quiet. And when I stepped into the kitchen…” He pauses, eyes dropping to the floor. “I found Hannah on the floor, and she wasn’t moving.”
His voice goes hoarse. “There was blood,” he says. “I’d never seen so much blood.” His eyes lift to mine again, and the pain in them is so raw it makes my own eyes sting. “There was a man standin’ over her,” he continues. “Gun in his hand. His back to me.”
I don’t realize I’ve stopped breathing until my chest burns. “I didn’t think,” Catcher says. “I didn’t hesitate. I shot the motherfucker where he stood.” His stare goes distant again. “I didn’t know there was a second intruder until I saw him bolt out the back door.”
I don’t say anything. I can’t. Tears stream down my face, silent and hot.
My chest aches with every breath, and it isn’t the bruises this time.
It’s Catcher. My heart breaks for him in a way I don’t know how to hold.
I knew Catcher had demons—everyone does, in one form or another—but nothing could have prepared me for this.
For the image of him walking into the home he built with his hands and finding it ruined in a single night.
For the sound of his voice right now, stripped down to bone and truth.
I want to reach for him. I want to pull him into me and tell him I’m here, that he isn’t alone with it anymore, but my body is pinned to this bed.
All I can do is look at him through blurred vision.
Maybe this is the root of the steel in him.
The reason he watches every door. The reason he goes quiet when people talk about families and futures is that he doesn’t trust either one to stay.
My tears don’t stop, but I don’t wipe them away.
I let them fall as I hold his gaze, waiting and terrified for what he’s going to say happened next.
Catcher’s eyes drop again, and when he speaks this time, the words come slower.
“After that, there were sirens, lights, and people askin’ questions,” he says, voice tight.
“I don’t remember half of it. I remember holdin’ her hand, and it being cold.
I remember somebody pullin’ me away.” His throat works as he goes quiet again.
“I buried my wife and child three days later. Just like that, they were gone.”
My tears start again, fresh and helpless. I try to blink them back, but they just keep coming, sliding down my cheeks into the pillow. Catcher keeps talking, his voice a low current I can’t escape.
“I stood there at the front of her casket, draped in flowers. White daisies because they were her favorite. I was lookin’ at a box that’s supposed to hold the person whom I had planned to spend the rest of my life with.
” Catcher’s hands clench and unclench. “I remember thinkin’ it was all a dream, and I’d wake up to find Hannah in the nursery. ”
His eyes squeeze shut for a beat. When they open again, all I see is anguish. “I lost everythin’ that night.”
My hand flies to my stomach so fast the IV tugs and stings.
The pain barely registers. All I can think is no, a raw, feral sound inside my head.
My baby. His baby. Our baby. The grief on his face makes my chest cave in.
I didn’t know it was possible to look at someone and feel their loss like it’s a weight dropped into your body, but that’s exactly what happens.
Catcher doesn’t give me details, probably because he can’t or maybe because he won’t.
But his voice turns rough. “They tried,” he says.
“Doctors, nurses… everybody.” His gaze drops to my hand over my stomach, and something savage flashes there before it disappears. “But there wasn’t anything to save.”
He drags in a breath, shoulders lifting, then dropping. Then I picture it without wanting to—an untouched nursery, the handmade crib waiting for a baby who will never sleep there, and a house full of love and her laughter, suddenly just… empty rooms.
I make a small sound, not quite a sob, not quite a breath. My heart feels shredded. He’s sitting here beside my hospital bed, bruised and exhausted, and he has been carrying the loss of his wife and child around with him every day.
No wonder he’s afraid.
No wonder he fights like he has nothing left to lose because once, he did.