Chapter 5
Sarah
Stew was running down his shirt. The empty tray was still in my hands, and I was standing in the middle of the dining tent trying to form words when reality hit.
Donovan. His name was there before I reached for it, and everything that came with it crashed in behind.
The nightclub, the hotel hallway, all of it ending with me throwing up on his shirt.
I’d spent three weeks trying to forget that night, and now the man at the center of that memory was standing in front of me wearing my dinner.
“What are you doing here?”
He asked the question at the same time.
We both stopped. Stared.
The man behind him had red hair and broad shoulders, and he was the one who’d said the thing about shirts.
He looked between us with his eyebrows climbing.
A third man stood farther back, arms crossed, watching all of this with the patience of someone who had learned to let situations develop before stepping into them.
“I work here,” I said finally. “I’m one of the veterinary fellows. I’ve been here for a year.”
Something shifted in Donovan’s expression. He was running through the same impossibility I was and coming up equally empty.
“We’re here for work too,” he said. “Just arrived today.”
“Work?” I looked at the three of them. “What kind of work?”
Before he could answer, Zayn came through from behind the serving area, and his face lit up when he saw the three men.
“Sarah. You’ve met them.” He said it like this was a good thing, like I hadn’t just launched a full plate of food into one of them. “These are the trainers I told you about.”
Zayn had mentioned them two weeks ago. He had said something about specialists coming in to work with the rangers, help them get organized, give them some real structure.
I’d pictured Kenyan Wildlife Service officers.
Maybe someone from an international conservation group.
Older men with clipboards and polo shirts with organizational logos on the chest.
These men did not carry clipboards.
I looked at them again, all three, and whatever they were, it wasn’t wildlife management.
They stood differently from anyone else in this camp.
Shoulders pulled back, weight balanced on their clearly athletic legs, and they had a level of attention that felt like it could bore a hole straight through you.
While Donovan talked, the redhead’s eyes tracked someone passing behind the serving area without his head turning.
The third man had shifted his weight to face the open side of the tent, and I didn’t think he’d done it consciously.
“We work for Citadel Solutions,” Donovan said. “Private security and training. Ethan Cross, our boss, has a relationship with the conservancy. He sent us to help get the ranger program on its feet.”
“Private security,” I repeated.
The redhead extended his hand. “Andrew Volante.” His grip was warm and brief, his smile was relaxed and immediate. “Don’t worry about the shirt thing. Donovan’s been through worse.”
The third man stepped forward and shook my hand too. “Cole Braddock. I’ve been on the ground here for a couple of weeks.”
“I’ve seen you around camp.” I was pretty sure I had. I just hadn’t spoken to him beyond a passing nod. He kept to the operations side, and I kept to the animals.
“I’m Sarah Calloway,” I finally volunteered. “The other two fellowship vets should be here shortly. Alyson Goodwin and Daniel Henderson. We’re mostly around the vet facility if we’re not out on the reserve with the animals.”
I turned back to Donovan. He was looking at me with an expression I couldn’t decode. The stew was still dripping down his chest, and I was still holding the empty tray like it was the only thing keeping me vertical.
“I am so sorry about the—” I gestured at the mess.
“It’s fine.”
“It’s really not. That’s the second time I’ve—”
I stopped. I had been about to say the second time I’ve destroyed one of your shirts, which would have required explaining the first time, which would have required everyone in this tent to know that I’d vomited on this man in a hotel hallway in Paris.
And I would rather have been trampled by the entire southern white rhino population than let that sentence finish.
“Second time you’ve what?” Andrew said.
“Nothing. Never mind.”
Donovan’s eyes held mine for a beat. He didn’t fill in the blank audibly for everyone. I was grateful enough for that.
“I’ll get you a towel,” I said and turned away before anyone could ask me anything else.
I was three steps toward the serving area when Alyson walked into the dining tent.
She was mid-sentence before she cleared the entrance. This was standard. Alyson’s voice arrived a full second before the rest of her did, and the rest of her was not quiet either.
“Sarah, Daniel is useless. I asked him to check on the impala and he forgot, and now I have to go out there myself after dinner, which means—”
She stopped.
She was looking past me. At Donovan.
I watched the recognition land. Alyson’s eyes went wide, then wider, and her mouth fell open in a way that would have been comical had I not been experiencing the beginning of what I was fairly sure was a cardiac event.
“Oh my God.” Her hand came up to her chest. “Oh my God. That’s— Sarah. That’s—is that—”
“Alyson.”
“That is the guy from the club.” She said it at a volume that carried across every open side of the tent and probably out to the nearest outpost. “That is the guy from Paris. The one you—”
“Aly.”
She looked at me. Looked at Donovan. Looked at the stew on both of our shirts. Then she looked at me again, and her face contorted into something between joy and disbelief that I wanted to physically remove from her features.
“What is he doing here?”
“Working.” My voice came out tight. “He’s with the team Zayn was telling us about.”
“The security guys? The trainers?” She looked at them again, and I could see her recalculating everything the same way I had, except Alyson was doing it loudly and with her entire face.
I caught something else. Andrew was looking at Donovan. His easy smile was gone. In its place was stunned comprehension, a series of facts he’d been holding separately snapping together all at once.
He’d known about Paris. Or known something about Paris. But he hadn’t known that the woman from Paris was standing in this dining tent.
The look he gave Donovan said everything: This is her?
Donovan didn’t look back at him.
Which meant they were absolutely going to talk about this later, and the thought made me want to walk directly into the savanna and never return.
“Let me get that towel,” I said to no one in particular and escaped to the serving area.
A short time later, after handing Donovan something to wipe off his shirt, I sat down at a table with Alyson and a new plate of food I didn’t remember serving myself.
The Citadel team was at a table across the tent, close enough to hear if either side raised their voices.
The canvas roof rippled above us in a breeze that did nothing for the heat underneath.
Alyson leaned toward me immediately. “Talk. Now. What is happening?”
“Not here.”
“Sarah—”
“Not. Here.” I picked up my fork. “The tent is open on three sides. I don’t want to have this conversation in front of the entire camp. Okay?”
Alyson looked at the open sides, looked at the Citadel table, and sat back.
From across the tent, I heard Andrew’s voice, low but not low enough. “So the woman from the hotel, the one with the—”
Donovan cut him off. I couldn’t hear the words, but the tone was unmistakable. A wall dropping into place.
Andrew said something else. Then he laughed, one sharp exhale, and I heard him say, clear as a bell, “You cannot make this up.”
I put food in my mouth. Chewed. Swallowed. Put more in.
This was the rule in the field—eat when food is available.
The day started before sunrise and ran until the last animal was checked and the last log was written, and if you skipped a meal because you were having an emotional crisis, you didn’t eat.
The crisis would still be there in the morning. The food wouldn’t.
Alyson watched me shovel stew and rice with a simmering impatience that made her leg bounce under the table. She picked at her own plate, moved food around, leaned forward twice, and thought better of it both times.
“After dinner,” I said without looking up.
“Your cabin?”
“Fine.”
“I’m coming, whether you invite me or not.”
“I know.”
Daniel showed up at some point and sat down next to Alyson with his own plate. Then he said something about the impala that I didn’t process. Alyson answered him without taking her eyes off me. He glanced between us, read something in the silence, and had the good sense not to ask.
I finished my plate. The stew was good. It was always good. The women who cooked for the camp put more care into these meals than anyone in this compound probably deserved, and I’d learned a long time ago to appreciate every bite.
I stood up, rinsed my plate at the wash station, and walked out of the tent without looking at the Citadel table.
Alyson caught up before I’d made it ten steps.
“You said after dinner. It’s after dinner.”
“I said my cabin. We’re not there yet.”
She fell into step beside me. The compound had gone quiet in the way it did every evening after the meal, the camp drawing down to the hum of the generator and the distant sound of the kitchen staff talking softly as they finished.
I could see the lights on in the operations building and, beyond the cabin cluster, the broad, empty dark where the conservancy stretched out toward the horizon.
My cabin door stuck the way it always did when humidity was high. I shouldered it open, and Alyson followed me inside and sat on the edge of my bed before I’d turned on the light.
“Talk.”