Chapter 13
A fter Sam finally conked out, Celeste reached for her journal with some urgency. She could hear him snoring softly on the couch, but she darted him a glance in case, reassuring herself he was fully asleep. She could have taken the journal to her room, but she didn’t want to. The bedroom was for sleep; the living room was for writing. By keeping the two spaces separate, she allowed herself to reserve the bedroom for rest and sleep, two things she desperately needed after unburdening so much of her emotional baggage.
She picked up her pen and, as ever, the words began to flow, hateful, desolate words filled with bitter remembrance from her unhappy, chaotic childhood. In her haste to unscramble what flew out of her, she tried hard to think of one happy snow-filled memory, just one to add to the growing horror. Instead she could only remember the time she’d been locked out after arriving too far past curfew. Those caregivers had been strict and harsh, believing the children in their care had been too long without proper boundaries. Celeste had gotten caught up at a construction site, fascinated by all the concrete tunnels and towers she’d been able to commandeer. When she arrived home and found the door locked, she prepared herself for a long night of no supper. I’ve been hungry before, she reminded herself. But as the temperature dropped rapidly and the wind picked up, she realized she was about to face something new: hunger in the snow.
It began to fall fast and hard and Celeste banged on the door, certain they would let her inside when they realized how cold it was, how much it was snowing. No one came, however. The door remained steadfast, a reminder of her punishment.
I’m going to die, she thought, her too-thin body wracked with shivers.
No I’m not, she argued, stumbling through the yard to find whatever she could assemble as a shelter. The family doghouse was empty, and celeste was small enough to fit. She dragged a piece of cardboard inside with her, using it to block the wind from the entrance. While not exactly warm, it provided some small measure of protection from the wind and snow. Celeste wasn’t comfortable, but she probably wouldn’t die. That night a new realization began to take place inside her. She couldn’t count on the grownups anymore. Until that moment she’d harbored a small amount of hope that someday someone would come along and save her. But no one was coming. She would have to care for herself and, inspecting her makeshift shelter, she could. And she would. I’m going to take care of me, she vowed. No matter how, no matter what.
With the vow came a small measure of security. From now on she would be okay because she would make certain she would be okay. But there was a strange loss of something she couldn’t pin down, a little piece of her heart that closed up and sealed itself away.
Celeste paused and stared into space, pen held aloft, trying to find the proper word to identify what she couldn’t back then. What had she lost that night, when she gained her independence? Hope. She had tucked it away, replaced it with cynicism. Was it gone completely or, like her child self that night, was it simply weathering the storm, hoping for morning and a rescue?
There was an anemic little flutter in her chest, and she wondered if it was that long ago hope, locked away and trying to break free. But to what end? What if she found her hope again? What would she do with it? Could she safely bring it here, to this strange town and this sterile house where each day felt like fresh failure? What would she tell it? I survived my horrific childhood and had a great career. What would it say? Great, and now what?
Once again her life came full circle because she had no answer for any hope that might still be living in her. Her career had filled a fifteen year span of time, had spackled over a lot of fear and insecurity from her youth. Thanks to the government’s recognition that killing people for a living should be properly compensated, she had no financial worries any longer. As long as she lived reasonably and within her means, she never needed to work again. But did she want to? She was thirty three years old. Reasonably she might live another fifty years, unless her past caught up with her and someone decided to take a life for a life. For a moment she almost hoped that would happen because otherwise those five decades stretched before her like a gaping chasm. What could she possibly do to fill fifty years of time?
One thing she knew for certain, she couldn’t allow them to be worse than the first thirty. A dream presented itself before her, a functioning orchard with her at the helm, greeting customers and children who came to pick apples, retiring each night to sleep in this house, transformed to a cozy habitat instead of its current sterile wasteland.
She blinked once and the gossamer vision dissolved. Ridiculous. She’d never even had a houseplant. How did she purpose to revitalize a hundred year old—probably dead—orchard? How could she hope to grow apples when she couldn’t manage more than the most basic life functions?
Suddenly she reached her limit of thinking and feeling for the day. As ever after she journaled, the energy drained out of her, leaving her depleted. She closed the book, shoved it back onto the shelf, stumbled up the stairs, and fell into a dead sleep.
T he noise was slight but it was enough to wake Sam. He watched Celeste shove a notebook onto the shelf, turn off the light, and walk upstairs. Her gait looked odd, like someone who’d emerged from a coma and was having trouble using her legs again. He squinted, almost calling out in concern before thinking better of it. One thing he’d learned about Celeste, the only thing, was that she was private. His attempts to peer into her psyche and learn more about her—anything about her—had been a complete failure.
To say she was unexpected would be an understatement. When The Colonel told him he’d be going to Montana, he hadn’t cared enough to pay attention. He was fleeing for his life, after all, with only the shirt on his back. If not for American Military Intelligence, he would be dead by now, probably several times over. They’d intervened on his behalf multiple times over the years, taking care of situations and arranging them so the outcome landed in his favor, albeit quietly. There had been a lot of coincidences in his world, thankfully not enough that anyone on the wrong side noticed. But if he had stayed, they probably would have. Sam had already survived too long in a world with a predictably short lifespan. Eventually someone would have started to talk and wonder why Din Chatti seemed to be made of Teflon, never in trouble, never in danger, always escaping harm at the last possible moment and in the most amazing way.
As ever, Sam felt a mixture of gratitude and resentment. Grateful that he’d been kept alive, resentful that he had to rely on the man who held his former love. The Colonel might be the main man in charge, but without a doubt it was Cameron Ridge who’d kept a particular eye on Sam the past few years, sending teams to pull him out of various scrapes. His only comfort was that Ridge likely resented it as much as Sam did. Not that Ridge wanted to see him dead. Or maybe he did, who knew? Sam didn’t want Ridge dead. He just wanted him to never have existed to begin with, to magically erase him from the earth and Maggie’s heart forever.
Unable to sleep now, his thoughts strayed toward Celeste. And such was his psychic misery over his own sad life that he was happier to think about hers. To say she was unexpected would be an understatement. After he safely arrived in Canada and made contact with the team, he found out he’d be staying with a woman, a former contractor for The Colonel. Sam had pictured someone old and stodgy, a weathered matron whose voice was as hardscrabble as her face. Instead he found Celeste. His first view of her hadn’t left an impression, half delirious as he was with pain and blood loss. But then as he sat against the wall of the kitchen and tried to ignore the searing pain in his shoulder, he listened to her descend the stairs and braced himself, certain she would put him on blast for bumbling into her house in the middle of the night.
Instead she had eased into the room looking small and vulnerable, a skittish bunny with big eyes and small features. There is no way this woman worked for The Colonel, he thought. Perhaps she was some far-flung family member and he’d been mistaken. His interactions with her since had done nothing to clear up the confusion. He stared at her whenever she wasn’t looking, trying to solve the mystery. The more he looked, the more he liked what he saw. There was something so…soft about her when she wasn’t aware she was being watched. She examined each thing she found as if she’d never noticed it before, as with the pie. Certainly she’d had pie. He’d lived in Saudi Arabia for most of his adult life, and even he’d had pie.
He began to think maybe The Colonel had stashed her here to keep her safe for some reason. If the way she recoiled from any physical contact was any indication, perhaps she’d been hurt. If so, that person should be killed in some heinous fashion. How could anyone wound someone as small and helpless as Celeste? It was unfathomable.
I want her to trust me, he thought and then immediately banished it. There was no reason anyone should trust him ever again. In fact there was every reason in the world not to trust him after the things he’d done, the lies he told. He’d faked his own death to get out of his wedding, after all, eviscerating the person in the world he loved most, the person who thought he was trustworthy enough to pledge her life to. He only wanted to bestow friendship and kindness on Celeste, and yet even that was beyond his reach. He had nothing to give anyone, least of all someone as pure and deserving as Celeste, who seemed to be doing her best to care for him despite recovering from whatever she’d been sent here to recover from. He had no idea what it was, but he knew it was something. He of all people recognized the signs of trauma and Celeste had it in spades. It made him angry on her behalf, whatever it was.
His eyes strayed to the bookshelf and the notebook she’d put back. It was obviously her journal. His fingers itched to reach for it, but he couldn’t, wouldn’t. It would be a terrible invasion of privacy. He knew that, and yet he longed to solve the mystery that must lie within. Who was Celeste? Why was she here? How had someone so delicate, so vulnerable and innocent wound up alone in the wilderness of Montana?
Sleep stole over him again. He closed his eyes and vowed to solve the mystery another day. Soon, sometime soon he would figure her out.