Chapter 3 #2
For a second, I didn’t know where I was. The canvas walls, the tent pole, the heat—gone. In their place: a hotel ceiling, faint city light leaking in around the blackout curtains, the low hum of the air conditioner.
My skin was damp. My T-shirt was twisted around my torso. My thighs pressed together on instinct, chasing the ghost of sensation that wasn’t there anymore.
“Goddammit,” I whispered.
I flung an arm over my eyes and lay there, dragging in air. The dream clung to me, sticky and unwelcome. My body was still throbbing, angry at being dragged out of that last, blinding moment. My heart was … worse.
It had been years.
Years.
And still, my subconscious thought it was a great idea to throw him at me like that. To remind me, in excruciating detail, of exactly how good it had been. Of how easily I’d let him in. Of how completely he’d gutted me when he’d chosen secrecy over his promise.
I wanted to scream.
Instead, I sat up, shoving my hair out of my face. The room tilted faintly—jet lag doing its thing. I reached for the bottle of water on the nightstand and took a long drink, the coolness sliding down my throat and doing absolutely nothing for the fire under my skin.
My phone lit up when I shifted it.
4:58 a.m.
Charleston was still dark, but it wouldn’t be for long. The city would wake up slowly.
And for once, the time on my phone matched the time on my parents’ bedside clock.
I hesitated, thumb hovering over my contact list.
They’d be up soon, anyway. My dad was always an early riser, and my mom had never been able to sleep past five once she hit fifty. Small-town life in northern Ontario didn’t exactly demand pre-dawn wake-ups, but old habits died hard.
I pressed the call button before I could talk myself out of it.
The line rang twice.
“Hello?” my mother answered, voice soft and a little raspy with sleep.
Guilt flickered. “Hey, Mom. It’s me.”
“Amelia.” The way she said my name—warm and relieved and just this side of anxious—always got me. “Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” I lied automatically, then softened it. “I just … couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d call. It’s not the middle of the night for you, for once.”
She huffed a small laugh. “No, it’s not. Your father will be thrilled. He hates when the phone rings at 3 a.m. and it’s you calling from some mountain with tanks rolling by.”
“Tanks don’t roll by every time,” I protested.
“No,” she said dryly. “Sometimes it’s gunfire.”
I smiled in the dark. “Those are usually farther away than they sound.”
“Mm-hmm.”
There was shuffling, then my dad’s voice in the background. “Is that Amelia? Put her on speaker, Jo.”
A click, then his deeper rumble came through clearer. “Hey, kiddo.”
“Hey, Dad.”
“How’s the war zone?” he asked.
I snorted. “This one has canapés.”
My mother made an interested sound. “Oh? Fancy war zone, then.”
“I’m in Charleston,” I reminded them. “Remember? South Carolina. Stateside. No helmets required.”
“Yet,” my father muttered.
“Dad.”
“What?” he said. “You have a talent for finding trouble. I’m just respecting your gifts.”
I rolled my eyes even as my chest warmed. “So far, the only thing trying to kill me is the humidity.”
“How was your event?” Mom asked. “You said there was a gala?”
I leaned back against the headboard, tucking my knees up. “Hot. Crowded. Too many people with too much money. The mayor was there. Her fiancé. A lot of men who looked like they’d rather be holding rifles than champagne flutes.”
“Your type, in other words,” Dad said.
Heat flashed across my face, the remnants of the dream roaring back to life. “They’re not my type.”
My mother hmmed. “They used to be.”
“Yeah, well.” I twisted the edge of the sheet around my finger. “I learned.”
Dad was quiet for a beat, then asked, “This story you’re chasing … it’s safe, right?”
Safe.
I thought of Dominion Hall.
Of missing records and scrubbed searches.
Of the way the air in that ballroom had felt like it was holding its breath.
“It’s stateside,” I hedged. “That’s safer than usual.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I stared at the shadowed window. “I’ll be careful.”
“You always say that,” Mom said quietly.
“And I’m still here, aren’t I?”
Silence. Then a long exhale.
“You are,” she agreed. “And we are very, very proud of you.”
Something in my chest eased. These were the people who’d raised me in a town where everyone knew everyone else.
Where Friday nights meant hockey games and cheap hot chocolate, and Saturdays meant shoveling snow off the porch.
Where I’d been the girl who checked too many books out of the library and clipped newspaper articles about wars happening half a world away.
“Sometimes I miss it,” I admitted. “Home, I mean.”
“Come back for a visit,” Dad said. “We’ll take you to the diner. Jean still makes the best pancakes in Ontario.”
I smiled. “I will. Once this story’s done.”
“When will that be?” Mom asked.
“If I’m lucky?” I blew out a breath. “Soon. If I’m not … I don’t know.”
They knew better than to push. I didn’t tell them much about the details of my work. Not because I didn’t trust them, but because I didn’t need them lying awake at night picturing me in Kevlar every time they saw my byline.
“We just like knowing we’re in the same time zone as you,” Mom said. “You feel closer.”
“I feel closer,” I admitted.
Closer to them.
Closer to … something else, too. The version of myself who’d left that town with a suitcase and a scholarship to Columbia, heart pounding with possibility. The girl who’d believed in bylines and truth and the idea that if you showed the world what was really happening, it would change.
That girl hadn’t known what it felt like to stand in a tent with his hands on her skin.
She hadn’t known what it felt like to be betrayed by him, either.
“Are you eating?” Mom asked.
“Yes.”
“Sleeping?”
“Working on it.”
“Meeting any nice people?” she tried.
A laugh escaped me. “Define nice.”
“No guns,” Dad said.
I thought of Charleston’s suited soldiers, their quiet, lethal confidence.
“Working on that, too,” I said dryly.
We talked for a few more minutes—harmless things. The neighbor’s new dog. The early thaw back home. A book my mother was reading. My father’s ongoing war with the snowblower.
Normal things from a normal life I’d stepped sideways out of years ago.
“You should try to sleep,” Mom said eventually. “You sound tired.”
“That’s because I am.”
“Dream something nice,” she said. “Not tanks.”
I swallowed. “I’ll do my best.”
“We love you,” Dad said.
“I love you, too.”
We hung up, and the room was quiet again.
I tossed the phone onto the bed and slid off the mattress, padding over to the window. I pulled the curtain back just enough to see the street below.
Charleston was starting to stir. A delivery truck idled at the curb. A man in running shorts jogged past, earbuds in. The sky was just starting to lighten at the edges, hints of pink creeping over the rooftops.
I pressed my forehead lightly to the glass.
I’d built a life out of asking questions no one wanted to answer.
I’d flown across oceans for less than the digital silence that surrounded this place and these men.
And now I was here, half wild with jet lag, haunted by a man who’d once held my body like a promise and then walked away like I was expendable.
It must have been the military men at the gala who’d reminded me of him.
I was so mad I could scream.
Not just at him. At myself. At my traitorous body. At the fact that even now, anger and desire tangled inside me like barbed wire and silk.
“No more of that,” I told my reflection faintly visible in the glass.
I was here for the story.
For the truth.
For the people who still believed it mattered—and for the girl from that small Canadian town who’d once clipped headlines and dreamed of making the world a little less full of lies.