Chapter 6 #2
“I’ve been a little worried about Tova the last couple of days. She hasn’t been quite herself. Nothing I can pin down exactly, she’s just been a bit off. Quieter than usual.”
The dog looked fine to me. She looked the way she’d looked every other time I’d seen her: a dog entirely at peace with the world and in no hurry to do anything about it.
“Would you mind keeping an eye on her this afternoon and the next few days? Take her with you while you’re working. Just so I know someone’s watching her.”
“You want me to take the dog.”
“She’s easy. She won’t be in your way. Definitely won’t run off.”
I looked at Tova. Tova looked at me. Her tail thumped twice.
I shrugged. What the hell. “Sure.”
“Thank you.” Lark opened the kennel and clipped a lead to Tova’s collar. She handed it to me, her fingers brushing mine during the transfer. “She likes to lie in the sun. Don’t let her eat anything weird. She has a history.”
“What kind of history?”
“A sock. An entire corncob. Part of a tennis ball. She’s not picky about her snacks—” Her phone rang.
She pulled it from her back pocket, glanced at the screen, and something moved across her face that she smoothed away in under a second.
“I have to take this. It’s— Yeah, thanks for helping with Tova. ”
She was already walking away. Out of the barn, across the lot, her voice fading as she went.
I stood in the barn holding a leash attached to a dog I hadn’t asked for.
“All right,” I said to her. “Come on.”
I went back to the fence line. Tova followed. I let her off the lead once we were in the pasture, and she didn’t go anywhere. She found a patch of sun near the post I was setting and lowered herself into the grass with a long exhale, her chin on her paws.
I dug. She watched. I didn’t talk to her, and I didn’t know what I would have said if I’d tried. I’d never had a dog, never wanted one. They were fine from a distance, but they wanted something from you, attention or affection or some form of emotional exchange that I didn’t have the bandwidth for.
Tova didn’t seem to want anything. She just lay there, breathing, occasionally lifting her head when a bird crossed overhead or one of the horses moved in the far paddock.
I set the post. Tamped the concrete. Moved to the next hole.
Tova got up, relocated to a new patch of sun three feet from where I was working, and settled back down with the same long exhale.
We did this for two hours. A man and a dog who didn’t know each other, sharing the same ground without a reason to.
Gunfire. Dirt I could taste at the back of my throat. The light was wrong: too bright, too flat, the kind that burned shadows off the ground and turned everything white. A vehicle that wasn’t there anymore. Hands pulling at metal that used to be a door.
Someone screaming and then not screaming, and the silence after was worse than the sound.
Then a rooftop. Or a road. Or both at once, the way they always blurred when the dream had been running long enough.
Reid’s voice cutting through the noise, close and steady, saying my name or saying something else…
I couldn’t hold on to it long enough to know which.
He was right there. Right beside me the way he’d been for ten years, and I was reaching for him when—
I opened my eyes.
The ceiling of the cabin. Dark. My shirt was soaked through, and my heart was hammering at a rate that had nothing to do with where I actually was.
The sheets were twisted around my legs, and my jaw ached from clenching.
The gunfire was still ringing somewhere behind my ears, fading out slow, the way it always did, like a station losing its signal.
I lay there and waited for my body to come down. It took a while. It always took a while.
Reid had been there. I couldn’t pin the dream to one memory; it had been the convoy and the rooftop and the firefight that lasted an entire afternoon, all of them running together the way they did when my brain decided to play the whole catalog at once.
But Reid had been in it. His voice was the last thing I’d heard before the ceiling replaced whatever sky I’d been under.
He’d been alive and real and close enough to reach, and now I was in a cabin in Montana and he was eight months dead and there was nothing in the room except the dark and the sound of my own breathing.
The nightmares weren’t the same every night.
Some nights, it was just the convoy. Other nights, a building in Helmand or a firefight that ran all afternoon with no end or a face I couldn’t save that shifted, depending on which deployment my brain decided to pull from.
A decade of combat on shuffle, every night a different cut from the same reel.
Reid was in all of them. He’d been there for every deployment, every firefight, every door we’d kicked in. He was woven through everything because he’d been standing next to me for ten years.
Fighting the battles had been easier than remembering them.
When the fight was real and in front of me, my body knew what to do and my mind stayed in the present because leaving the present would get me killed.
But the battles were over. I’d survived them, and now the only thing left was to lie in the dark at three in the morning and let them replay while I fought nothing at all.
I got up. Changed to a dry shirt. Pulled on pants and boots. Went outside.
The property was still. The barn was a dark shape against a sky full of stars. Lark’s farmhouse a short distance away showed only the porch light she’d left on. The mountains were black outlines pressed against the horizon.
I walked. The paddocks first, along the fence I’d been working on. The posts I’d set that afternoon were solid, the concrete cured. The horses were standing at the far end of their pasture, shapes barely visible in the dark. One of them huffed as I passed.
I thought about getting Tova out of her kennel but decided to let her sleep. Surely Lark’s request to keep an eye on her didn’t mean waking her up and dragging her into my mental hell.
I kept moving, going nowhere in particular.
I eventually ended up at the east side of the property, past the equipment shed, down toward the back edge where the land sloped to the tree line and the access road ran along the boundary.
A dirt road, barely maintained, that connected to a county route half a mile out.
Lark had mentioned it once and said nobody used it.
I stopped.
Tire tracks. Fresh ones, cut into the soft dirt at the edge of the access road. Two sets running parallel, deep enough that whoever made them had been driving heavy or fast. They came in from the county road side and stopped about thirty yards onto the property before turning around.
I crouched and looked. The edges were clean, the tread marks sharp. A day or two old at most.
I stood and looked toward the south fence. The gate down there was visible in the starlight, a metal tube gate on a chain. I’d latched it two days ago when I’d walked this section.
The chain was loose. The gate was closed but unlatched.
My brain started running. Scenarios, angles, the automatic architecture of threat assessment that built itself whether I wanted it to or not.
I deliberately stopped myself before I spiraled further.
Less than an hour ago, I’d mentally been in a convoy in Afghanistan, pulling a dead man out of burning metal.
My heart rate had barely settled. This was what my brain did at three in the morning: it scanned for threats because threats gave it a job, and a job was better than lying in the dark replaying things I couldn’t change.
Hypervigilance wasn’t instinct. It was a symptom, and I knew it.
PTSD. I didn’t like to say it. I didn’t even like to think about it. But it still hung over me like a cloud. No one specific event. Just one loss after another over the course of a career in the military.
So, tire tracks on a rural property? A gate I probably hadn’t latched as well as I’d thought? My brain interpreted both those as an imminent threat.
But the truth was, there was nothing here except a man who couldn’t sleep, looking for something to be wrong because wrong was the only frequency his brain could find in the dark.
I turned and walked back toward the cabin. It was a long walk across open ground, the stars unchanged above me, the property silent around me. I let myself in, sat on the edge of the bed, and didn’t lie back down.
Sleep wasn’t coming. It never did.