Chapter 16
CHAPTER 16
SAWYER
“ I think this is the last of it.” I slid the box into a hole between a bookcase and a chest of drawers in the back of my truck.
Willa stepped on the tire and pushed herself up so she could lean in to attach one of the bungee straps. “Aren’t you glad I’m not one of those women with eleven-thousand pairs of shoes?”
I took the other end and stretched it across the load, securing it to the next hook. “I’m grateful you’re exactly who you are, every single day.”
“I want to gag a little because you two are so cute, but I’m too pleased you’re happy to give into it.” The side-eye Bree shot me made me question how pleased she really was.
Through the whole process of packing Willa’s stuff and hauling it up to Sutter House, she’d been giving me looks that suggested she didn’t completely trust me. But she hadn’t said a word and hadn’t pushed. Maybe this was carryover from her fallout with Ford years ago. Or maybe she was reserving judgment. That was fair enough. She was one of Willa’s best friends, and she had to be feeling some shit over the fact that she hadn’t known about us.
Willa leapt down, brushing her hands off on her shorts. “Well, I guess this is it.”
“Good thing, too. They’ve issued a hurricane watch for that storm off the coast. Either way, we’ll be getting a shit-ton of rain in a few days.” Once we got all her stuff stowed away, we’d be working on prepping the house to deal with that.
Bree’s hard shell cracked, and she pulled Willa in for a huge hug. “I’m gonna miss you like crazy.”
“It’s not like you’re not going to see me on the regular. I’ll be coming by the brewery all the time.”
“Yeah, but it won’t be the same as coming home to have you here.” She wiped at something that might have been a tear. “I’m even going to miss that big lug of a dog. Maybe I’ll think about getting my own.”
“You should totally do that. There’s a mutt at the shelter who would be perfect for you. I’m pretty sure he’s part Aussie Shepherd. Smart as a whip. He’s very trainable and super chill inside.”
Bree laughed and let her go. “I’ll think about it. Do you need help unloading on the other side?”
“No, we’ve got it. Honestly, the fact that we’ve gotten everything in two loads really highlights how little stuff I have.”
Because she cared more about experiences than possessions. It was just one of the things I’d always admired about her. “You ready to get rolling?”
“The sooner we go, the sooner we’re done.”
“And the sooner you two can get back to the boning you’d rather be doing,” Bree added.
“Bree!” Willa’s face had turned the color of a grape tomato.
“What? You’re newlyweds. It’s expected.”
Good thing there was a truck between me and the two women to hide my dick’s reaction to that. “Right. Let’s go, Wren.”
With one last hug, Willa climbed into her Jeep, and we started our caravan out to Sutter House. I spent the whole time mentally reciting naval regulations to kill the semi-permanent woody I’d had basically since the moment I said, ‘I do.’ It didn’t work.
What did was the sight of the unfamiliar vehicle waiting in the drive when we got home.
Who the hell was this?
The guy leaning against the bumper of the gray sedan straightened as we slid out of our respective vehicles. “Willa Sutter?”
She frowned. “Yes?”
The guy moved toward her, and I hustled to intercept. Roy was corralled in the house to maximize hauling space, so I was on full guard-dog duty.
“I have a delivery for you.”
Her frown deepened. “What kind of delivery?”
I made it to her side just as he offered her a large manilla envelope. I had a real bad feeling about that envelope, but Willa took it.
“You’ve been served.”
“Son of a bitch.” They’d tracked her down here? At home?
The guy’s eyes widened, and he lifted his hands, backing away. “Just doing my job, man. Sorry about whatever this is.”
I scowled after him until he’d made it back into his car and drove off. She already had the contents pulled out by the time I turned. Over her shoulder, I read the top of the document. Petition for the Adjudication of Incompetence.
The papers shook in her hand, but her voice was steady. “Well, we knew it was coming. I guess now we call Mr. O’Shea.”
I held her hand as she did that right from the middle of the driveway.
“It’s here. No, I haven’t read it yet. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay, we’ll see you then. Thanks, Mr. O’Shea.” She hung up. “He’s going to come out at the end of the day, as soon as he’s done with appointments, so we can talk about all this.”
I stroked a thumb along the skittering pulse in her wrist. “Are you okay?”
She huffed a humorless laugh. “No, not really.”
I couldn’t fathom what she was going through right now. What she must be feeling. What she might be remembering. Because I couldn’t do anything else, I wrapped her tight in my arms. “I won’t let them get to you.”
On a sigh, she burrowed in. “I know. It’s just dragging up a lot of shit.”
“Do you want to talk about it?” As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I wished I could take them back. “You don’t have to. You don’t owe me an explanation.” My curiosity about what she’d been through had more to do with exactly how many lifetimes in hell her parents had earned.
For a long moment, she stayed quiet. “I don’t know specifically what they’re claiming, but I suppose you should know at least the basics of what they have to work from. Let’s get Roy and go for a walk. I need to move. The stuff can wait to be unloaded.”
The moment the door opened, Roy bounded out, dancing around her, his whip of a pittie tail wagging a hundred miles per hour. He sniffed her from all sides, then engaged velcro mode, sticking right at her hip as she headed for the stairs that led down to the beach. There were no signs of the horses today. Maybe for the best. I didn’t know how they’d react to the dog.
We strode partway down the empty beach until Willa dropped down on a rise of sand overlooking the water. Roy stretched out along her left leg. I sat on her right and waited.
“They committed me in the first place on the grounds that I was suicidal.”
“What the fuck? You were never suicidal.” I paused, realizing I didn’t know for certain. “Were you? I didn’t think things were that bad.” I cursed myself. What did I know about the details of her pain? Maybe it had been that bad.
But Willa only shook her head. “No, but that was the only way they could make sense of me being in the water that night. And since I couldn’t remember—still can’t remember—how I got there, I didn’t have any way to argue. That in and of itself might have been okay. In truth, it should have been maybe a 72-hour hold for evaluation. But what should have been 72 hours turned into nearly two years.”
Rage tore through me, every bit as vicious as the storm whose teeth I’d snatched her from. But she didn’t need that from me, so I fought it back until I could keep my tone level. “How?”
“I don’t know exactly. It started out as treatment for the trauma I’d been through. I had serious holes in my memory, and they were working with me, trying to fill in the gaps. They tried all sorts of things. Hypnosis. EMDR. Virtual reality. Drug therapies.”
“They gave you drugs for traumatic amnesia? Is that even a thing?”
“There actually are some used for victims of traumatic brain injuries. Which, technically, I had because of the cerebral hypoxia. We don’t know how long I was without oxygen before you revived me.”
A lifetime. That’s what it had felt like as I’d fought first the sea to get her back and then the fates to give her breath. I had my own lingering trauma around that night. But this wasn’t about me.
“Nothing seemed to work, and my parents pushed them to keep trying other things. The treatments got more experimental. When I said I wanted to go home, I was told that it was all for my own good. Really, I think my parents just wanted them to fix me. I’d never been what they wanted me to be, and I was so much worse after drowning.”
This had all happened because I hadn’t gotten to her fast enough. Because I’d helped her sneak out at all.
Willa’s hand closed over my clenched fist. “No. This is not on you. I know you’ve blamed yourself all these years, but I’m not going to keep telling you if you’re going to take this on yourself. This is not your fault. If you hadn’t helped me sneak out that night, I would have found another way.”
I choked down the self-recrimination and loathing. “I’m okay.” I wasn’t. Not even close. But she’d had to live through this nightmare. I could survive hearing about it. “Keep going.”
“My behavior was considered erratic, prospectively dangerous to myself and others. And I suppose it did look like that from the outside. My anxiety was through the roof. I was in this totally unfamiliar place, with unfamiliar people. I kept having PTSD flashbacks. I had a few escape attempts, attacked a few orderlies in the process. That was when they started keeping me drugged for compliance all the time.”
I’d already imagined seventeen ways to disable and torture Willa’s dad before she continued.
“Eventually, I figured out how to hide my meds under my tongue until I could dispose of them in the toilet. I knew how they expected me to behave, and I mimicked that, analyzing the staff, trying to figure out who was on my side. I managed to convince a nurse who was a new hire to mail a letter to my brother. Jace didn’t know any of this was happening. My parents had told him I’d been sent to boarding school. He came to get me immediately, and as he was over eighteen and family, they couldn’t stop him from checking me out and spiriting me away before anyone was the wiser. I owe him my life for that. I don’t know how much longer I could have lasted in there.”
She might as well have stabbed me directly in the heart. The fuckers had kept her caged and drugged for two years . They’d put her through hell for two years . I wrapped my arm tighter around her, pulling her close. “I’m so sorry they put you through all that, Wren. If I’d known?—”
“If you’d known, there wouldn’t have been anything you could’ve done.”
“We’d have found a way to jailbreak you. Somehow.”
One corner of her mouth lifted. “I don’t doubt y’all would have tried.” The faint smile faded. “Did you know I had no idea Gwen was even missing until Jace got me out?”
“Seriously?”
“I went from the beach where you pulled me out to a hospital on the mainland. And from there to the facility where they kept me for two years. I never came back to the island, and I wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone from home.”
“So the police never questioned you about that night?” In the days and weeks after her disappearance, I thought they’d questioned practically everyone on the island. Certainly everybody who’d been at that party.
“I don’t know if they even tried to get to me. It was well documented that my memory was shot, so I wouldn’t have been able to give them anything either way.”
“It must have been devastating to find out about her like that. To have to deal with it as if it just happened. Because for you it did.” Gwen had been one of her closest friends. She and Gwen and Gabi had very much been the Three Musketeers.
“It haunts me that I can’t remember. What if I saw something that could’ve helped with the investigation?” I could see the depths of guilt in her eyes. God knew I understood it.
“You can’t give in to that kind of guilt. It’ll eat you alive.”
She glanced up at me and arched a brow. “Spoken from the voice of experience?”
“Yeah.”
With a sigh, she tipped her head to my shoulder. “I did try to push myself when I came back. To try to remember. It didn’t go well.”
There was a wealth of pain and trauma in those few words. What additional suffering had she put herself through in the name of trying to find out what had happened to a friend?
We’d never talked about any of this before. There’d always been a huge invisible Keep Out sign. I didn’t want to traumatize her any further, but since she was opening up a little, I had a few questions.
“What’s the last thing you remember from that night?”
“Playing in the surf with the dog. Then it’s a big blank until I woke up to you.”
“What about the storm rolling in? The party breaking up?”
Willa shook her head. “Nothing.”
I thought back, considering. “That was at least half an hour before I went to look for you.” What the hell had happened to her in that span?
“I broke your rule.”
“What?”
“You told me not to leave the beach without one of y’all.”
“You remember that?”
“Everything before is very clear. From you helping me sneak out, to all the ground rules you laid out.” She straightened to meet my gaze. “I wouldn’t have broken them without a good reason. I wouldn’t have gone into the water without a good reason. I just… don’t know what that was.”
I stroked the hair back from her face. “I believe you.”
The list of what teenaged Willa would have considered good reasons was remarkably short. I could only think of two. To help an animal in trouble. Or to help a friend. What if she’d gone into the water after Gwen? What if I’d managed to save Willa and let Gwen die? The thought of it made me physically ill.
Willa reached up to cup my cheek. “I’ve thought of it, too. It was a fucking miracle you managed to save me. If she was out there, there was absolutely no way you could have gotten to us both. And there’s no evidence she was there. It’s all pure conjecture because I can’t remember, and this is the kind of shit my brain throws out to torture me. So don’t you dare take that on, too. You saved my life. Period. You’re still saving it.”
I hoped that was true. And I hoped for her sake that someday she got answers that would vanquish the thought monsters.
With a twitch of her shoulders, she let her hand fall back to her lap. “Anyway, I don’t know how much of this they’ll get into with the petition. This is all my perception of what I went through, and no doubt they’ll have documented my unstable memory. There’s no one to corroborate. It’ll be my word against the professional opinions of the doctors there. They’ll have case notes. The fact that I left against medical advice. I’m not entirely sure how we combat that.”
“They won’t have anything current. They won’t have the truth. We will.” I cupped her cheek. Her eyes were full of remembered pain and fear and a whole host of emotions I couldn’t read. “No one is going to get to you. No one is ever going to make you go back to that place or anywhere like it. You will never have to face those people ever again.”
I’d do anything to make sure of it.