Chapter 32
CHAPTER 32
SAWYER
“ A re you sure you don’t mind me leaving you on your own tonight?”
I skimmed my hands down Willa’s arms, stopping to clasp both her hands. “I’ll be absolutely fine. You go and have fun. And if Bree gets a little too free with the bartender pour, call me. I’ll come get you.”
My wife rose to her toes and gave me a lingering kiss that stirred a whole host of other ideas for the evening. But I knew she needed time with her friends. It was more of the normal she so desperately wanted. So I kept my suggestions to myself as she stepped back.
“Love you.”
That would never get old. “I love you, too. Drive safe.”
She hefted the canvas bag of snacks. “C’mon, Roy.”
The big dog happily followed her out the kitchen door.
Then I was alone in the big house that suddenly felt far too empty. I hadn’t been here on my own before. Since I’d come back to Hatterwick, Willa and I had been joined at the hip. I was gradually getting accustomed to the idea that this was my home now, but being here without her felt strange.
It had been two weeks since her panic attack. She’d wanted to get back to normal, and I’d done everything I could to foster that. There’d been no more attacks, no nightmares, no headaches. If I hadn’t been there, hadn’t seen, I wouldn’t have known she’d been struggling. She’d gotten back to her grant writing and even begun attending committee meetings for the upcoming Founders’ Day celebration. Her capacity for compartmentalizing was impressive, though I wondered if it was really healthy.
There’d been no further word on who our dead guy was. If the investigation had turned up anything, Carson wasn’t sharing. I had to acknowledge that we might never get answers about who it was or what had happened. That uncertainty stuck in my craw and made me restless. If I was honest, that wasn’t the only reason. What Jace had said about Willa’s reactions not looking like normal trauma had been circling my brain since he’d left. He hadn’t spelled out what he meant, and we hadn’t had time to discuss it before he’d been forced to return to duty, but that hadn’t stopped my own speculation. It didn’t take me anywhere good.
Prowling into the kitchen, I grabbed a root beer from the fridge and carried it out to the back deck. What the hell was I going to do with myself tonight? I’d updated my resume already and sent out a handful. The storm damage around the house had been repaired. I’d even picked up a handful of other repair jobs around town from folks who’d had damage and didn’t need or want to wait on the bigger contractors. A few more were lined up over the next couple of weeks. I didn’t mind construction work. Seeing visible results of my labor was satisfying, and I enjoyed working with my hands, feeling useful. It was a good distraction from everything else.
I missed my brothers. It was odd being back on Hatterwick without them. Having Willa in my life as my wife, my partner, my focus, was great. But it wasn’t the same.
I considered texting Hoyt to see if he wanted to do something, but if he wasn’t on duty at the fire station, he’d no doubt be home with his family. I didn’t want to take him away from his pregnant wife.
Maybe Daniel was off duty. Although, if he was, he was probably up on Nag’s Head instead if here. That wasn’t exactly a hop, skip, and a jump.
Which left me exactly… nowhere.
When my phone rang, I pounced on it. Dax.
“Hey, man.”
“I call with good news. Everything has been effectively planted, and there is no reason that anyone would think that you and your lady love have not been actively seeing each other for the last three years. Feel free to start pulling info for the courts.”
The courts. Right. Because the lawsuit was still open. Because of the hurricane, Willa and I had gotten extra time to gather all the documentation. Crazy that I’d forgotten for even a moment. But in the grand scheme of things, after finding human remains on the property, everything else had felt relatively quiet.
“That is good news. Thanks, man. And not that I think you have any moral qualms about doing this, but it seems worth mentioning that even though it didn’t start how you laid everything in, it is real. For both of us.”
“Man, that’s awesome!” When I didn’t immediately reply, he added, “Why doesn’t it sound like it’s awesome?”
Dax had a quick and admittedly suspicious mind. And I knew he’d operated in some of the same circles Jace did now, so I took the opportunity and filled him in on everything that had happened since we’d last spoken.
“I just can’t shake what Jace said.”
“Well, of course not. The implication is that either she saw something that was so traumatic that her brain and body are noping out anytime she gets remotely close to remembering what it was, or someone took what was already a horrible experience and exacerbated it so she couldn’t remember.”
Hearing it laid out so succinctly made some of the itch in my brain go away. “Yeah. Yeah, that’s it exactly. And my worry is that, in either of those scenarios, there’s another actor out there who was involved that night. Either doing something to her directly, or potentially doing something to this guy who got shot—which maybe Willa saw happen.”
“Have the remains been dated to the same time period?”
“No idea. I think forensics is still doing their thing. And either way, we’re not law enforcement, so there’s no reason the police chief would update us. But I worry that if she did see something that someone wanted to keep secret, what if that someone is still out there and sees her as a threat?”
“Fair concern. But let’s think this through. Willa’s been out on her own all these years. If somebody meant her actual harm, wouldn’t they have already come back to do that?”
Ten years where she was on her own, with no one to protect her. Jesus. And yet, she’d been fine all that time. “In theory. But there’s never been any suggestion she was going to remember before.”
“Is there a suggestion that she might now?”
“Not really. But ever since we found this body, she’s been having pretty extreme reactions to things. That’s what made us start thinking about all of this in the first place. It’s just got me paranoid about everybody we pass on the island, wondering if they had something to do with what happened to her. Do they have secrets they’d hurt or kill to keep? I can’t shake the idea that something bigger is going on here. Jace is planning to look into the doctor and the hospital to see what he can find out. At the very least, it sounds like there’s a malpractice suit waiting to happen, but I haven’t heard anything from him. Given his deployment status, there’s no telling when that might happen.”
“You want me to look into it? See what I can find?”
“I’ll owe you.”
“Consider it a wedding present. Do you know the name of the facility and the doctor?”
Thanks to Jace, I had some of that information without bothering Willa about it. I didn’t know how she’d feel about my doing this, so the less I had to involve her, the better. “The doc is Collin Caswell. Not sure about the hospital itself, but it’s located in Columbia, South Carolina.”
“Okay, I’ll see what I can find out. Do some digging into the good doctor to see if I can find a connection to Hatterwick. If nothing else, it might give Jace some additional lines to tug toward supporting that malpractice suit.”
“Thanks, Dax. I appreciate it, man.”
“Now, you let me do my thing and go enjoy this time with your wife. Be vigilant, but don’t let the paranoia take over, okay? We’re doing what can be done and taking the steps to establish a threat assessment. I’ll let you know what I dig up.”
I hung up the phone, feeling a little steadier. Like I’d at least voiced my fears and taken some steps toward either dismissing or validating them. With Dax’s go ahead, I went inside to grab the laptop and begin the laborious task of gathering the email trail to prove our relationship. It was something else productive I could do that would, hopefully, finally get rid of this bullshit lawsuit from Willa’s parents and allow her to truly move forward with her life.
I wanted that for both of us. I wanted the chance to start figuring out what a life together would really look like.
And as I logged into my email and began pulling the emails Dax had so seamlessly slid into our chain of correspondence, I ignored the voice of disquiet in the back of my brain, saying it was too soon to relax.