Chapter 16
Sixteen
“And then she said, I swear to God, Ethan, this actually happened, she said, ‘I thought the defibrillator was just for show.’ Like we carry around thousand-dollar equipment as a prop!” Carla’s laugh filled the ambulance cab, bright and untroubled.
“Can you believe that? As a prop! I’m like, ma’am, we’re not running a medical equipment showroom here.
This is an ambulance. Everything in here has a purpose. ”
Ethan made a noncommittal sound that might have been agreement.
Might have been anything. He stared out the window at the pre-dawn darkness sliding past, the streetlights of Willow Glen glowing orange in the cold.
The town was still sleeping, windows dark, streets empty except for the occasional pickup truck heading out for an early shift.
“I mean, I get that people panic during emergencies,” Carla continued, undeterred by his silence.
She was twenty-six and perpetually cheerful, even at six in the morning after a double shift.
Fresh out of EMT school last year, still young enough to think the job was exciting instead of exhausting.
“But you’d think basic medical equipment would be, like, common knowledge.
Defibrillators. AEDs. The things that restart your heart?
Not decorative. Though now that I think about it, maybe we should get some decorative ones.
Like with rhinestones or something. Make them more aesthetically pleasing. ”
She laughed at her own joke. Ethan didn’t.
“You okay?” Carla glanced over at him. “You’ve been weird all shift. Quiet. I mean, you’re always quiet—strong, silent type and all that, but this is like … extra quiet. Super quiet. Like, monk-level quiet. Did something happen?”
Did something happen?
Ethan’s jaw tightened. Yeah, something had happened.
He’d walked out on Lydia in the middle of a fight.
Had left her standing in the kitchen crying while he grabbed his keys and drove away like a coward.
Had come straight to work without calling, without texting, without doing anything to fix what he’d damaged.
“Just tired,” he said.
“You sure? Because?—”
“I’m sure.”
Carla fell quiet for about thirty seconds.
A record. Then, “My roommate’s boyfriend is like that.
Gets all moody and won’t talk about it. Just sulks around the apartment, making everyone miserable.
Last week, he didn’t speak to anyone for three days because Jessica forgot to buy his specific brand of protein powder.
Three days! Over protein powder! I told her she should get rid of him, but she’s convinced he’s going through something.
I’m like, we’re all going through something, Jessica.
That doesn’t mean you get to be a jerk about it.
You know what I mean? Like, have your feelings, process your emotions, whatever.
But don’t punish other people for your bad mood. ”
She paused, maybe waiting for Ethan to agree. When he didn’t, she kept going.
“Though I guess sometimes people don’t realize they’re doing it. The punishing thing. They think they’re just dealing with their own stuff, but it affects everyone around them anyway. My friend is a therapist, and she says that emotional withdrawal is actually a form of control?—”
Ethan let her words wash over him without really hearing them. His mind was back at the house. Back in the kitchen with Lydia looking at him like he’d slapped her.
I can’t keep doing this. Can’t keep reassuring you that you’re worth caring about if you won’t believe it.
What had he been thinking? She’d been spiraling, terrified, pushing him away because she was scared. And he’d walked out. Had proven her right that people leave when things get hard. That she couldn’t trust anyone to stay.
Granted, he was still on shift, but still. He could have given her a hug. Texted her to tell her it would all work out.
The thing was, he understood it now. Hadn’t understood it in the moment, when frustration and hurt had been clouding his judgment. But sitting in the ambulance for hours with nothing but Carla’s chatter and his own thoughts, he’d had time to think.
Lydia was under stress. That much was obvious.
She’d come to Willow Glen to get away from trouble, to start fresh, to build a safe life for her kids.
And then someone had tried to kill them.
Had set fire to their house while they slept, had nearly succeeded in burning them alive.
The only reason they’d survived was because Caleb had happened to drive by.
Because Michael had appeared at exactly the right moment.
Because of a series of near-miracles that could have easily gone the other way.
That kind of trauma didn’t just disappear. Didn’t just resolve itself because you wanted it to.
And it wasn’t fair … what he’d said. Wasn’t fair to demand that she trust him, believe him, let him in when her entire world had just proven that nothing was safe.
That danger could find you even when you ran.
That someone who’d once promised to love you could turn into someone willing to murder you and your children.
He knew what it was like to have people hostile to you.
He’d spent a year in Kandahar dodging IEDs and sniper fire, never knowing if the local who smiled at you in the morning would be planting a bomb by afternoon.
That constant vigilance, that inability to trust, that hyperawareness that death could come from any direction, it changed you.
Made you harder. Made you see threats everywhere.
Made sleep impossible because your brain never stopped scanning for danger.
Ethan had come home from deployment different.
Quieter. More withdrawn. Meeting Sarah had been a turning point.
She had gently coaxed him back to himself over months of patient conversations and quiet understanding.
But even she couldn’t erase what Afghanistan had taught him about the fragility of safety, the speed at which normal could become life-threatening.
But this, what Lydia was going through, this was different.
This was worse, in some ways. In Kandahar, the threat had been diverse.
Anyone could be an enemy. The danger was ambient, environmental, part of the landscape.
You learned to live with it the way you learned to live with the heat and the dust and the constant noise.
Here, it was specific. Tom Redding. Not some faceless enemy combatant, not some abstract threat, but a man Lydia had loved.
Married. Built a life with. A man who’d fathered her children, who’d held those babies when they were born, who’d promised to protect them.
And he was actively, intentionally trying to kill them.
Had stood on Ethan’s porch and threatened to burn them all alive.
How did you trust anyone after that? How did you let someone in when the person you’d trusted most, the person who was supposed to love you and your children more than anyone, had become your personal nightmare? When the man who’d vowed to cherish you was now the greatest danger in your life?
Maybe that’s why she was balking. Why she’d picked this fight about the credit card and the groceries and being a burden?
Because this was a little piece of her life she could control.
People did that when they had too big a problem.
They picked fights with the parts of their life they weren’t afraid of. The parts that didn’t terrify them.
And Lydia had to be petrified.
Tom had been on their porch. The kids had heard him. Rosie had seen him through the window, had heard that rage in his voice. And then, the next day, Lydia had spiraled about being a burden, about taking advantage, about needing to get her life together.
Of course, she had. Because she couldn’t control Tom.
Couldn’t stop him from finding them, couldn’t prevent him from showing up drunk and threatening, couldn’t protect her children from their own father.
But she could control whether she bought groceries with her own money.
Could control whether she was imposing on Ethan.
Could pick a fight about something manageable because the real problem was too big to face.
And he’d walked out.
“Which is why I think online dating is a scam,” Carla was saying, apparently having moved on to a new topic without Ethan noticing.
“I mean, sure, my sister met her husband on one of those apps. But for every success story, there are like fifty nightmare stories. Did I tell you about the guy who showed up to my friend’s date with his mom?
His mom! He said she wanted to make sure the girl was good enough for her baby.
Like, sir, you are thirty-two years old?—”
“Carla.”
“Yeah?”
“Can we just—” Ethan rubbed his eyes, feeling the exhaustion of the shift settling into his bones. “Can we have a quiet drive back? Just for the last ten minutes?”
She looked hurt for a moment, then shrugged. “Sure. Whatever. You’re the senior partner.”
The silence that followed was somehow worse than the chatter had been. Ethan could feel Carla’s wounded feelings radiating from the driver’s seat, could sense her glancing over at him periodically like she was trying to figure out what she’d done wrong.
Nothing. She hadn’t done anything wrong. She was a good EMT. Competent, quick-thinking, good with patients. The talking was just her way of dealing with the stress of the job. Some people talked. Some people went silent. Some people drank themselves numb.
Ethan did that last one less than he probably could have, given everything.
The ambulance station came into view, a squat brick building with the county seal painted on the side.
Carla pulled into the bay, and they both climbed out into the cold November morning.
The sun was just starting to lighten the eastern sky, turning it from black to charcoal to that pale gray that meant dawn was coming.