Chapter 12
F rom his spot near the small river that flowed behind his house, the muted chime of his doorbell tried crawling into his consciousness.
Ignoring it, he took a sip of beer, keeping his gaze fixed on the flames of the firepit.
He was in no mood for company. Not after the stretch of days he’d just had.
Over the years, the Falcons had extracted hundreds of people from abusive relationships. They’d all grown up in similar situations, and the volunteer work was part and parcel of who they were as adults. But the one he and Monk had just returned from hadn’t gone like any of the others.
They’d had a few change their minds, they’d had some ask to be taken back, they’d even had one try to kill herself. But this one, well, they’d never walked in on a man dragging his wife’s body to the garden.
He and Monk put a stop to his cover-up and called the police—tricky business since the asshole was one of them. And when they discovered that the woman he’d been about to bury wasn’t actually dead—yet—they’d clung to a tiny shard of hope that Stacey Harris would survive.
For three days they stood watch over her while she lingered in a coma. Call them crazy, but they weren’t going to trust the police to protect her. Not after learning a few of the douchebag’s colleagues knew how he treated his family and had said nothing, done nothing.
The only saving grace of the entire shitty situation was the bastard wouldn’t walk away unpunished for what he’d done.
And Stacey’s sister, Nicole. She’d rushed to Bakersfield from her home in San Diego the day of the attack and immediately begun the paperwork to take custody of her niece.
Her husband and her own daughter—twelve-year-old Anita—had come with her.
The family seemed close and like good people, but he’d asked Leo to confirm. Once Leo assured him that Nicole and her family were solid people, he took his first easy breath since finding Stacey and the troglodyte.
Nine minutes before midnight on the third day, Stacey Harris succumbed to her injuries and died, leaving her daughter, Anna, to live with the consequences of her father’s actions.
He and Monk had had a long, quiet ride home.
His doorbell rang again, and again, he dismissed it. He’d only been home for three hours. He’d showered, gone for a ten-mile run, then showered again. Now he planned to do nothing more than sit, sip his beer, and stare at the fire.
Only Callie had other ideas. He didn’t need to look to know those were her footsteps treading evenly on the grass as she walked down the small hill behind his house. Because of course it was her. He had no idea what he’d done to piss karma off so bad, but clearly, he’d done something.
“Gabriel,” she said, coming to a stop beside him.
He glanced up. She wore those tall fuzzy boots over a pair of fitted jeans and a puffy black down jacket. Her hair hung loose down her back, but a purple wool cap covered her head. The light of the flames reflected in her dark eyes, and he swore he saw a hint of empathy as she studied him.
He turned away.
“Not tonight, Callie,” he said, taking another sip of his beer. His second taste in the last thirty minutes.
She remained silent, and he harbored hope that she’d turn and walk away. Only a tiny part of him recognized that wasn’t true. Or not entirely true. He didn’t want to talk about Laura Nolan. He didn’t want to talk at all. But he wasn’t quite sure how he really felt about her being there.
“Okay,” she said.
He looked up again only to see her bend down and grab a bottle of beer from the six-pack he’d brought out with him. She twisted the top off and dropped it back in the holder, then took a seat in the chair beside his.
He should be on guard around her. She wanted something from him he couldn’t—wouldn’t—give. But exhaustion pressed in on his heart and soul, and he was too tired to care. The past few days had drained him. He’d find his stride again, but not tonight.
They sat in silence for an indeterminate amount of time—honestly, he had no idea how many minutes passed, maybe even an hour. They each sipped their drinks, watched the fire, and kept their thoughts to themselves.
“Why are you here?” he finally asked. “You want to talk to me, I get that. But why are you sitting here now?”
She set her drink on the arm of the chair, her fingers loosely holding the bottle.
“Something happened to you. I’m not asking you to tell me.
But something did. I’ve seen the look. I’ve had the look when a case went south,” she said.
“Sometimes it helps to be with someone who understands. Someone you don’t need to talk to, because talking doesn’t help—not then, anyway. ”
She worked white-collar crime. He’d never thought of her as having shit days. Or days that included violence and murder. But what did he really know about her? Not a whole lot. Intentionally.
“I’ll go if you want me to,” she added.
Did he? He honestly didn’t know. And now probably wasn’t the right time to think about it.
Suddenly, the fatigue that occupied his body stripped away another layer of the emotional wall he’d built to keep Callie out.
He wouldn’t forget the day that she changed everything between them, but he was tired of letting it define him, define how he interacted with her.
Yes, she’d taken something good and ground it to dust. But before that…
before that there’d been so much more. Friendship, laughter, adventures, late nights lying on the roof of her grandparents’ house looking at stars.
She’d been the one and only person he truly trusted other than his brother.
They had a decade of good memories that he’d refused to remember after that one night. But now, sitting in the dark, his defenses low as he recovered from the brutality of what he’d witnessed, he let his mind inch down that path.
He’d loved her in the way a seventeen-almost-eighteen-year-old could.
It hadn’t started out that way, not at six and seven, but it had grown into that.
She brought a light to his dark world that no one else ever had.
He never told her that, of course. He never talked to her about his home life at all.
He hadn’t wanted to drag her into his misery.
She’d been his anchor. His one beautiful, good, kind thing in the storm of his childhood.
At seventeen, it had taken all his courage to ask her to his senior prom.
A declaration. A step toward shifting their relationship to something more than friends.
Even all these years later, he remembered the way her eyes lit up when he finally managed to say the words.
And for a moment, joy held him suspended, as if they were flying. His life was perfect.
But in the next second, her eyes shuttered and the light extinguished.
He remembered the moment it happened. And the confusion that followed.
She said no. But that wasn’t all she said.
She’d hurled words at him that never, in a million years, would he have imagined hearing from her—not curse words, but ugly ones.
Ones so unlike that girl he’d always known. The girl he loved.
He took a sip of his drink, letting the memories roll over him.
She hadn’t said anything to him that night that his father hadn’t spewed a hundred times before.
But coming from her, it had been worse than a surprise one-two punch to the gut.
With time, he realized that it wasn’t so much the words that had destroyed him, but what he’d seen—felt—as her betrayal.
In those five minutes, she changed from the girl he loved into someone he didn’t know. Someone he didn’t recognize.
Twenty years later, she was still someone he didn’t know. Did he even want to? And if he did, would he ever trust that who she showed him was real? Did it even matter? All she wanted from him was information. Maybe all this rumination was his way of avoiding thinking about the past few days.
Taking his silence for a “no,” she leaned back and let her head fall against the chair, turning her face toward the clear night sky.
“It’s beautiful here,” she murmured, more to herself, he thought, than to him.
It was a little surreal sitting there with her. Never in a million years would he have pictured the two of them like this—her a federal agent, him a former Spec Ops soldier and current business owner living in a home of his own in Northern California.
The warmth of gratitude wrapped around him. Yeah, the last few days had been complete shit, but overall, his life was pretty damn good. A thousand times better than he ever thought it would be—ever imagined it could be.
The remaining tension in his body—from Stacey’s murder to Callie’s arrival—leached away, and he relaxed. Truly relaxed for the first time in a long time. Letting his head fall back against the chair, too, he took in the stars spread across the sky in an almost unfathomable blanket.
They lapsed into silence again, but when the flames began to die, Callie uncrossed her legs and stood. He watched as she stepped close to the fire, absorbing the last of its heat.
A few minutes passed, then she turned and set her empty bottle back in the holder. She paused, hesitated, then laid a hand on his shoulder. A brief touch, then it was gone.
“I’m sorry for whatever happened, Gabriel,” she said sincerely, reminding him of the girl she’d been all those years ago. The kind one, the one who cared about him.
And then she was gone. Leaving him to wonder what the hell would happen next, because nothing was over between them. Not anymore.