Chapter Eight
Hannah stared out the big window in the lodge’s reception area, scanning the quiet grounds. She was so warm and comfy in the lodge, and she dreaded the thought of having to venture back out into the frosty morning.
She had come out early to help get breakfast made, and now she was going to walk Jed to his first meeting with Sarah so he’d know where her office was for future appointments.
Letting out a big sigh, she wrapped her arms around herself in a futile attempt to ward off the cold, opened the door and made her way toward his cabin.
Shoving her hands deep in her pockets as she trudged down the misty path, she couldn’t stop from wondering how much longer spring was going to take to show up.
Chatting with Jed last night, she had gotten a strange vibe from him.
She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was, and she had dismissed it out of hand, convincing herself that it was nothing more than his trauma or stress making him act a little off.
Once he got a little more settled here, she was sure she would feel more comfortable around him.
Reaching his cabin, she was just lifting her hand to knock on the door when it opened in front of her. She offered him a smile in greeting.
“Good morning,” he announced, stepping out from the cabin quickly and closing it up tight behind him, like there was something in there he didn’t want her to see.
“Hey,” she greeted him. “You sleep okay?”
“Great, thanks,” he replied, though the dark rings around his eyes told her differently.
She decided not to press the issue, and gestured back toward the lodge. “You ready for your meeting with Sarah?”
“Sure,” he replied. “Lead on.”
He kept pace with her as they made their way back to the main building. Something seemed to have shifted in him since the night before, and he was spilling his story to her before she had a chance to respond.
“I’ve heard so many good things about this place,” he remarked brightly. “I wanted to come here for a long time. Got so much to work through, you know?”
She nodded, remembering him saying something similar the day before. “Lots of the guests here do,” she replied. She wasn’t going to delve any deeper, but there was something about the way he spoke that told her he wished she would.
“Yeah, wartime really does a number on you,” he remarked. “I saw some pretty messed-up stuff out there.”
He paused expectantly, but Hannah didn’t take the bait.
She didn’t want to hear those stories. She knew he must have been through hell to end up here, but that didn’t mean she had to go into the details first thing in the morning.
“That’s what Sarah’s here for,” she told him with a smile.
“She’s amazing at helping people work through their trauma. I bet you’ll find her really helpful.”
He paused as they stepped inside the lodge together and rolled his shoulders back.
A hint of defensiveness came off of him, and Hannah held his gaze steadily.
She was better at managing grocery lists and intake forms than listening to people’s deepest, darkest secrets, and she wanted to keep it that way.
But the way he was looking at her, it was clear he felt she’d said the wrong thing.
Did he expect her to sympathize, tell him how sorry she was?
Maybe she had been too blunt. Just as she parted her lips to apologize, footsteps caught her attention, and she turned to see Xavier approaching the two of them.
“Oh, Xavier,” she greeted him, glad for the distraction. “This is Jed, one of our new arrivals.”
Xavier extended his hand to Jed, and it seemed as though his presence instantly shifted something in Jed’s mood. Jed cast aside the grim expression on his face and put on a smile instead, shaking Xavier’s hand enthusiastically.
“Good to meet you,” he remarked jovially. “You’re one of the owners, right?”
“Yeah, I am,” Xavier replied.
Hannah’s ears perked up. Wait, how did Jed know that? He must have really been doing his research on Warrior Peak before he got here.
“Well, I think I can take it from here,” Jed told Hannah. “You said the therapy office was down there, right?” He pointed down the corridor.
Hannah nodded.
“Thanks for your help,” he told her, and then he took off down the hallway.
Hannah watched him as he went, and so did Xavier. Xavier had always had a good eye for people, and she was sure he could tell as much as she could that something was off here. “What’s up with him?” she wondered quietly.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But he reminds me of someone.”
Hannah looked to him in surprise. “Reminds you of someone? Who?”
“Not sure, there’s just something familiar feeling.” Xavier shrugged and turned his attention to Hannah. “I need to head into town to see Sheriff Willis, want to come along?”
She felt a smile spread over her face before she could stop it. Time alone with him? Yes, please. “Sure,” she agreed.
They headed out to his SUV, where Hannah cranked up the heat. She was still freezing from her trek to get Jed earlier, and the way his tone had shifted when Xavier walked up had sent a shiver down her spine in a way she couldn’t quite understand.
“So what do you need to see the sheriff about?” she asked.
Xavier paused before he responded, his eyes fixed on the road in front of him, as though he was considering exactly what he was going to tell her.
God, he looks so handsome in this light, the way it picks up the sharpness of his jawline…
“There was a break-in at the lodge earlier this week,” he explained. “One of the rooms. Mine, to be precise.”
“Oh no way,” she gasped, panic gripping her chest. “Did they take anything?”
“Can’t seem to find anything missing,” he replied, shaking his head. “So probably not, but I wanted to check in with Sheriff Willis anyway. Especially after the generators were taken out the other night.”
“You think there’s a connection?” she wondered aloud.
“Could be,” he replied. “Better to be safe than sorry.”
“Does anything ever go smoothly at Warrior Peak?” she remarked, only mostly joking.
Xavier turned one of the heating vents toward her, apparently noticing she still felt chilled. “It will,” he assured her.
She couldn’t help but notice how tense he was right now, the way the tendons in his arm flexed when he palmed the wheel.
He was clearly anxious, and she wondered how much was going on that she had no idea about.
She got it, she really did. Hannah wasn’t involved in the big decisions of the day-to-day running of the sanctuary, and she didn’t need to know every little detail.
After the fire, though, she felt as if she should have been kept a little more in the loop with whatever went on around the place. She did live there, too, after all.
But she knew it went deeper than that for Xavier.
Of course it did. She knew what he had lost when he was in the army.
His little brother had followed him into active service and had died out there—right in front of Xavier, from what Lawson had told her.
She couldn’t even imagine what that must have been like.
And that would have been bad enough, but when he came home, his parents blamed him for the loss.
The funeral had been a mess—his mother jumping on the coffin while Xavier tried to hold her back, only for her to turn around and blame him publicly for Max’s death.
Hannah hadn’t been there, but she’d heard about that from Lawson, too, and it made her chest ache to think of what that must have done to him.
Xavier had been grieving, too. She didn’t know why his family had a hard time seeing that. She understood that it was normal for grieving people to look for someone to blame, but he had needed their support instead of their guilt and accusations. He was the one who had to watch Max die, after all.
The family went to pieces after that.
His parents passed away one after another—first his father, then his mother. She was hardly speaking to Xavier, even when she was on her deathbed, and Xavier had been left alone to bear the brunt of everything that had happened, all the pain and suffering that his family had struggled through.
Hannah had no idea how he even kept his head up sometimes.
She couldn’t imagine carrying on in the face of losing so many people close to her, let alone knowing that most of them blamed her for kicking off the chain of events that led them down that path.
All of it just felt utterly sick and twisted, but here he was, still standing.
Even if sometimes it looked as though he wanted to fall apart entirely.
But he didn’t. He held himself together, and Hannah knew a big part of that was because he felt so much responsibility to the people at Warrior Peak Sanctuary. He had worked hard to make it as safe a space as he could for those who were going through so much of the same trauma as he had.
If it hadn’t been for his dedication, she was certain there were those who wouldn’t have made it through at all.
The struggle they faced was so unique, sometimes they needed people around them who really got it, rather than some expert who only had a distant understanding of what it must have been like.
But Hannah wondered why he couldn’t extend the same kindness to himself.
He must have needed the support, especially after what he had been through, but he always seemed to reject it.
Maybe he didn’t feel as though he was worthy of it, given the way his parents had turned on him when he lost his brother. It wouldn’t have surprised her.
He must have taken some of their blame to heart, even if it was wildly misplaced. She had heard a little about his brother from Lawson, and she knew that Xavier would have done anything to look out for him. Like he did now for the guests of Warrior Peak.
As they wound their way down the mountain into Blue Ridge, Hannah watched Xavier out of the corner of her eye. She had tried to talk to him about getting help before, when they were doing the dishes, but he seemed to just brush her off without really taking any of their conversation to heart.
And she understood that. It had to be painful to bring all those memories back to the surface again.
But he couldn’t keep living like this—torturing himself, treating himself like the perpetrator when she was sure he did everything he could to protect Max.
Hannah knew Xavier would have given his own life in Max’s place if he could have.
Though, if what he was saying about the break-in was true, she understood why he felt like he had more important things than his mental health to focus on. There could be someone targeting the lodge again.
The thought of that happening, their safe space being violated again, spooked the hell out of her. She knew it worried Xavier and Lawson, too.
She focused her gaze on the road ahead of her as they pulled into town and Xavier took a turn to head to the police station. She silently promised herself she was going to do everything she could to help keep the sanctuary—and the people who relied on it—safe.