“Have a good day tomorrow, Daddy,” she said through a yawn.
A moment later, Naomi’s voice came back on the phone. “Give me just a sec.”
He heard his wife telling their daughter to have sweet dreams and could almost visualize her tiptoeing out of their little bug’s room after turning off the light.
When he heard the bedroom door close, she came back on the line. “So how’d it go today? Really?”
She’d picked up on the edge in his voice. Couldn’t have been difficult in the mood he was in. He noticed the distance in hers.
“Good. Got started at least,” he said. “These people need clean water and more food than we have.”
“Did you eat?”
“Yeah, sure,” he lied. He’d given his protein bar to a little girl who was now an orphan thanks to the earthquake that had buried most of her village. He knew exactly what her future would be. Poor. Angry. Alone. He forced other thoughts out of his mind—thoughts of what it would mean to grow up in a forgotten hell with no one to look out for her. Rage burned in his chest. Daniel shoved the unproductive thoughts aside. Maybe this kid would get luckier than he’d been.
Naomi paused and that pretty much meant she knew he was lying. “You sound...tired.”
“Nah. I’m good. Nothing a good night of sleep won’t cure,” he said, quickly dismissing her worries. Too quickly.
“You can talk to me, you know, about anything,” she said, placing careful emphasis on the last word. Her voice was loaded with tension.
He couldn’t actually, not even if he wanted to. The United States government had stonewalled him into signing legal documents that made it illegal for him to talk about what was really bothering him, even with his wife.
“I know. It’s not that. Don’t worry. I’m just tired. Remind me never to go camping when I get home.” Daniel cleared his throat. “The air here is drier than a lizard fart and there’s no water for showers.”
She forced a chuckle. “Somehow, I bet you’ve been in worse circumstances.”
He ignored that comment. It was true, though. “Didn’t we make a rule? I don’t go anywhere without air conditioning.”
“Me too,” she said and then issued a soft sigh laced with tentativeness. “I’m really proud of you for doing this. Have I told you that?”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment.
“There was so much poverty here before…you know…and now this happens. The people have been through so much that it hardly seems fair.” How many times had he said that fair was an unreasonable goal? “I heard another relief worker talking about how the place is condemned.”
Naomi made a grunt-noise. “The land you’re on, Hispaniola Island, is also called Quisqueya, which means cradle of life. I looked it up. And with a name like that, it can’t possibly be condemned.”
Maybe it was just Daniel that was damned.
“Ruthie is calling for me,” she said before he could respond. “I better go see what she wants.”
Hearing the relief in her voice at the prospect of getting off the phone speared him in the chest.
“I’ll call soon,” he said.
He should’ve said he loved her. He did love her. And when he got home he was going to figure out how to make their relationship right, how to make himself right again.
Chapter 2
Daniel bolted upright, instinctively surveying his surroundings for signs of danger. His KA-BAR was palmed and ready to slice his enemy’s throat. Sweat beaded on his forehead, his hands were fisted and his back teeth clenched so hard he thought one might crack.
He blew out a sharp breath. He’d fallen asleep hard in the tent he shared with Sebastian Elie, a twenty-year-old relief worker from Canada who’d taken leave from university to help dig out survivors of the quake.
Destruction was something Daniel understood. Daniel’s strong suit was blowing things up, not picking through rubble in order to find survivors.
The nightmares were back and so were the headaches. He bent forward and gripped his head with his free hand. He set down the blade.
Pounding his palms against his eye sockets helped.
It took a few minutes for him to shake off the nightmare—the one he could never bring himself talk about and not just because his work at ManTech was a matter of national security. That’s what the legal documents would call that clusterfuck back in South America.
Daniel ran his hand along the edge of his cot, searching for his rucksack. He found it and then pulled a couple of ibuprofen from his pack before dry-swallowing them. There was a bottle of water around there somewhere, a luxury to most in this God-forsaken place.
Sebastian stirred. “Everything all right, man?”
“Yeah. Peachy. Go back to sleep.” Coming to this country wasn’t helping. In Haiti, Daniel felt more disconnected than ever.
What better place to trick the spirits than here, he thought wryly. And, with any luck, catch a break from the ominous cloud that had been hanging over his head, a cloud he’d been born with that had gotten darker by the day since returning to the States.
He should’ve been used to it by now. It had been following him around from as early as he could remember, had intensified when he’d signed up for the Army on his eighteenth birthday, and now here he was a grown man with a wife and a daughter. The cloud had only thickened. It was the kind of feeling that warned something very bad was coming.
Collect your mental package, Damon, that annoying voice in the back of his mind quipped.
Two hours of tossing and turning, and the sun was finally up. The heat from it turned on like someone had flipped a switch. Breakfast amounted to a bottle of water and a power bar.
“You coming?” Sebastian always ate in the Mess Hall tent.
“I’ll catch up later.” Daniel wasn’t in the mood for company.
Fifteen minutes later, he was dressed and working. He’d picked up another load of debris, trying to distract himself from his heavy thoughts. His
