really ’cause that second one was much worse, apparently. Much…bigger.” She tugged on the top of her ear. “In fact, I didn’t hear anything for a while after that. Not properly anyway. The explosions, I was told, damaged my eardrums.”
Zachary was frozen. Ice slid down his ribs, splintering in his chest.
Fuck, he’d never reacted like this before. Never felt someone else’s pain as deeply as he did Eve’s. What was it about her that heightened his every emotion, his every thought?
“Turns out…” Again, she waved her hand vaguely in the air. “Turns out, the window I’d been staring in saved my life. It, um, left me scarred. Really badly scarred, and it cost me heaps of blood, but…” She ran her fingers over her cheek. “It saved my life. If I hadn’t been looking in it, I’d have been standing a hundred meters down the road.” She pointed, as if staring that hundred meters down the road. “With my brother.”
Zachary followed her finger, looked in that direction, and then comprehended what she’d said. That’s when he clicked. That’s when he remembered his walk along Coogee Beach in Sydney, the monument built on the cliff tops honoring the more than eighty Australians who’d lost their lives in the Bali bombings.
Nausea slammed into him.
“Eve…” He had to clear his throat. “Your brother?” He shouldn’t feel like this. Shouldn’t be so completely gutted.
She shook her head. “Lochie didn’t stop to look in that window. He just went on ahead. Without me.”
Tears prickled the back of his eyes, and God help him, Zachary was not a crier. His throat closed, forcing air to wheeze through it.
He needed to say something. Needed to ask questions, comfort her. But fuck, he couldn’t. He wasn’t capable.
Last night, backstage, Zachary had sensed a connection between himself and Eve. It had grown over the last twenty-four hours. But this now, his reaction to her story, this was something a whole lot bigger than a connection. This was something inexplicable.
Eve’s grief was his own.
“Parents?” he finally managed to croak. “Sister?”
“They found me. Found the glass too.”
“Did…” Jesus, this was hard. “Did they find your brother?”
Her voice was whisper soft. “No.”
Still Eve stared where she’d pointed, one hundred meters down the road of her memories. Did she see him? Her brother? Standing there? Or…
Nausea struck again, violently.
Or…not standing there anymore?
“The DVI officers did,” Eve said vaguely. “Days later.”
“DVI?” Fuck, he didn’t want to know.
“Disaster Victim Identification.”
Zachary offered to carry her back to the hotel. Repeatedly. But Eve suspected her legs were steadier than his.
She’d had eleven years to come to terms with the bombings. Eleven years to learn to live with her scars and without her brother. Zachary had only minutes to comprehend the horrific details she’d shared with him. He was as shocked as she’d known he’d be.
The walk back was slow, very slow, because Zachary kept stopping, shaking his head and swearing.
“What happened after?”
“They flew me to Perth. The hospitals in Bali were full. They couldn’t cope with that kind of…devastation. My injuries were serious enough to get me on a plane, and my sister, who’s three years older, came with me. My parents stayed in Kuta to search for Lochie.” It no longer amazed her that she could discuss the bombings yet remain so distanced from it.
Her many hordes of therapists had helped her understand. The posttraumatic stress made it impossible for her to remember with anything besides emotional detachment. If she’d continued to relive it with such intense emotion—as she had for weeks and months after the explosions—she simply would not have been able to cope from day to day.
The disassociation was her way of getting on with her life. Accepting what had happened and moving on.
“Briana, my sister, faced endless press interviews. She didn’t exactly love them. They were…difficult. Upsetting. But she did them in case anyone recognized Lochlan and came forward with news about him. And when I was well enough, I was targeted by the press too. Not in a bad way. There was no harm intended. Just a need to show everyone how tragic, how terrible the bombings had been. But after…after they found my brother—” or what had been left of him, “—we couldn’t face the questions anymore. Couldn’t face the interviews. We asked for privacy, and they tried. They did. But every day it seemed there was that one reporter who got in, anyway. Who just had one small question for us.”
Zachary growled a throaty growl. “And I thought I’d had it bad with the press.”
“Don’t compare the two,” she told him logically. “That’s not fair to you. Your experience was different. They tried to crucify you. With me, my family, I think they were just as horrified by our experiences as we were. They looked for the human angle of the bombings. And their interest passed, in time. After the funeral.”
Pain stabbed her belly.
Okay, so Lochie’s death was the one thing she hadn’t learned to detach herself from. She still missed him every day.
“That’s when I had my first vision,” she told him.
“After the bombs?”
“When I got back to Perth. They’d drugged me on the trip home because the pain was so bad. I woke up when they took me off the plane. Bree was there, holding my hand. Initially I thought I was still dreaming, because when the vision struck, it was one of me and Bree and Lochie playing when we were kids. They were building with Lego, and I was meticulously taking their buildings apart. But the memory wasn’t mine. It couldn’t have been. I was too young to remember it. Maybe only one or two.”
“You were seeing the memory from your sister’s perspective?”
“I was. It took a very long time for that realization to sink in. It made no sense at all. None. But every time Bree held my hand, something similar happened. And she held my hand a lot then. We needed each other. Needed that contact.”
“Did she know what was happening?”
“We discussed it, heaps. Decided it was just the drugs. I was on ridiculous painkillers, strong stuff. We both thought I was hallucinating. Tripping on the morphine or something.” Only she hadn’t been. And the visions weren’t limited to Bree. When a nurse took her pulse one morning, and held her hand in the process, Eve had suddenly seen identical twin boys in her mind.
Not understanding the power of what she’d seen and how she’d seen it, Eve had asked about the twins. The nurse had left without saying another word. Eve hadn’t seen her again.
“It took a while to figure the hand-holding triggered the visions, and even longer to recognize the symptoms—the tingles in my palm, the electricity shooting up my arm.” She shrugged. “I guess there’s no better teacher than experience.” That same experience had taught her to give up the affectionate practice of holding hands.
“How did you deal with it all? You were so damn young.”
“Therapy, Pacey. Years and years of counseling. I am very in touch with my inner child. She and I?” She held two fingers together. “We’re like this. Best mates.” Although the counselors had never understood the whole
