The Way Home

On a deep breath, she gathered herself, then made the longest walk of her life.

JESS STOPPED HESITANTLY outside the door of J.R.’s room, steeled herself, and, as Brad hung behind, walked inside.

Oh, my God, oh, my God.

She covered her mouth with her hand to smother a gasp. She barely recognized the man asleep in the bed. His hair was long and threaded with gray. He had a beard. J.R. had hated it when he’d had to grow a beard for a mission.

Tears filled her eyes, and she walked closer and better saw the ravages his captivity had done to him. A pressure squeezed so tightly in her chest she could barely breathe.

Emaciated.

Withered.

Gaunt.

Destroyed.

Those words cycled over and over in her mind as she studied him in stunned disbelief.

And pain. My God, the pain he had to have suffered.

What the years and the war had done to him crushed her heart. And what love she’d had for him revitalized and swelled as she remembered the man he had been—now as much a stranger to her as she was to him.

Any question she’d had about whether she could do this, whether she could walk away from a man who loved her and toward a man who didn’t even know her anymore, had been answered in the few seconds since she’d walked through that door. She could not turn her back on this man. This broken, damaged man. She could not be that selfish.

Then and there, she made a promise to do whatever it took to help heal him and heal their marriage.

Filled with new determination, she went to his side, folded his limp hand in hers, and softly said his name.

Chapter 29

Minnesota, late November

JEFF SAT IN FRONT OF THE T?V in the new recliner Jess had bought for him, the dog asleep by his feet.

“To keep that leg up,” she’d said with an overbright smile when the chair had been delivered shortly after she’d brought him home to this apartment above a store he’d apparently frequented but didn’t remember. “Don’t think I don’t notice that it swells up on you if you’re on it too much.”

He’d been back in Minnesota for two weeks. And everything about the Crossroads General Store and the lake where he’d grown up fishing and hiking and hunting and camping remained as foreign to him as a moonscape.

“Did we live here?” he’d asked Jess after he’d painstakingly climbed up the stairs from the store to the apartment for the first time.

“We didn’t, no. I lived here with my parents. You spent a lot of time here, though.”

“Why? Did I work here?”

“No. I did. You hung around so you could flirt with me,” she’d said easily and with a shy smile. “After we got married, you and I lived on several different Army posts. We were at Bragg when you deployed and…” She let the thought trail off.

And went to Afghanistan and got killed, was what she was going to say. Maybe he should have gotten killed. Maybe he should have died over there.

“But then you already know you were at Bragg,” she added inanely.

Yeah. He knew. After he’d been discharged from the hospital three weeks ago, they’d put him and Jess and his brother up at the Fisher House that had been built specifically for rehabbing soldiers and their families so they’d all have someplace to stay during his debriefing. All of them had been relieved when there’d been three bedrooms.

He’d hoped returning to Bragg would help jog his memory, that maybe he’d remember the good times. Instead, it had been pure hell. The debriefing sessions exhausted him. Worse, though, was when his teammates —the ones who weren’t deployed—dropped by to see him. Men he’d fought side-by-side with, drunk beer with.

Men he didn’t remember.

He didn’t know who had been more uncomfortable, them or him.

Maybe I should have died there.

He stared blankly at the TV. Look at the lives he’d ruined by living. Rabia. Her father. His brother, Brad. Jess.

It hurt him to watch her try so hard to be natural with him. So he didn’t watch. He watched TV instead. For hours and hours on end, even though he couldn’t say what he’d seen an hour ago, let alone the day before. Mostly, he watched it so he wouldn’t have to deal with the pain in the eyes of a woman who was still a stranger to him.

Sometimes he looked out the window. He couldn’t see much except the tree line, but he passed time watching the wind blow and the snow fall. In northern Minnesota, the snow fell early and often. The fact that he knew that didn’t count.

What counted was what he didn’t know.

At first, she’d brought him high school yearbooks and photo albums. It made his head hurt to look at them, to see himself as a boy he still didn’t recognize. So he asked her not to bring them anymore.

With a patient but sad look in her eyes, she’d understood. “Sure. No problem. I didn’t mean to bombard you. I thought maybe… I don’t know. Maybe I hoped seeing the photos might trigger a memory.”

“It’s OK. It’s nice of you. I appreciate it. But nothing’s happening. I’m sorry.”

She’d knelt down beside him, covered his hand with hers. “You don’t have to be sorry. It’ll either come or it won’t. There’s no pressure, J.R.”

But there was pressure. Every time she looked at him that way, every time she drove him to a doctor’s appointment in Hibbing or a counseling session in Duluth, or every time she called him J.R. in that automatic way that said she’d called him that since they’d both been little kids, he felt the pressure.

I can’t come with you, Jeffery.

Rabia.

Another pressure. One he couldn’t get out of his head.

He rose stiffly from his chair. “I think I’ll turn in.”

That hurt look again. “Don’t you want dinner? I fried chicken. Your favorite.”

Maybe it was. He didn’t know. “Sorry. It’ll still be good tomorrow, right?”

“Sure. You go ahead and go to bed.”

So polite. They were so polite to each other. Like strangers meeting on a train, passing through each other’s life to get back to their own lives. Only the train never stopped and dropped him off where he was supposed to be. It kept going and going, and he kept searching and searching.

He forced a smile for her, because she tried so hard, then got up and walked into the bedroom that was supposed to be theirs. Only he slept there alone, and she slept in another room on another bed.

Two strangers on a train.

He lay down, covered his ears with the pillow so he couldn’t hear the soft sounds of her weeping, and thought of Rabia again. Always. On a rooftop under the stars. Bringing him back to life with her soft hands and healing heart.

The soft clicking of paws on the hardwood floor, then the slight dip of the mattress, told him the dog had