“I don’t have a wife!”
“J.R. Wake up. You’re having a nightmare.”
“I don’t have a wife!” he yelled again, as hands held him down.
He reared up swinging… connected with flesh… heard a cry.
Not his.
A woman’s.
“Rabia? Oh, God, Rabia.”
He frantically looked around. He wasn’t in an interrogation shed. He wasn’t in a box.
He wasn’t on a roof under an Afghan moon.
He was in a room. With soft light. A soft bed.
A dog whined and scratched at the door from the other side.
Another muffled cry.
Not a dream.
“Oh, God. Jess.”
“I’m OK,” she whispered from the far side of the bed.
“Did I hit you?”
“It’s OK. I’m OK. I’ll… I’ll be right back.”
The door opened, and she hurried out.
And all he could do was sit there in the bed, his hands braced behind him, his heart pounding wildly… and relive the nightmare that had been his life in captivity.
JESS RUSHED INTO the bathroom, flipped on the light switch, and walked directly to the vanity. One look at her mouth, and she turned on the cold-water faucet. Blood pooled between her teeth and her split lower lip and trickled down her chin.
She groped for a washcloth with a shaking hand, wet it under the stream of water, then winced when she pressed it to her swollen lip.
“Jess.”
Her head snapped up. She met J.R.’s eyes in the mirror.
He stood in the doorway behind her, his eyes filled with anguish.
“It’s OK,” she reassured him.
“It’s
“It looks worse than it is.”
“I hit you. I hurt you.” If pain was a sound, it came out in his voice.
She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have woken you like that. But you were having a nightmare. I… I don’t know. I wanted to wake you. To get you away from wherever you were.”
It all crashed down on her then. From hearing the news that he was alive. To telling Ty good-bye. To seeing J.R. in the hospital, broken and defeated. To bringing him home and trying so hard to give him his space and hoping so, so hard that he would remember…
A sob wrenched out unbidden, and then the floodgates broke.
She sank to the floor, helpless to pull herself together. All the years without him, all the pain of adjusting, and now, less than a month with him, and she’d hit the wall.
She’d thought she could help him.
She’d thought she could heal him.
She’d thought they could begin again.
For him, she
But it was never going to happen. She couldn’t reach him. She couldn’t have Ty. She couldn’t stop crying. Couldn’t catch her breath. Her chest hurt. And still she cried, her tears mixing with her blood and her helplessness and her shame.
She felt his hands grip her shoulders. Felt him lift her, wrap her in his arms, and hold her as she unraveled.
After several long minutes, he walked her into the living room. He sat down with her on the sofa and wrapped them together in a big soft comforter, with Bear anxious and confused at their feet, the soft lights from their new Christmas tree gently twinkling.
And despair crowded around them like darkness crowded in on dusk.
Chapter 31
SUNDAY MORNING, JESS WOKE UP on the sofa, the comforter still tucked around her, her head on J.R.’s lap. Bear, curled up in a tight ball, slept soundly at her feet.
Her head hurt. Her eyes and throat burned from crying, and her lip felt as if it had swollen to the size of a basketball.
Then J.R. finally started talking, and none of that mattered anymore.
“During the beatings,” he said hesitantly, “they used to tell me they would find my family and kill them if I didn’t talk.”
She didn’t speak. She couldn’t speak.
“So I told them I didn’t have a family. I told them I didn’t have a wife.”
She sat up slowly and found him looking at her.
“I didn’t remember… until last night. Maybe… maybe that’s why I don’t remember you… maybe I said it so often to protect you my mind made it true.”
She hadn’t thought there were any more tears left inside her. “I am so, so sorry for what they did to you.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.” His brows furrowed, and he took her hand. “Was I a good husband, Jess?”
“You were a good man, J.R. You’re still a good man.”
He grunted. “Tell that to your lip. And do
“I wasn’t going to say that.”
“Was I a good husband?” he persisted.
She stretched to cover her discomfort over broaching this subject, then got up and walked to the kitchen to make coffee, put on water for his tea, and figure out what she was going to say.
He was still on the sofa when she came back. And he was still waiting for an answer.
“You were as good as you were capable of being.” She sat down beside him again and gathered the quilt over her, tucking it around her bare feet.
“What does that mean?”
They’d gone past the point of whitewashing and tiptoeing around each other’s feelings last night. When the dam had broken on her tears, so had her ability to cushion the truth. “It means we were kids when we started dating. It means we fell in love and became a couple before we figured out what it was like to be friends. It
