He laughed and said, “Absolutely it is.”
Inside the next plane, she realized it was the same damn thing again. Nico buckled her down, and it took another forty minutes before they were airborne again. “So now, what do we do on this flight? I’m too achy to sleep more.”
He shrugged and said, “What do you want to talk about then?”
“Something that doesn’t involve this case.”
“So tell me about your childhood.”
“It was glorious, and then my parents died. And that’s the end.”
“And you don’t remember the details?”
She shook her head. “I don’t think I want to remember the details. I was first in foster care for all of grade four, I believe. Even the details get hazy though. Most of the time I hated so many of the foster homes.”
“Were your foster parents so bad?” Keane asked on the other side of her.
“No, I just think they were so busy with a lot of kids that they couldn’t deal with one who was too traumatized. I wasn’t an easy child during that time.”
They nodded. “Did they say why you and your brother were split up?”
“That’s easy,” she said. “He was much more difficult to handle. He was really angry, threw lots of fits, was hard to control. He was removed from the home and went to another place.”
“Well, hopefully at the other place, he got some help for the anger and the grief that had to have been choking him.”
“Maybe,” she said, “but I don’t know about that. I didn’t get a chance to find out because I never saw him again. And that ended up making me feel even angrier.”
“What about your marriage?” Nico asked.
She shut up on that topic.
Now that was an interesting reaction. He leaned over and studied her face. “What aren’t you telling me?”
She shrugged. “Just more guilt,” she snapped. “Do we really have to talk about that?”
He didn’t know what to say because guilt wasn’t what he expected.
“Why would you feel guilty?” he asked. “I gather you weren’t happily married?”
“I was very happily married,” she murmured, dropping her head back and closing her eyes again, rather than seeing their faces. “My husband got sick right away, probably had been sick before I met him and before we got married. His treatments were difficult, and his medications were even worse, and he changed. And, no, it wasn’t his fault. And, no, I didn’t love him any less. But living with him was not easy.”
“What medications?”
“He had brain cancer and a couple other sideline issues that just seemed to make life even more difficult. But he kept reacting to the medications. He would get angry. He gained fifty, sixty, seventy pounds, and his face would blow up and swell, and he’d have trouble going to the bathroom. It was really hard on him.”
“Sounds like it was hard on you too.”
“But nobody ever thinks about that,” she said. “You’re supposed to be there for your spouse, for the person you love. You nurse them through sickness and health, but nobody tells you that, from the time you’ve come home from your honeymoon, it’s possible to get so badly sick.” She swallowed, then whispered, “It was a brain tumor, and it took him five years to die. Five years where I watched the beautiful future I had hoped for and the man I loved go through endless pain and torment. At the same time, every time his medication was changed, he would go through this personality shift and …” She fell silent. “Listen to me. I’m bitching about how he acted, and yet he’s the one who died.”
“I think part of the problem,” Nico said quietly, “is you feel guilty because you felt the way that you felt.”
“Sure,” she said. “Wouldn’t you?”
“Well, I would hope that I’d understand that that’s where I needed to be and that I did the best I could and then move on.”
“Well, the trouble is, I haven’t moved on,” she snapped. “I still feel guilty for not being the perfect angelic wife that I was supposed to be.”
“Did you yell at him?” Nico asked. “Did you tell him off for being who he was? Did you get angry that he was sick? Did you let him see it?”
She stared at Nico in horror. “Of course not. I’d never do that. He was the one who was already going through all the trauma. I wouldn’t add to it.”
“Exactly,” he said. “So why do you feel guilty? You’re human. You were taken to the edge of your endurance. You had to watch somebody you love die in a slow and painful way. I hardly think that’s something you should feel guilty about.”
She frowned at him. “So how come it sounds completely normal when you say it, but it’s hard for me to clear my head from anything other than feeling bad because I could have done better?”
“Think back to the days that you looked after him. Some of the worst days of your life. How exhausted you were, getting up at nighttime, how exhausted you were during the day because it never ended. Do you really think you could have done more?”
“No,” she whispered, tears in the corners of her eyes. She brushed them away impatiently. “There were days where I went and cried in the shower. Sometimes two in one day just so I could bawl and not have him know. It was torture.”
“I think a lot of that is survivor’s guilt,” he said softly. “And I do understand that too.”
“And how is that?”
“Because I worked as a SEAL before this. I’ve been there where my buddies all died in missions, and I survived. You don’t want to be the only person who walks away, where everybody looks at you and wonders why you lived and why not the guys with the families and the kids and parents they supported, instead of the single guy who appeared to have nothing and nobody waiting for him and not even a scratch on his body.”
She opened her eyes. “Wow,”
