His tone tells me he knows how important this is. I’m not saying my life is worth more than someone else’s, but hers is. He knows it. You can only take so much good out of the world. The scales will tilt in the favor of evil. That’s what happened with the terror attacks. Dirty facts of life.
“You aren’t going to try to keep me back here?” I snarl, ambling to my desk to pull on my worn out ball cap from a bottom drawer. “Leif thought to try,” I add.
Aidan’s footsteps are loud and his voice carries as he greets more men who enter the building. The same status is given to them, and he turns to face me. “Go find your fucking puppy,” he growls. The grin tells me he’s being kind, a fact no one else in their right mind would understand. He slaps me on the back. I force a smile as reply.
Wet from the rain and sweating from the unknown, I jog down to the docks. My muscles protest, and it gives me something to focus on instead of thinking about the alternative. The searing selfish pain of my mistake. All of them, actually. Harboring so much resentment from a past relationship, I let it affect a new one. The only one that matters. Trying to control every aspect backfired.
Boarding the boat, we set off at a breakneck pace, pounding on the choppy wake as we travel toward Shell Island. The smoke is pouring into the dark sky, a signal we’re traveling in the correct direction. We’ve passed the island while going out to sea for fishing and training so I know exactly where it is. I thought it was pretty. It’s too small for houses and doesn’t have the infrastructure to have buildings of any sort. I’ve seen colorful tents so I know it’s a popular camping spot. There are shells bleached white from the sun that line the coast and trees of varying sizes. I can’t recall the shape of the island even though I’ve seen it bird’s eye on a map. The motors are too loud and the chop to rough to ask questions, or else I would be pestering everyone around me. The driver of the boat is stoic, a steely take no shit mask on his face. He’s a guy from another Team who got transferred to Bronze Bay against his desires.
The mangled, fiery wreckage comes into view as we approach and I’m pretty certain it matches my insides right now. The time to be cool, calm, and collected is long gone. Now, the time has come to panic like a mother fucking, raging idiot.
I bellow as we slow down and the side comes into view. I know every one of the airplanes that belong to May’s Airport by heart. I memorized them when I was trying not to obsess over Caroline and what that meant for my street cred. Even though I already knew it was her, and Shirley told me as much, seeing it in front of me in living color is a page from my worst nightmare playbook.
Someone puts their hand on my shoulder, but I can’t turn my gaze away from the wreckage to acknowledge the gesture. It takes multiple seconds to swallow, another few to realize I need to take a breath, and then several more to shuffle my feet as the boat hits land.
Men pour off the first boat and the portable water system shoots water onto the flames, while others approach a wing of the airplane that has been torn off. It’s obvious it exploded after it landed, and not on approach, small indicators giving away gruesome clues.
My gaze scans the beach surrounding the aircraft, hopeful to find what I’m looking for. My hand rests on my side arm even though this isn’t a time for guns. It shows how desperate and disheveled I am in this moment. Orders are being followed and my feet refuse to move.
Another matte black boat rolls onto the beach, and I know Leif must be on it. A silence transcends all that is happening, the business of everyone working as a team as I finally trudge through the rain towards the plane.
Voices cut through my self-imposed deafness. Words likeempty cockpit, no human remains, must have escaped before the explosion,make my heart hammer along faster than the rain stinging my skin.
The sight of the blackened cockpit speeds my breathing. “She wasn’t in there,” Leif says, walking past me. “Come on,” he says. His lips are moving and although I hear his words, it feels like a slow-mo movie. I can’t fully comprehend. “Come on, Tahoe,” Leif repeats. “You’re okay. We’ve got this.” He nods a few times until I nod back.
Shaking it off is difficult. “Take that section over there,” he says, pointing left, further from the wreckage. “Guy and Taz are over there combing the brush. Help them search.”
I take my orders and start for the section of island, but someone yells, voice booming, in the opposite direction. That’s when I run. A haphazard staggering on top of the shells and sand. More voices echo off the trees, and my soaked ball cap feels like it weighs a thousand pounds.
“She’s over here! Medic! Medic!” It’s Aidan’s voice.
When I make it to huddle of people, I throw a few men out of my way to get a visual. They have a makeshift tarp propped up shielding the top half of her body from the rain. I’d recognize those bare legs anywhere. The shade of tan. The curve of her knee. I try to ignore the burn marks as I survey her body. My gaze travels up further to her bare stomach as the medic rushes in to perform CPR.
The three freckles.
Connect the dots.
He breaks her ribs with a hard compression, the slicing crunch and crack prickles my skin. Someone tries to pull me back, but I turn with a hard, right hook to a face. No one fucks with me after that.
I drop to my knees when I’m next to her and lay my hand on her stomach, keeping those three marks hidden. They’re mine. Removing my hat, I bow my head. I’m not the praying type. When you’ve seen what I’ve seen, you have to doubt God exists. I’d sell my soul to the devil with a firm handshake if it means Caroline pulling through. So, I do pray. Hard. Mercilessly. With every fiber of my being. I ask for healing.
I ask for a miracle.
Perfection is messy, but I guarantee it never looks like this.
Chapter Nineteen
Caroline
Even if I had checked the radar before I left, I wouldn’t have anticipated how furious the storm that took my plane down would turn out to be. For all intents and purposes it was the perfect Florida storm. Gory and treacherous, wild with surprise, and mild in warning. It took no prisoners. I spent four months recovering in St. Mary’s Hospital. Months that were brutal for many different reasons. My body and mind will never be quite the same, ever again. The hospital is inland several miles and I swear to God, you can’t smell the sea air that far away. It was like being trapped in another dimension. One in which a fern named Beatrice kept me company during the lonely night hours. I kept the plant alive. When everything hurt and tears were pouring down my face as I sat up in bed, watering that plant gave me a purpose. Water the fern. Eat. Water the fern. Sleep. Water the fern. Breath. Water the fern. It was the only mantra I lived by, watering that fern kept me alive.
Friends came and went, but after such a long time, the visits dwindled down. Aside from my mama bringing in lunches and dinners for the hospital staff a few times a week when she visited me, I was alone but for my beeping monitors and a night nurse named Felicia.
One person who wanted to be there daily wasn’t, because I wrote his name on the do not visit list. There’s really no such thing in a small-town hospital, but I made Felicia promise me she’d tell the office girls to make sure he didn’t get up those stairs to see me. I envisioned the employees swooning instead of obeying my wishes, but I haven’t seen him. Not even since I’ve been home. I only know he wanted to visit because my daddy told me so.
I moved in with my parents so they could help me maneuver around with the crutches, and if I’m being perfectly honest, I can’t bear being that close to the airport. The house up on the hill gives me the distance I need and assures me I won’t run into him. Or any of the memories that used to bring me happiness.
It’s the middle of the day on a Wednesday when my mama knocks softly on my door. I’m staying in my childhood room, the walls a soft blue, the color of the sky—the color it’s been since I was old enough to have an opinion. At the moment if they were black, they wouldn’t be dark enough for my tastes. I call out, “Come on in.” She does, slipping inside with a hot mug of water and a canister of loose leaf tea on a small tray.
