The Last Hour (Thompson Sisters), Sheehan-Miles, Charles [reading an ebook .txt] 📗

code, a code of loyalty to each other that superseded everything else. Except that Ray had broken that code.

Whenever I got upset about the Army, Ray would say he understood, but they were doing the right thing. Seeking justice for a twelve-year-old boy who couldn’t get it any other way. Thinking of that made me feel so selfish. Selfish for wanting my husband, selfish for wanting to have a normal life, a life that wasn’t caught up in a media frenzy and court martial and scandals at work.

Ray just said, “Those weren’t the cards we drew, baby. But we’ll meet it together.”

He was right. We could handle it with each other. But I didn’t think I was strong enough to go it alone.

It’s Doctor Babe to you (Ray)

After we struck out finding Daniel’s parents, Sarah took him to go look for the pediatric intensive care unit, while I followed Carrie down to the cafeteria. My mind kept turning around why he was in the hospital. He’d been on his way to the zoo with his parents. They must have been in the same accident as us. Were his parents even alive? I was distracted and tense as Carrie, Alex and Dylan talked in the cafeteria.

I could have done without Dylan telling that story to Carrie. For one thing, I didn’t get as drunk as he seemed to think I had. I was pretty seriously upset that night, though. Talking with Carrie about it, even in as little detail as I had, seemed to have started a snowball effect. I hadn’t been able to get my mind off of it, replaying the whole scene over and over again in my mind while I was on the flight back to New York. I’d been in Texas almost a week. A week Carrie and I spent every single moment together. By the time I got back to New York, I had to talk to Dylan, so I sent him a text from the airport and headed straight into town.

So there we were, sitting out on the green, and it felt like it was about forty degrees below zero, and I was freezing my balls off while I told my story to Dylan. And the whole time I was telling the story, I could see I was killing him. When I got to the part about Colton, he stood and started pacing around, then turned to face me suddenly.

“You’re serious about this. Sergeant Colton?” Dylan sounded desperate when he said it.

I nodded. “Yeah. I’m sorry.”

Dylan shook his head. I could see the shock, the disappointment in his face. He walked away from me, breathing heavily. Clouds of tiny ice crystals floated away as he breathed.

“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” he shouted.

“What the fuck, Dylan? When was I supposed to tell you? When you were in the hospital, by open email? Or, let me guess, when you were getting yourself thrown in jail? Or should I have told you when you were fucking making yourself and Alex miserable?”

His face fell, almost as if I’d hit him. And then I felt like crap, because I had drunk a little too much, and the drink had taken whatever filters I normally maintain and thrown them out the window.

“Jesus, Dylan, I’m sorry. There just ... hasn’t been a chance. And honestly, I didn’t want to tell you. We all looked at Colton like he was our father. It was awful. You had enough crap to deal with.”

Dylan stomped his feet, trying to stay warm, and said, “All right. Yeah, I get it. I haven’t exactly been in the best shape this fall, have I?”

I shrugged, and he said, “Speaking of which, my leg’s starting to kill me. Let’s get inside somewhere warm.”

So we walked toward his apartment. “What happens now?” he asked.

“I don’t know. That’s gonna depend on the Army.”

“How so?” he asked, his face puzzled.

I swallowed then said, “Before I left ... and I mean right before I left … I reported it.”

“You’re shitting me. And they let you go?”

I bit my lip and looked away from him for a second. “I kind of took a coward’s way out, Paris. I wrote it all up and dropped it in the mail.”

He nodded. “Can’t blame you for that.”

We walked a little further, and then he spoke again. “Sherman ... you did the right thing. Reporting it.”

“I don’t know.”

“You did.”

“Maybe. But I didn’t do a damn thing to stop it from happening in the first place.”

Dylan didn’t have much answer to that. We got to his apartment a few minutes later. Alex was there, studying, but she took a break and the three of us hung out for a while playing cards and goofing off. Every once in a while, she gave Dylan and me a curious look, but she never asked what the deal was. And I was grateful for that.

The next morning I caught the Long Island Railroad back to Glen Cove and my parents’ place.

Glen Cove is a nice suburb of New York City, a train ride away but on Long Island. Firmly upper middle class, it doesn’t have the grime and crowding of Queens and Brooklyn, nor the pretensions of the Hamptons. My parents had ridden the dot com boom up, managed to hold on to their jobs with their company through the startup phase, and made a lot of money. They bought a million dollar home, but don’t think of it like you’d think of a million dollar home in North Carolina or Texas or some place: a million dollars doesn’t go a long way on Long Island. It was a nice, cozy place, four bedrooms with a two-car garage. It was the American dream. I grew up here, playing in the neighborhood, living a nice, decent life.

Unfortunately, all that vanished overnight in late 2008. When the economy went under, so did my parents’ company. I was already away in school at that point, so I missed the worst of what