Rough Edge (The Edge #1)(30)

“Yes. I’ll take care of it.” I knew how to do that. I had it under control, and if I wanted to keep it that way, I had to make it a point to look forward, not down. If I looked down, I’d be afraid to fall. “Don’t worry,” I said to him, but really, to me. “I’ll call you if I hear anything.”

“Thank you,” he said. “You were always a good kid.”

I hung up and let myself have hope. A shining light of a dream the good kid always had, but kept to himself because it was uncomfortable.

I hoped that my father was dead and my mother was alive.



* * *



JANUARY, 2007





Ronin’s experimental bullshit wouldn’t come up until we were out of options.

The day after Jenn’s gallery opening, when I told Greyson I thought I was going crazy, she canceled two morning sessions.

Before we sat down, I’d considered a dozen things I could claim I wanted to talk to her about. Moving out of New York. Having a baby. Divorce. Anything. I would rather have made up a story about cheating on her than admit I was convinced I was being stalked by a… what? Force? Entity? Ghost? Demon? A rogue piece of my own mind? And that after pushing her limits the first time, this Thing had disappeared, only to resurface until I bent her over a banquet table?

It was insane.

But I stood at the kitchen island, across from her seat, and pretended I was someone else. I said it. All of it. The way the Thing folded into the shadows and laced itself inside sounds. The pressure to get rid of it. The raging jealousy the more I sensed it wanted her. The method I’d used to get rid of it twice.

“And you’re okay now? Right now?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me yesterday?”

“I didn’t want to tell you in front of it.”

She nodded, finishing her tea, thinking for a long time.

I hadn’t wanted to tell her, and even though that last admission was the craziest, it had come more easily than the first because of who she was. Greyson accepted me at face value. She listened. Always. If she thought I was losing my mind, she didn’t show it. There was no judgment in her.

Thank God for her. A lesser woman would have done so much more damage.

Finally, she spoke. “I think your reaction is very sane.”

“My reaction to losing my mind?”

“Those types of phrases aren’t helpful.”

“Let’s not do this.”

“Do what?”

“I need you to not be a psychiatrist about it.”

She brought her teacup to the sink. “That’s hard. But all right. I won’t monitor your words.”

“Thank you.”

“So obviously it’s a form of PTSD. Is it affecting your work?”

“Not at all.”

“How is that possible?” She got a notepad from a drawer and plucked a pencil from a cup of them.

“Compartmentalization, baby.”

She smiled and leaned her hip against the counter with her pencil hovering over the paper. “Sure. All right. When did this start?”

I took the pencil and pad away and put them aside. “You’re not doing an intake form on me.”

“It helps me think if I write it down.”

I gathered her in my arms and kissed her neck. “But it makes me uncomfortable. I only want to tell my wife.”

She exhaled deeply in my arms. “When did it start?”

“It started soon after you got back, but I think it’s been with me the whole time. Since the war. I brought it back from Iraq.”

“Are you sure?”

I let her go.

“Could it be September eleventh?” she asked.

I sat on the stool and faced her, letting our legs tangle between us. “I wasn’t exactly looking for it. So I don’t know.”

“And what is it like, this Thing?”

“It’s… inside things. I hear it in ambient noise and in the shadows.”

“In your peripheral vision?”

“No. Looking straight at it or not, it’s there. Sometimes there’s nothing to see, but I know it’s there.”

“Hm. So it’s an it, not a who?”

“It’s not a person, but it has a personality.”

“Can you describe it?”

I laughed a little at myself. “I know there’s no intake form, but man, it seems like there is.”

“Please?” She ran her hands down my arms, giving her plea a warmth and need she wouldn’t have given a patient.

“It’s nice.”

“Nice?”

“It’s a nice personality. Not charming or interesting. Compassionate. Gentle. Kindhearted. The only person in the world it hates is me.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re mine. Every time you’re in the room, it gets stronger. Every time I think of you, it comes out a little more.” I pressed my lips together and breathed deeply. “It’s making me not want to think of you, and that’s unacceptable. Trying to keep away from you? I thought I could starve it out, but if I starve it out, I starve you out. I won’t let it do that to me.”

I laid her palm on mine. Her nails were short and clean. Unpolished, yet delicate.