by Alice Ward
“Okay, slow down.”
I sucked in a breath. “I’m calm.”
“He’s missing? You’re sure?”
Irritation pricked at me. He was wasting time with all these questions. “Yes. When did you talk to him last?”
“Okay. Wow. I haven’t heard from him in almost three weeks. When was the last time you saw him?”
“When I dropped him off at the recruiting station. But I spoke to them, and he wasn’t called in! He’s not deployed. I just talked to his dad, and he either doesn’t know where Seth might be or he doesn’t want me to know. I think there’s something he doesn’t want to tell me. He talked about...” I shook my head. “I don’t know. He said some random things. He mentioned that Seth would never ‘go back there,’ but he didn’t say where there was. Do you know?”
“No, I don’t… damn,” he quietly cursed.
“I have to find him.”
“Blaire’s in town for a few days. Do you remember her? You met her at that rooftop bar.”
“I remember.”
“She and Seth are close. They served together in Afghanistan.”
“Can you give me her number?”
“How about this? I’ll call her and get her to meet with the two of us. I’ll text you the details.”
“All right,” I agreed haltingly, not eager to concede control of the situation. But at least Phil seemed as worried about Seth as I was. It would be good to have someone on my side.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll call her right now.”
“Okay. Call me back right away. Please.”
I stared at a bamboo plant on the end of the bar while I waited. Even a minute of inaction was torture. Seth was somewhere in the world — possibly going through hell right now — but I didn’t even have a clue what continent he was on.
My phone rang within five minutes.
“Blaire can meet us this afternoon,” Phil said. “At a coffee shop in Lake View. The Canyon. Four o’clock.”
I tried not to think about all the minutes that would be wasted in-between now and then. “Okay. Thanks.” I hung up and buried my face in my hands.
Rory’s touch on my shoulder brought me back to the moment. “You need to eat.” She pushed a basket containing a burger and fries in front of me.
I choked down what little I could, then passed the time by staring at the wall, going over every minute with Seth that I could remember. There had to be a clue in our past. Or maybe in one of his emails. Or somewhere in his home.
I didn’t have time to run over to his building though. Not if I wanted to get to Lake View on time.
***
Blaire sat at one of the little iron tables in front of the coffee shop, her blonde hair whipping in the breeze.
I plopped down across from her. “Hi,” I said breathlessly.
“Hello,” she smiled slightly, with an expression that said she was just as on edge as me.
“Seth...”
She nodded and closed her eyes briefly. “Don’t worry, Quinn. I think I know exactly where he might be.”
I gulped and stared at her. “Where? Where is that?”
“Don’t worry. If I’m right, he’s not in danger. Not in… immediate danger. Let’s wait till Phil gets here, so I can explain it to you both.”
“Okay,” I grumbled, barely able to control my urge to force the information out of her immediately.
“Do you want a coffee or anything?”
“I can’t even think about drinking anything right now. I barely got some French fries down earlier.”
Her lips drew tight together. “I understand.”
Her large ring caught my eye again. “What’s it like being engaged?”
She looked surprised by my question, but after a few seconds smiled. “Since it’s to the right person… it’s amazing. The only thing better will be making him my husband.”
Phil coming up the sidewalk caught my eye. I waved him over, and he settled in the seat next to me.
Blaire took in a long breath. “So...”
I nodded for her to go on. “So?”
“Seth and I served together in Afghanistan.” She looked at Phil. “Do you know about this?”
“Yes.”
She tilted her head. “Which part?”
“The serving together in Afghanistan.” His eyebrows bunched together. “Come on, Blaire. What are you getting at?”
Blaire’s shoulders drooped. You could almost see the sudden weight press them down. “Seth’s sister also served there with us.” She looked from me to Phil.
I exchanged a glance with Phil. “I didn’t know he had a sister.”
“I didn’t either,” Phil said.
Blaire shook her head. “That’s because Seth doesn’t talk about her a lot. Well… maybe never. Her name was Emmy.”
Was.
“She died?” I could barely hear my own voice.
Blaire nodded.
A sister. All this time and I’d just assumed Seth was an only child. When talking briefly about his family, he never, never mentioned another kid. It was always just him going on skiing trips with his grandfather… him playing basketball in high school.
Ellen’s house. When we got there that night, he’d wanted to go in first. It seemed crazy at the time. He had no real reason to do that. But now I understood. He wanted to go in so he could do something without me seeing… so he could hide Emmy’s pictures from me or ask his mom not to talk about her.
It was why he freaked about the boxes of photos in the basement, why he put his hand on my back and basically pushed me out of the house the moment his mom got even close to reminiscing.
“No,” Phil vehemently said. “I’ve known Seth for two years. I would know if he had a sister.”
Blaire interrupted. “This happened four years ago. In Afghanistan.”
Phil and I waited for the rest.
“So he wouldn’t have mentioned it,” Blaire said. “He and I never really talk about it, and I knew Emmy. I met her and Seth at the same time.”
“But why?” Phil asked. “Why wouldn’t he tell anyone about her?”
My head was spinning. “It must be too painful,” I whispered, feeling close to tears. “Maybe he’s just trying to forget.”
Blaire nodded. “Yeah.”
“What happened?” I was on the edge of my chair, leaning so close to the table that I was in danger of falling out of my seat.
“The three of us were together in Afghanistan. We were deployed there for one year. We were at Camp Black Horse in the Kabul district. It’s a pretty decent size base that American and Canadian forces both operate on.”
I swallowed hard, my throat burning. I was hanging on each of Blaire’s words, every syllable she spoke burning permanently into my brain.
Blaire tucked a lock of hair behind her ear and hesitated. “Um… so anyway, the three of us were there for a year. It was a pretty good deployment, as far as they go. Emmy had a knack for people. She just connected with anyone she met. She kind of became friends with a few women in a nearby town. They were helping her learn more Dari, and she was helping them with English. And then one day, a couple weeks before the three of us were going to go home, Emmy came back to the base really upset.”
My hands started to shake. I pressed them between my legs to keep them under control and glanced at Phil. He looked like a statue, absolutely still as he stared at Blaire.
“One of the women Emmy had gotten to know was being abused by her husband. From what Emmy said, it was really bad. Not just getting pushed around. I’m talking bad beatings. Emmy went to our uppers to put in a complaint, but it was dismissed. She was told there was nothing we could do. It wasn’t a matter that US forces could involve themselves in.”
My nose wrinkled in distaste. “Really?”
“It’s complicated,” Phil explained.
Blaire nodded. “Getting involved in something like that can go sour real fast. When you’re forces in a foreign country,
there’s already a tense relationship established. We’re not there to meddle. It can look like you’re trying to impose your way of living.”
“But if someone is being abused the right thing to do is to try and stop it,” I argued.
“I know,” Blaire emphatically nodded. “But there are worse things happening than a woman getting beat up, trust me… and stepping in can escalate a simple beating to those worse things...”
I shuddered, not wanting to know what those “worse things” were.
“About Emmy,” I said, the name feeling strange on my tongue. Seth’s sister’s name… I still couldn’t get over the shock of her existence.
“She did something anyway,” Blaire said tightly. “That was Emmy. You could wave the big picture in front of her all you wanted, but she built her life around helping people. She was the reason she and Seth enlisted.”
“It wasn’t just for money?” I breathlessly asked.
“No,” Blaire said. “They didn’t have their inheritance yet, but I don’t think that had anything to do with joining the army. Not for Emmy anyway. Seth… I think he went to be with her. They were less than two years apart. Everyone always thought they were twins. They looked so alike and had all the same gestures and ways of speaking. I guess you could say they were twins in a way, just twins that happened to be born in different years. They could read each other like no one else. He was always looking out for her. She could be… impulsive. Maybe because of how big her heart was. He was the rational thinker. He would hold her back when her emotions were taking her to an out of control place.”
“So what happened?” Phil pressed.
Blaire looked down at the table and bit her lip. “Emmy went to take care of things herself. She went to the house of the abused woman. As far as I know, they just talked. Emmy was trying to find a way around things, trying to figure out if there was somewhere the woman could go, someone else she could stay with.”
“There wasn’t, was there?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
Blaire looked at me. “There? No. Probably not. Especially if her family wasn’t in the same town. Then she was definitely on her own.”
“And what about Seth? Did he know all of this?”
“He tried to stop her from getting involved. He tried to talk her out of it. They had a big fight. I saw it happen. Emmy went anyway. Then… on her way back to Black Horse… she was killed.”
The last word wrapped around me, pressing against my lungs and making it hard to breathe. “Killed? By who?”
“We think by the family of the woman, but we can’t know for sure.” Blaire’s face took on a stony quality, but it was a facade. She was trying to be strong yet, deep behind her eyes the pain was visible.
The weight of the story pressed down on me. Emmy… Blaire… The abused woman… Seth. I felt so bad for all of them.
“Oh my God,” I sighed to myself.
“I’m not surprised Seth hasn’t told either one of you this,” Blaire said. “It’s always been a secret. You need to know… I don’t think he kept it from you because he didn’t want you to know him, or because he doesn’t care for you.” She looked directly at me. “Some things are just so painful that you can’t share them, and you know that if you even tried to you would do more harm than good.”
I fought back the tears. If even one fell then dozens more would follow, and I didn’t know when I would be able to stop crying. I didn’t have time for that.
I leaned closer to Blaire, pressing my forearms onto the table. “So this has something to do with where Seth went? Is that what you think?”
“I can’t imagine it being anything else. His life since then has been… normal. Mexico. Chicago. Nothing else has happened. He’s just been trying to get over it all.”
“This is what his dad was talking about.”
“I think so, yes.”
Phil spoke up. “He wouldn’t. No… he wouldn’t do it...”
I whipped my head toward him. “He wouldn’t do what?”
“If he’s gone somewhere then it’s back to Afghanistan...”
“Right,” Blaire agreed.
“And it’s for one purpose.”
I stared at Phil, waiting in dread. The gears in my head ground away but produced nothing. “What are you talking about?”
Phil grew pale. “It’s to get revenge.”
“Exactly,” Blaire intoned coldly.
“Re...” I stammered on the word.
“But why now?” Phil asked.
I nodded feverishly. “Yeah, it’s been a long time. So why now? Maybe he didn’t go to Afghanistan. Maybe he’s somewhere else.”
Blaire’s mouth twisted in doubt. “Where?”
My heart sank. The photo Seth emailed me. Perhaps it hadn’t been from years ago or one pulled off the internet. Maybe he had taken it and sent it to me in real time.
Blaire peered at me. “Has anything else happened recently? Have either one of you seen him acting weird, or talking about anything strange?”
I slapped the table with my palm. “His dad. He had a couple of meetings with his dad. And he wouldn’t tell me what they talked about, but the second time, the night before he told me he’d been deployed, he came to my house drunk. He was really messed up. He said something...” I tried to remember Seth’s exact words. “I think he said something about his dad blaming him, and about how he didn’t care.”
Blaire blinked rapidly. “That’s… awful.”
“Yeah. It doesn’t seem like they have the best relationship. I always thought it was because of Seth’s granddad and the falling out with his dad.”
“But maybe that’s not just it,” Blaire finished.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “It’s definitely not.”
Something occurred to me. “So much happened in Seth’s life all at once, or nearly. You said Emmy died four years ago?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And then his grandfather died… I can’t remember. What? A couple years ago? Right around the time his parents got divorced. And he told me he was always close with his grandfather. Closer than he was with his dad.”
Phil grunted. “That’s a lot of loss to deal with at once.”
Blaire’s eyebrows pushed together as she mulled it over.
I put up my hand. “Wait. I wasn’t suggesting that Seth has snapped.”
“No,” Blaire said. “I don’t think he’s gone crazy. But I do think that if he’s in Afghanistan, it has something to do with his dad.”
Phil leaned closer toward us. “What are you guys talking about? You’re saying Seth’s dad blames him?”
“Maybe,” answered Blaire. “And maybe, if Seth’s back in Afghanistan, that’s why he picked now to go.”
My gut twisted. “His dad might have said something to him. It hurt Seth, he went out and got drunk, then made a plan to hunt down Emmy’s killers. But of course, he couldn’t tell me that, so he lied.”
Phil wagged his finger. “And probably thought he could sell you the lie since you’re not in the army and don’t know the processes involved with getting deployed.”
I pursed my lips, feeling like an idiot.
Blaire sighed and pressed her hands against her temples. “One week… one more week and we would have been out of there.”
I gulped. “You mean Emmy was killed a week before you were to come home?”
“Yes,” she said dryly.
“How could Seth’s dad blame him?” Phil demanded. “He tried to stop her from going, didn’t he?”
I could answer that one. “Maybe he thinks Seth didn’t try hard enough.”
A thick silence settled over us.
“The asshole,” I spat.
“He lost his daughter,” Blaire said.
“Yeah and now he’s pushed his son away.”
And maybe lost him as well.
I stood up so quickly my chair fell over. Blaire and Phil both looked at me with wide eyes.
“I’m going to find him,” I explain
ed.
Blaire’s mouth dropped open. “What do you mean you’re going to find him? Quinn, we don’t know where he is! He could be...”
“But we have an idea, and that’s enough. I don’t know about you, but I can’t just sit around here and wonder what happened to him.” My words shook, and my lips trembled. I pressed them together to stop their shaking.
Blaire looked up at me, sadness in her eyes. “So what? Are you going to fly to the Middle East and hunt for him? You don’t even know where to start.”
“But you do. Do you have the name of the woman Emmy was trying to help?”
“No. I’m sorry, but I don’t. I don’t know if I ever knew her name.”
“But the name of your camp. It was called Black Horse, right?”
She hesitated. “Yes.”
“So I could start there. And do you know the name of the village the woman lived in?”
Blaire’s mouth opened, but she didn’t speak.
“Please, Blaire. Please”
“Tejen,” she replied. “It was called Tejen.”
“I’m going,” I declared, knowing without a doubt that I would do exactly that.
She stood up, imploring me with her eyes. “And do what? Walk into a military camp and start asking questions about something that happened years ago? Or a village where you don’t even know the language?”
“I can get a translator.”
Her jaw clamped shut. After a moment she reluctantly said, “Okay.”
I stared at her in surprise. “Yeah?”
She nodded. “What do you need from me?”
“Anything you can remember.”
“That’s all I remember. I told you everything. I’ll let you know if anything else comes to me, but I’m almost sure that’s it. Except… I want to go with you.”
“No,” I said, a fierceness in my voice. “I’m not going to put Seth’s friends at risk. Plus, you need to show up to your wedding day. There’s no point in all of us going.”
“This will be more dangerous than you think, Quinn.”
“I can accept that.”
“You might… you might be putting your life on the line.”
I swallowed hard. I knew what she was thinking. I’d only known Seth a short time. Why would I risk so much on someone I’d only just started calling a boyfriend? Mothers loved their babies way before they are born. Was it so hard to believe that a woman could risk herself for a man before their relationship was mature? I didn’t just love Seth right now. I loved the Seth I knew I would marry someday. The Seth who would father my children. The Seth who would walk our daughter down the aisle. The Seth I would grow old with. Love our grandchildren with. I might not know him very well, but I was in this for the long haul.
