“Coffee’s still on the list. As long as it’s fair trade.”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s only been nine months since we saw each other. Why no mention of any of this vegetarian stuff in your texts or emails?”
He could have pointed out that he’d been moving in this direction a lot longer than nine months, but she’d been too consumed in the world she occupied when they were apart to pay attention to something as mundane as his eating habits. Catching up on things they no longer shared was a conversation for another time. Instead, he nodded toward her camera and asked, “Did you get anything this morning?”
“I hope so.”
“Want to show me?”
“Yeah—as a matter of fact, I’d like your opinion on something.”
Although he knew dozens of photographers, Lindsey was the only person he went to for criticism. It was the same with her. They both dealt with editors who judged their work in the context of the story they were working on, and luckily, they’d both had several who were the best in the field. But Matthew had never gone to any of them with his personal work, and Lindsey had never shared the pictures she took for herself with anyone but Matthew.
She rolled up the too-long sleeves on her bathrobe and pulled the belt tighter around her waist before she opened her laptop and turned it on. With the memory card in the card reader, she sat on the sofa, angling to give Matthew room to sit beside her. In the time it took to download the pictures, he added another log to the fire.
She put her hand possessively on his thigh when he sat down. He liked it when she showed this kind of natural and easy communication, and he hungered for it more often than he had in their early years, when being apart was an exciting novelty. This easy intimacy was the way his parents interacted. They saw each other every day, but it seemed they were as excited when they were together as he and Lindsey were when they saw each other after months apart.
Lindsey clicked on the first picture, the one that out of habit she always took to check exposure and settings and to be sure the camera was operating the way it should. She moved to the second picture, stared at it for several seconds, and then wordlessly turned the screen toward Matthew.
What he saw was a mist-shrouded child, no more than four, her arms flung wide, her face glowing with unmitigated delight. “She’s beautiful,” he said, struggling for a better word. “What was she doing out there?”
“Gathering seashells to surprise her parents.”
“Where were they?”
“I’m assuming they were still asleep.”
“She was there alone?”
“Her grandparents were with her.” Lindsey turned the laptop back to search the picture more closely. She frowned and clicked on the next picture. And then the next. “They were right here,” she said. “They were right beside her the whole time.” She enlarged the picture and looked for aberrant pixels. “She talked to them. She gave her grandmother the shells to hold.”
Matthew took the laptop and made some adjustments to bring out details hidden by the fog. “There’s nothing here, Lindsey. Not even a shadow.”
She ran her hands through her wet hair. “I saw them, Matthew. I can describe them down to the kind of shoes they were wearing.”
He went through the remaining pictures, carefully searching the hundreds of images. What he saw was a child filled with the pure, raw joy that comes with the innocence of not knowing how bad the world can be and believing love doesn’t have to be earned, it just is. “Is this them?”
Lindsey glanced at the screen. She shook her head. “That’s her parents.”
“Did they talk to the old couple?”
She considered his question. “No . . . they were gone by the time Abbey told her parents about them.” She started to get up. Matthew tugged on her sleeve and brought her back down.
“Look at this.” He scrolled through the images until he found the one he was looking for, then pointed to the girl. “She’s definitely talking to someone.”
Lindsey stared at the screen and then scrolled further back. “Here,” she pointed. She skipped to another picture. “And here. She’s plainly listening, Matthew. And she’s laughing in this one.”
“Maybe she’s one of those kids who have imaginary friends.”
“And where does that leave me? Remember, I saw them too.” She enlarged another picture and studied it. “Look at this one—her hand’s outstretched. She’s giving something to someone.” She enlarged the picture further. “It’s a shell.”
Lindsey flipped back and forth between the picture of Abbey holding her hand out and the ones that came before and after. She’d been shooting on burst, and yet she hadn’t captured the actual handoff. In one frame Abbey was holding something, in the next she wasn’t. Lindsey enlarged the picture even further, looking to see if the shell was sitting on the sand. It wasn’t—at least not that she could see. Lindsey turned to look at Matthew. “What’s going on?”
“Beats the hell out of me.”
“Mutual hallucinations?”
“More likely ghosts,” he said jokingly.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said, staring at the screen.
“You have a better explanation?”
Before she could answer, her cell phone rang. She handed Matthew the laptop and headed for the kitchen, where she’d plugged in her phone the night before. She hadn’t even tried to hide what she was doing. Matthew had known there was no way the gesture of handing over her phone at the airport was anything but a way to say how sorry she was for all that had gone before. “It’s me,” she said in lieu of hello.
“No, I haven’t been watching CNN, David. We don’t have a television here. Just tell me what’s going on.”
Matthew closed the laptop and put it aside. Calls from David were never good news.
“Shit.” The word was more an expression of pain than profanity. “When?”
The silences were followed by rapid-fire questions until finally there was a silence longer than the others. “I can’t,” she said, her voice dropping low. “I mean it, David—I can’t.” This was followed by, “All right, then, I won’t. You’re going to have to find someone else this time.”
Matthew opened a cupboard door on the wall opposite the fireplace, touched a button, and stood back while a large-screen television came forward and angled itself toward a pair of recliners. He hadn’t been hiding the fact that there was a television at the beach house, he just hadn’t gotten around to telling Lindsey.
He glanced at the cable lineup and tuned in to CNN. Familiar faces filled the screen behind the reporter, one was a writer Lindsey had worked with in Afghanistan and another was a photographer she’d shadowed when she had her first assignment in Iraq. The third face that scrolled across the screen was a young Arab journalist Matthew didn’t recognize, and the fourth hit him with the force of a physical blow. Ekaterina Bradford was the wife of Matthew’s best friend, Zach. She was an award-winning photographer who specialized in human-interest stories, not battlegrounds. What in the hell was she doing in Syria? He turned up the sound.
“—missing almost forty-eight hours. Their bodies were found in a dump site near Damascus just days after Syrian forces again proclaimed they would kill any journalist who set foot on their soil. Early reports say it appears Bradford had been tortured and sexually assaulted. We’re waiting for confirmation of—”
“Turn it off,” Lindsey said, covering her ears with her hands. When he didn’t move fast enough, she raced for the remote control and frantically searched for the off button. Looking up and seeing the depth of his concern, she tried to cover her reaction with a shrug and a weak explanation. “They’re past any real news. All we’re going to get now is salacious retellings.”
He took the control from her and hit the off button. “Are you all right?”
Even as she answered him, she backed herself into a corner and collapsed into a fetal position, burying her face against her knees and covering her ears again,
as if the television were still playing.
Matthew was too stunned to move at first and then, slowly, not wanting to scare her, he lowered himself to his hands and knees and approached. How could he have missed what was happening to her? Shouldn’t he have recognized the PTSD symptoms, even over the phone? “What do you want me to do?” he said softly. And then, “Do you have meds?”
“I threw them away.”
He put his head back in frustration and stared at the ceiling. “Why?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
She was trembling noticeably now. “They made me groggy.”
Not knowing what he should do, he did the only thing he could and brought her into his arms. She was shaking so badly now that, at first, it was hard to hold her.
“I’m sorry,” she sobbed.
“Say something smarter,” he insisted.
Surprising them both, she laughed. “You’re sorry?” she said.
It broke his heart to hear the desperation in her voice. She didn’t want to be in the dark place that held her. He would give everything he had to help her, but he didn’t know how. So he simply rocked her and whispered words of love and softly sang her favorite songs. Eventually Lindsey stopped shaking.
She sat up and looked at him, working hard to gift him with a smile of appreciation. “I’m okay now.”
He kissed her tearstained cheeks. “Hungry?”
She nodded.
“Can we talk about this?”
“Later?”
He nodded. “I’ll fix us something to eat, and then I really need to call Zach.”
“You won’t reach him.” She unfolded her limbs like a flower reluctant to face the sun. “He left for Beirut this morning.”
“They know for sure it’s her?” he asked, his throat tightening as he fought to hold back his own tears. “There’s no doubt?”
“None,” she answered so softly he had to strain to hear her.
“Were they able to get them out?”
“Someone in the rebel forces arranged transportation to Beirut.” She ran her hands through her hair and then over her face. “David said their bodies are on the way there now. The Syrian army is celebrating this as a great achievement, doing everything they can to get as much attention as possible. They actually think it will keep journalists out of the country, at least female journalists. No one believes we have the stomach for this kind of thing, especially for seeing our women raped and tortured.”
Matthew knew without question where this was headed. “David wants you to go.”
“Of course.”
“Seems to me you’ve earned a pass on this one. Their story is going to be told a hundred times before you step on a plane. By the time you get there, they’ll be little more than a footnote on a page listing all the journalists and photojournalists who’ve been killed covering the Middle East.” He reached for her.
“It’s my job. I don’t have the luxury of going to work only when I feel like it.” What was she saying? She’d already told David she wouldn’t go. What screwed-up part of her mind couldn’t accept that?
Instantly, he was angry beyond reason. “That’s bullshit. When have you ever turned down an assignment? You’re going to have to come up with something better if you want me to believe you.” He stood and paced, trying to control the stupid urge to put his fist through a wall or to throw something. “Are you sure the real reason isn’t because no one would draw the same attention as a Pulitzer Prize–winning female photographer martyred for the cause? Is that what you’re after? Go down in a blaze of glory?” He started to walk away, then turned and came back. “Have you considered that when they find your mutilated body, there won’t be anyone left to cover the story the way you think it should be covered?”
She answered him with an achingly sad smile. “Is that the best you can do?”
He flung his arms wide. “I give up.”
This was why on particularly lonely nights he was tempted to walk away, why it didn’t matter how much he loved her or admired her or knew his life wouldn’t be the same without her. “Do what you want—I’m out of here.”
“I told him I wouldn’t go,” she said defensively.
He gave her a withering stare. “But did you tell him in a way he would believe?”
Chapter 5
Lindsey picked up her phone to see who was calling. It hadn’t stopped ringing since Matthew left. As she’d expected, it was David again, the third time in the past ten minutes. He wanted a chance to talk her into changing her mind.
Losing friends and colleagues in battle wasn’t something she would ever get used to, but since losing Asa it had gotten even harder, more personal. Why else would she have had that embarrassing meltdown in front of Matthew?
She understood Matthew’s reaction. He was scared, and he was tired of being scared, especially after what she’d just put him through. The episodes were something she’d been dealing with for a couple of years. Until today, she’d always managed to control them until she was alone.
In the field, she never had complete control over her environment, but she managed to maintain the illusion that she had options. Matthew had nothing but an occasional dispatch from wherever she was, assuring him that she was all right and that the IED or suicide bomber or riot she’d been assigned to cover had taken place miles away or before she arrived. They were mutually agreed-upon lies that protected them from the truth. For a man with Matthew’s imagination, waiting to hear from her was its own kind of hell.
It didn’t matter if he himself was in an isolated part of Botswana doing a piece on wild dogs or in the Amazon Basin tracking jaguars through hostile Shaur headshrinker territory, he worried about her. He tried to deny it, insisting that he understood her need to follow her own path and that he was okay with it. It was another all-consuming lie that had sustained their relationship for ten years.
The phone rang again. She didn’t have to look. It was David. He didn’t know how to back off or give up any more than she did. She bristled when someone called them adrenaline junkies, reducing their passion to tell the truth to the level of a video game.
This time she answered.
“You think this story is going to wait while you futz around with Matthew?” he said by way of greeting.
“Too far, David.”
He ignored her warning. “Matthew’s a nice guy, Lindsey, but what he does is cotton candy compared—”
“Stop right there, David. I’ve let you get away with talking about Matthew’s work that way in the past because you have the sensitivity of a slug and have never been in a relationship without a price tag. But no more. If you want me to keep taking assignments from you, then things are going to have to change, starting with accepting the fact I’m not taking this one.”
“When this gets out—”
It was everything she could do not to scream at him. Only the knowledge that losing her temper had never worked in the past kept her voice at a relative calm. “Just who did you have in mind to tell, David?”
“These people were your colleagues. They deserve to have their story told by the best. And that’s you.”
From manipulation to bullying, then back to manipulation. She hung up on him.
She tossed her phone on the recliner and headed for the kitchen to pour herself another cup of coffee. Her mother had always claimed that whatever inheritable domestic gene existed in their family had skipped Lindsey and doubled down on Rachel. Her sister made her own curtains, whipped out a five-course meal as if it were hot dogs on the barbecue, and made a room she’d decorated from Target close-outs look like something out of Architectural Digest. She did all of this while mothering three intelligent and well-adjusted kids.
Knowing this about herself was both a blessing and a curse. When some latent urge to do something domestic bubbled to the surface, it always took Lindsey by surprise, then left her confused and at loose ends.
Like now. Why was she looking at the kitchen with this stupid urge to ba
ke something? Why was she noticing the uncluttered granite countertops and the polished wood cupboards? Most of all, why did she wish this was her kitchen in her home when she’d fought Matthew for years over owning their own place?
Foolish questions when she already knew the answers.
She knew the exact moment when this latest longing to set down roots had hit her—when she’d had to leave Sittina at the refugee camp.
She had a thousand pictures of Sittina, only a few of which she’d had to go through as potential shots for the syndicated story. Her contract gave her control of her photographs once the agency chose the ones it wanted to use. She knew there were potential award-winners in the mix, but she couldn’t bring herself to look at them. Not now. Not when the mental image of Sittina watching as Lindsey left the camp remained burned into her consciousness.
There hadn’t been anything accusatory or condemning in the look Sittina gave her. There wasn’t even a silent plea. It was the acceptance on the girl’s face that broke Lindsey’s heart. Sittina might have had the bad luck to be born in a country that had been at war with itself since assuming self-governance over fifty years ago, but that didn’t mean she was automatically denied hopes or dreams or ambitions. It was fundamentally wrong that she should accept being abandoned again, as if it were a warped kind of birthright and as natural as seeing her family slaughtered.
Before she left, Lindsey had made arrangements with a friend who worked for Save the Children to do what she could to find Sittina’s grandmother, even though she knew that finding the grandmother was as likely as finding a beloved family heirloom floating in the Japanese tsunami debris field headed toward North America.
A tear dropped from Lindsey’s chin to her chest. She grabbed the kitchen towel and wiped her cheeks. How could she not know when she was crying?
She poured her coffee, added creamer, and went to her computer, opening it and waiting for the familiar humming sound and the flash of color. A picture of Matthew blowing her a kiss came up first. He’d made it her wallpaper a couple of years ago after a trip to Holland, surprising her when she opened her computer on the plane. Corny, but effective. She’d taken a lot of teasing about it from people she knew would trade places with her in a heartbeat. In her circle of photographer and reporter friends, a long-lasting relationship was about as easy to come by as a double-indemnity accidental-death insurance policy.
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