Four hours later
Thursday morning
November 3 — 8:07 a.m. PDT
San Diego, California
Asleep and awake at the same time, Alex felt the bed rock one way and then the other. Back and forth. Every cell in her body continued to rock to the ocean waves. Her body shivered from fear and cold. Like the motion of the waves, her head repeated a single wave of thoughts — “You forgot a line of ‘Deep Peace.’ You’ve failed Zack. Now, he’ll never rest in peace.” She’d wake up just enough to remember that she’d said every line only to fall to sleep and hear the same thing — “Zack cannot rest in peace because you forgot a line of ‘Deep Peace.’ You’ve failed him.”
“Stop!” Alex said as she sat up in a dark room.
She felt the rocking waves of the ocean. Exhaustion tugged at her. She lay back down.
She heard a sound and sat up again.
“Hello?” Alex asked.
“It’s me, love,” John said.
He was sitting in a reclining chair just behind and to the left of her. She could tell by the color of the recliner that they were in some hospital recovery room. She grabbed her IV lines and started to tug on them.
“Are you okay?” Alex asked. “You made a noise.”
“Are you?” John asked. He moved to sit on her bed. “You keep waking and saying, ‘Stop!’”
He took the IV lines from her and put them back where they belonged.
“Sorry.”
“What’s that about?”
“I keep thinking I forgot a line of ‘Deep Peace,’” Alex shrugged.
“You usually forget ‘Deep peace of the shining stars to you,’” John said.
“I did this time, too. But . . .” Alex leaned forward to kiss his lips. “I remembered you telling me that I always forget it and said it last.”
“You made sure to leave off the verses about Christ?” John asked.
“Catholics co-opted every Goddamned thing from those they enslaved,” Alex said in a repeat of one of John’s brother, Cian’s favorite rant. John grinned in response.
“How are you?” John asked.
He leaned forward to be an inch in front of her. His eyes searched her face.
“I feel okay. Cold, tired,” Alex said. “I have the feeling that my ‘okayness’ is due to the pharmacy pumping through my veins.”
She gestured to the IVs, and John nodded.
“Zack?” Alex asked.
“He’s alive, thanks to you,” John said. “He’s in critical condition, but they expect him to make a full recovery.”
“And the team?” Alex asked.
“Your team was picked up by the Coast Guard, as you had arranged,” John said. “Leena’s new love — do we know her name?”
“Harlowe,” Alex searched her mind for the woman’s first name and then shrugged. “I don’t know her first name. Captain.”
“Captain?”
“Pretty sure,” Alex grinned.
“Yes, well, Captain Harlowe took the team into her custody. They were arrested but have been let go. No one expects charges to be filed.”
“Who found Zack and me?” Alex asked.
“That is a good story,” John said. “But one that will have to wait until you’ve rested some.”
Alex lay back on the bed and closed her eyes. John didn’t move from the bed. Alex groaned internally. He needed to talk. She opened her eyes and sat up again.
“I have something to say,” John said.
“Okay.”
“You almost died last night,” John said.
Alex winced. She opened her mouth to continue. He raised a hand for her silence and she closed her mouth.
“Before you start your whole ‘I’d understand if you don’t want to be with me’ campaign, I’d like to say something,” John said.
“Oh?”
John waited for a moment.
“You’re not going to say anything?” John asked.
Alex shook her head rather than getting into the loop of “I want to hear what you have to say/You don’t want to hear what I have to say” that was currently on rotation in their household. Alex was sure it was something he’d picked up from the jerk of a doctor John was training under. John was sure it was a manifestation of her recent “retirement.” Either way, Alex kept her mouth shut to try something different.
He opened his mouth and then shut it.
“Oh. I see what you mean. Look at that,” John said. He looked away. “I was just about to start what you call the ‘You’re not listening’s.’ I have picked this up from my training. But not from our teacher, from the other doctors.”
“Ha!” Alex pointed at him, and he laughed.
He kissed her, and she rested her head against him
“What’s going on?” Alex asked.
He was silent for a while.
“So, I almost died,” Alex started.
“Again,” John said.
“Again,” Alex said.
“I guess I want to say that we need to decide what the hell we are doing,” John said. “When you came home from being spanked by that horrible misogynist at the Pentagon . . .”
“Ingram,” Alex said. “Admiral Ingram.”
“Yes, I know his name. I was avoiding saying it,” John said.
Alex opened her mouth to quote a movie, and he pointed to her.
“Don’t,” John said. “There’s no reason to believe that he is an evil wizard.”
But he smiled. She grinned at him. He cleared his throat and raised his eyebrows. She nodded for him to go ahead.
“Since you returned from your confrontation with Admiral Ingram, I have not pressed you about what you’re doing next,” John said. “You said you wanted time to think, and certainly you have plenty leave and about ten years of overtime. This whole ‘I’m dead’ thing is a little macabre, but . . .”
John shrugged.
“We never got around to discussing what’s next for me,” Alex said.
“For us,” they said in unison.
“And I almost died,” Alex said with a soft smile.
“Precisely, but not the point,” John said. “I’m not saying that I’m numb to the fact that I almost lost you last night. I am not. I just . . .”
He shook his head and gritted his teeth to keep from saying more. She touched his cheek and he looked at her again.
“We can do anything,” John said. Alex nodded in agreement. “What would you like to do with the rest of your life?”
“The rest of my life?” Alex asked.
“Last night, you almost drowned in the ocean,” John said. “For an Army Lieutenant Colonel who lives in landlocked Denver, Colorado, the very idea is absurd to say the least.”
Alex closed her eyes and nodded.
“No, listen to me,” John said. Alex furrowed her brows at the return of the “Are you listening?” drama. He acknowledge with a nod but continued talking. “If you had died, you would have died in this limbo — not in the military and certainly not out of it. No military benefits. No death benefits for our children. No burial at Arlington National Cemetery. And all because someone implied that a team sent by Admiral Ingram was lost, likely because of his poor leadership.”
“They asked for me,” Alex said.
“Yes, I remember,” John said. “Have you ever wondered why they asked for you? ”
“Sure.”
“And?”
“That’s totally off the point,” Alex said. “I want to hear what you have to say.”
John burst out laughing. He threw his arms around her and hugged her tight.
“My brilliant Alex,” John said. “I am so glad you survived your time in the drink. Let’s not do that again. Okay?”
“Deal,” Alex said.
She kissed his lips and held him.
“Please,” Alex said softly in his ear. “Tell me.”
John shifted away from her. His eyes instinctively went to the ground.
“Last night, Trece came to the house,” John said. “He told me what happened, how you’d tricked him out of the helicopter and how Zack was missing as well. He made a joke that maybe you and Zack had eloped, but then told me that a team of people was looking for you and Zack.”
“A team of people?”
“Military contractors,” John said.
“What? Contractors? Why?” Alex shook her head. “No. Tell me later. Right now, I’d love to know about what you’re upset about.”
John nodded and continued.
“When he left, I sat in the living room by myself,” John said. “Quince was with Joey and Máire. Helene was pretending to help her mother with dinner. I had to nowhere to go. No one who needed me. You were, for all intents and purposes, lost to me. And I . . .”
He sighed. Sergeant Quince Davies was on assignment as their children’s nanny.
“I wondered what we were doing,” John said. “It was just a few months ago that you were hot on the trail of this Black Skeleton. We were doing this thing together, with your team and a whole host of intelligence officers, of course. You lived away from me, in North Dakota, for God’s sake, to stay on the trail. We made the arrangements to buy that building and the refurbish has started! Right this minute, there are workmen in the building, our building. And now, you’re sort of not in the military, sort of helping hostages, sort of working on this Black Skeleton thing, and mostly moping around.”
“It’s sort of like being dead,” Alex said.
“Yes, it is,” John said. “For me, too.”
Alex nodded.
“We’re . . .,” John used his hands to gesture from himself to her and back. “We’re not working our plan. We’re knocked off course, and last night . . .”
“I could have died,” Alex said.
“For nothing,” John said. “Not one damned thing. No one knows if men are actually lost or if it was something invented to reject you in front of everyone again. To humiliate you again. We don’t have any certainty why you were shunned on the ship. Do we?”
Alex shook her head.
“Or why they came after you with armed military fighter jets with orders to shoot you out of the sky!” John said. “Outrageous. Simply outrageous. Indefensible.”
Alex bit her lip and nodded.
“What are we doing?” John asked. “Because right now, it feels like we’re chasing our tails — or, worse, we’re waiting on queue for the firing squad.”
“I wouldn’t mind chasing your tail,” Alex said with a grin.
He gave her an irritated look.
“Okay, okay,” Alex said. “Let’s do this. I will think about what you said, and you will think about it. Before this day is out . . . What day is it?”
“Thursday, November 3,” John said.
“Wow, it’s only been a day since Mom told me I was autistic,” Alex said.
“Your mother what?” John asked.
She shook her head.
“Never mind,” Alex said. “Before this day is done, we will sit down . . .”
“Put pen to paper,” John said.
“Put pen to paper,” Alex said. “And figure out what we want to do. The problem is . . .”
“What?” John asked.
“I’m not sure I’ll know,” Alex said.
“Pros and cons?” John asked.
“We’ll make a pros and cons list, for sure,” Alex said. “Or at least start one.”
“Start a pros and cons list,” John nodded. “Like . . .”
“Medical school,” they said in unison.
“We did for medical school,” Alex said with a smile. “We can do this. We’ve done it before.”
John leaned in and kissed her.
“When do I get out of here?” Alex asked.
“How do you feel?” John asked.
“Like crap in a crockpot,” Alex said.
“Lovely,” John said. “I’m going to ask you something, and I’d love the truth. Promise?”
“Okay,” Alex said slowly.
“How is your hip?” John asked.
To annoy him, Alex rolled onto her left hip and looked at her right. She shrugged.
“Fine, why?” Alex asked.
Offended, John crossed his arms and scowled at her. She grinned.
“It hurts,” Alex said. “I don’t think the joint was designed for a billion hours of continuous motion in the open ocean.”
“At least you’re weren’t alone,” John said.
Alex’s eyes filled with tears. She shook her head.
“Jesse was with you, wasn’t he?” John asked.
“I haven’t seen him since Ingram’s office,” Alex said.
She sniffed back her tears.
“You’ve called for him?” John asked.
Alex nodded.
“And?”
“I haven’t seen or heard from him since Ingram’s office.”
“And Max has been in France working on that case,” John said. “I know I haven’t spoken to him in months. Have you?”
Alex shook her head and bit her lip. John put his arms around Alex.
“I’m so sorry,” he said into her ear.
Alex let go of an ocean of tears.
F