Page 2 of The Moment He Couldn’t Walk Away

Stepping outside into the pre-dawn darkness thirty minutes later, now with a full stomach, both men headed for the Humvee parked a few feet away. The air had a bite of cold to it, and a low fog still clung to the ground between the buildings. He had tactical maneuvers this morning, so he made his way to the vehicle he was driving. It sat low on its suspension, loaded down with heavy equipment.

Corporal Diaz climbed into the passenger’s side of the vehicle, while Finch did a slow circuit of it before climbing in, an old habit Drill Sergeant Okafor had beaten into him a lifetime ago and one he’d never managed to shake. Tires. Undercarriage. The security of the load strapped down in the back. Everything had to be squared away the way it should be. Satisfied, Finch swung up into the driver’s seat.

He felt the simmer of excitement that never really faded, no matter how many mornings like this one he’d had. He fucking loved his job.

Corporal Diaz yawned loudly. Some soldiers never got a handle on the early mornings. Finch loved them.

His thoughts circled back to Nina Winters as he started the Humvee moving. There had always been something about her that intrigued him. She didn’t take any BS from anyone—not even Blue Jay, and his sister could be fierce. He liked a woman who didn’t take anyone’s crap and knew her own mind. There was no getting around the fact that she was definitely his type. Pulling his mind back to the dark track ahead of him, Finch refocused.

Not the time, bud. He clearly hadn’t been with a woman in far too long if his brain was wandering like this on a training run.

Finch kept his speed steady, while beside him Corporal Diaz dozed, and pushed Nina and her body out of his head as he worked through the day’s itinerary.

The fog hadn’t burned off the way command had hoped. If anything, it had thickened and was pooling low in the hollows where the track dipped between the tree lines. It swallowed his headlights ten feet out and threw the light back at him in a flat gray wall. Finch eased off the accelerator without really thinking about it, an automatic correction built from many drives down this exact stretch of dirt and gravel. The radio in his ear stayed quiet, relaying only static and the occasional clipped check-in from the convoy somewhere ahead of him.

The deer came from nowhere, a pale shape exploding out of the fog and into the wash of his headlights, and it was directly in front of him before Finch had even finished processing what he was looking at.

“Fuck!” his passenger snapped.

Instinct took over, and his hands wrenched the wheel hard right, his foot already coming off the gas, his brain screaming at him not to hit it, to swerve. He felt the Humvee weight loaded on top shifting hard with the turn.

For one suspended second, nothing happened. The vehicle stayed upright, and the tires dug into the gravel road. Finch thought maybe everything was okay—and then the Humvee tipped. Slowly at first, and then all at once everything sped up. He heard the scrape of metal against rock, and the vehicle rolled once and then twice. The gear broke loose from its ties. His head slammed into the side door.

“Sarge!”

He heard the panic in Corporal Diaz’s voice but didn’t seem able to focus on anything. His head felt odd.

“Hold on, I’ll get you out!”

Those were the last words he heard, and then there was only darkness.

Chapter 2

One year later

Finch woke in a sweat like he often did after the nightmare. Pushing himself upright, he got out of bed, not wanting to risk slipping back into the hell. It was always the same—the deer came out of nowhere and then the Humvee was rolling. After that his life had changed beyond recognition.

Pulling on his clothes, he went to the bathroom and plunged his face into ice-cold water.

“Get it together, Finch,” he muttered when he was done, and headed to the kitchen. Looking out the windows, he saw the sun was well up. Just another thing he’d let slip since he’d left the army. There was no longer a need to rise early, because the days were long enough without making them more so.

Self-loathing wasn’t something he’d dealt with before in his life, but Finch was more than making up for that now.

Opening the wood burner, he threw in a few more logs, then headed for the coffeemaker. He got down a mug and dumped in a large spoonful of sugar. When it was full of black liquid goodness, he headed for the back door.

Opening it, he gazed out at the land that was part of his parents’ farm.

Trees of some evergreen variety, with leaves, others naked, hunkered down for winter. There were beds of earth ready for planting when the weather was warmer and various structures that no doubt had their uses, Finch just wasn’t sure what.

Turning, he studied the interior of the cottage, which was the secondary dwelling on the land, and tried to feel what he always did when he was here. Warm, comfortable, and familiar. But there was only numbness, icy and cold, filling all the spaces inside him.

A therapist had told Finch it was his brain’s way of protecting itself from the overwhelming emotion of loss and trauma, which sounded about right.

Finch and Lynx, his famous rock star brother, had painted the walls a soft butter color a while ago. His mother hadn’t been impressed. She liked bright colors.

Cradling his mug, he thought about going back to bed, where he’d spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling since he’d come home. The sound of voices stopped him. All women by the tones, which suggested his father was busy doing something or happy to leave him alone to deal with the hell that his life had plunged into.

The women in his family, however, were not. They’d fuss over him, trying to help him move on with his life.