Guarding The Soldier's Secret. Kathleen Creighton
mine. And when a tear detached itself from the shimmer and slid away down her cheek... I didn’t have a clue what to do. I remember kneeling down...putting my arms around her...feeling her body trembling. She was trying so hard not to cry. I think I picked her up then. I must have, because I woke up on my cot with her wrapped in my arms, sound asleep.
She paused, then went on in a half whisper. “What kind of person do you think I am?”
“I don’t really know that,” he said, matching his voice to hers. “Do I?”
“You know a whole lot more about me than I do about you.” She threw that at him, tight and quivering with emotions, three years’ worth of fear and uncertainty and unanswered questions. “I live my life in the public eye. You live yours in the shadows. You’re a...a—”
“Ghost?” A single word, spoken softly in the darkness.
Her chest constricted with the pain of remembering. She gave a helpless whimper of a laugh and turned away from him.
His voice followed her. “You still haven’t answered my question.”
She shook her head and looked up at the night sky, where the stars were veiled by the lights of the city, as they were in New York and Los Angeles and all the other cities where she lived most of the time. Starry nights were one of the things she missed now that she was no longer reporting from remote battlefields.
“Why did I keep her with me and not hand her off to some stranger?” She paused, then took a careful breath and answered truthfully. “At first, I guess it was because she seemed so...lost. So scared. So wounded.” She has your eyes. Did you know that? I know it’s not unusual for Afghans to have light-colored eyes...blue or green or hazel eyes. But Laila’s eyes are your eyes. “The way she looked at me...as if she trusted me.”
“I told her she could.”
How different his voice sounded. Did she only imagine it was emotion she heard? Or was she projecting her own inner turmoil onto him? Surely the Hunt Grainger she knew would never allow himself to be caught in such an unguarded moment.
But then, I really don’t know him at all.
If only I could see his face, she thought, then remembered, The same darkness protects us both.
“And was that it?” His voice was relentless. Implacable. “Just...she looked scared? So you decided to take on the responsibility of raising a child? Come on, Yancy.”
He’d had enough interrogation experience to know when someone was lying to him. Or being evasive, at least.
He knew he’d cornered her, so he wasn’t surprised when she jerked around to face him, squaring off again, obviously angry, struggling to find the right words. Which was pretty amazing, considering words were ordinarily her best weapons of choice.
The qualities of the night hadn’t outwardly changed—the same soft darkness, the sound of trickling water from a fountain in a neighboring garden set against the far-off percussion of city traffic—but the courtyard was no longer peaceful. Now it seemed more like a battlefield, crackling and humming with tension.
“Obviously, Laila isn’t—wasn’t—just any child.” Yancy’s voice was infused with the same tension that filled the air around them. “And even if she was, we don’t simply pass them along, like...like shipping off a package on a train. Every case is different, and we always try to do what’s best for the child. Sometimes that means educating the family, even paying a bride-price or school tuition so the child can stay with her parents. We only take a child away if she’s an orphan or in immediate danger.”
“She was—I told you that.”
“In danger, yes. But not an orphan, not entirely. She had a father, someone she knew.” She paused, and there was accusation in the silence. Then, in a breaking voice, she said, “I thought she had you.”
“So, you kept her because she was mine?” It took some doing, but he managed to keep any trace of emotion out of his voice.
“Of course I did,” she lashed back, then caught a breath that suggested she might not have wanted to admit that. After a moment, she said on the exhalation, “She was yours—you’d told me that—so naturally I assumed you’d be coming back for her.” Again she paused, and this time when she went on it was in her reporter’s voice, vibrant with controlled passion. “Which I thought would be a few days. Then a few weeks. But you didn’t come back, and after a whole year had gone by, I thought you must be dead. Surely you were dead, because, I thought, how could any man abandon his own child without one word?”
Or me! The thought intruded, slipped past her defenses. How could you abandon me?
She rushed on before he could respond. “Anyway, by that time I’d grown so attached—” She shook her head as if throwing that word away. “Okay, I’d fallen in love with her. It’s not hard to do, you know. I couldn’t bear the thought of losing her. So I started the process of adopting her. It wasn’t easy, but I’m in a unique position to get some strings pulled and cut through a lot of red tape. The adoption was final six months ago. She’s my child, Hunt. My daughter.”
“Did you even try to get in touch with me?”
She gave a huff of laughter. “Seriously? I’m a reporter, remember? I called in every favor, accessed every contact I had. Brick walls. Everywhere I turned, the story was the same. You’d been killed in action. The rest was classified. They wouldn’t even give me your family’s location so I could tell your parents they had a granddaughter. I thought— Never mind what I thought! Why am I answering your questions? You’re the one who owes me an explanation. A hundred explanations.”
The words seemed to ring in the quiet courtyard, like the after-humming of a struck gong. He listened, and it seemed as though he could feel the vibrations in his own chest. A hundred explanations. Yes. And it still wouldn’t be enough.
“I’m sorry,” he said stiffly.
She uttered a high sound, too sharp to be laughter. “Is that all? Seriously? Even now? Just...I’m sorry?”
He stared at her. His eyes felt hot and his face like stone. What could he say to her? He didn’t know how to talk to her, not this way.
In the darkness, touching her...he’d felt as if the depths of her soul, the secrets of her heart, the mysteries of her mind were all accessible to him, in protected vaults to which only he held the key. And that, if he wanted to, when the time was right, he could open the doors, unlock the secrets, learn what treasures she kept hidden from the rest of the world.
That was then. In the darkness...touching.
This is now, and everything has changed.
The physical distance between them was small—an arm’s length, no more. He could have reached across it and touched her—her face...her hair...her neck. He remembered the way it smelled, that soft sweet curve of neck and shoulder, hidden by the thick fall of hair, warm and musky from sleep. Memory struck like a knife in his gut so that he winced as if with physical pain. Because he knew the distance between them was a bottomless chasm, one he didn’t know how to cross.
“You know I’ve never been able to talk about my missions,” he said at last.
So, it’s come back around to this. The mission. As it always would.
As Yancy gazed at him through a haze that was half tears, half anger, it appeared to her as though Hunt was moving away from her, as if she was on a fast-moving train and he was left standing on the station platform. She felt an almost overwhelming sense of grief and loss.
She made a small, helpless gesture, taking in the whole of him—clothes, beard, surroundings. “That’s what this is—all this—a mission?”
“Of course.” With arrogance in his voice and his arms folded on his chest, in the near-darkness he seemed to become the Afghan chieftain he pretended to be.
“And you