All I made time for these mornings was my therapy of hitting the weights hard to take out my frustrations. My efforts resulted in well-muscled arms and a sculpted chest that narrowed to a V at my waist. I scrubbed a hand over my beard and sighed deeply.
It was the third time I had the nightmare in one week. Over the past year-and-a-half, the nightmare played out in my dreams and woke me from a dead sleep.
Knowing I wouldn’t be able to go back to bed, I climbed in the shower to wash the sweat and the haunted memories from my body and mind. The soap and water cascaded down my broad chest and thick thighs, and I scrubbed myself as if I could physically remove the memories.
It never worked.
Nothing worked.
I didn’t want it to work.
I coveted the pain.
The torment.
Pain was my way of seeking redemption. Redemption that I knew would never come.
I was living in my own personal hell, in the third town I’d moved to since that horrible night. I had to leave the place I’d once called home. It reeked of too many memories.
Too much guilt.
Too much innocence lost.
I walked to my kitchen to brew coffee, needing to kill time before Daniel would be awake in a few hours. He’d be up by five am his time. The Agency engrained that in him, just like it had in me.
Now, I was up before sunrise every damn day, but not because I had someplace to be. My mind was overwhelmed with memories that haunted me.
My little boy, Kason, had been sick that morning. He’d woken with a fever and his eyes crusted shut. I was pretty certain that he’d had pink eye, and my wife, Cary, had wanted to take him to the doctor to get checked out.
If I closed my eyes, I could still see the look of concern on her beautiful face. I could see the worry in her liquid brown eyes. I’d held her close to me and tried to tell her that everything would be fine.
Oh, how wrong I’d been. That was the last time I held her.
I remember sitting on the edge of my boy’s bed for a few moments, smoothing the dark blonde hair away from his flushed face. I bent down and kissed him before going to jump in the shower for work.
Little did I know when I left the house that morning, that it would be the last time I’d ever see them alive. If I’d only taken the day off to go to the doctor with them. If I’d only done any number of things differently that day, they’d still be alive.
I felt my heart begin to race, and I paced back and forth in my kitchen. I huffed a deep agonizing breath out into the air. It was happening again. A panic attack.
I needed to find something to do other than replay that nightmarish day in my mind or I was going to drive myself nuts.
Talking to Daniel would help. Daniel had become my closest friend through our years of field work at the Agency and he was the only one from my old life who I still communicated with. He’d been the only person who witnessed my downfall from start to present. Everyone else was locked out of my life for good.
It was better for them. Safer.
Daniel took care of most of the funeral arrangements.
A funeral I could hardly even remember.
I wanted to be left the hell alone.
Isolated from the world.
Bourbon tasted better than coffee, and the tears I should’ve been shedding came in the form of holes in my bedroom wall.
The police department in DC was filled with half-brained idiots. They called the shootings a simple home invasion and dropped the investigation after only a few weeks due to lack of evidence. It was a fucking joke.
The alarm system had been disabled, and the windows broken from the inside out. Nothing in the house was missing, and nothing was overturned as if someone was looking for something.