She picked her way through them.
Despite the ferocity of the storm, everything around her looked so white, so pure, and in a sense, remarkably innocent.
A stark contrast to how she felt inside.
Seven months ago, on the night it happened, she’d watched a man outside the back window of the home where she and Patrick were staying get shot and drop in the moonlight. Detective Cheyenne Warren, the woman who’d just fired the three shots at him, eased out the door, gun in hand, to see if he was alive or dead.
Tessa remembered how terribly her heart was beating.
Beating.
Deep and chilled.
Moments later, she’d heard another shot outside, then the wisp of a door opening and a swish of soft movement behind her. She turned, saw a man’s outline silhouetted against the moonlight seeping through the window behind him; his hand was raised high, something long and narrow in it.
Before she could call out, he brought the object down, hard, against her forehead, sending her spinning to the floor. The world went filtering, black on black.
A buzz inside her head.
Then she was on the carpet and everything was fuzzy and spinning and alive with colors that weren’t colors at all.
And then the man was pressing a knee against her chest and stuffing a gag into her mouth.
Terror rising.
The world became blurry as the ache in her forehead pounded through her, but she was aware of this much: the man dragging her down the hallway toward her room. And then, only a few moments later, she heard the porch door pound open and Patrick calling her name. She struggled to get free but couldn’t. The intruder yanked her to her feet and pressed a gun against her head. With his other hand he clung to a fistful of her hair.
Patrick called again and she tried to shout to him, but beneath her gag she barely managed to make a sound.
Then he was in the hallway, coming toward her, to help her, to save her.
The man jerked her backward into a room, closed the thick oak door, and took off the gag.
He demanded that Patrick tell her who was lying dead outside, threatening to kill her if he refused.
Patrick had tried to buy time, but in the end he’d told her.
Her father.
It was her father who’d been shot.
And when she heard the words, she screamed and Patrick used the moment to shoot at the lock and kick open the door, but the man was behind her, the gun against her temple once again. This time he held his finger over hers, which was pressed against the trigger.
She knew she was going to die. She knew it, knew it, knew it, and reached across her chest, grabbed her elbow, and swung the gun backward.
And squeezed the trigger just as Patrick fired at the man’s forehead. She felt the wet blowback of blood against the back of her neck as the bullets both found their mark and the man behind her died.
Crumpled to the carpet.
Then her ear was ringing and she was trembling, terrified, and Patrick was helping her outside and away from that house filled with so much darkness and death.
The hearing in her ear that was only inches from the gun never came back, and since that night Patrick had tried to reassure her that he was the one who’d killed the man; that it wasn’t her fault, that the gun in her hand had fired accidentally.
He had tried to convince her of that.
And had failed.
Because she knew she’d pulled that trigger, had willed it, had planned it, had done it.
And in the end she was glad she did.
She’d lost her father that day, and somewhere between tilting the gun and shooting a man in the face, she’d lost herself.
The snow whirlwinded around her, forcing her to turn up her collar all the way even before she reached the truck. As she tried to unlock the door she fumbled with the keys and ended up dropping them into the slope of snow at her feet.
The wind bit at her.
With her bare hands she began digging through the powder, looking for the keys.
Remembering.
Of course she’d mourned the loss of her father, but since she’d hardly known him, it was almost like mourning a stranger-someone you hear about on the news: a body was found in the park and you feel a wash of loss and concern, and then end up with only a vague sense of guilt that you don’t feel worse than you do.
In the seven months since that night, she’d learned to forgive the woman who’d accidentally killed her dad.
And over time, life had gone on.
In a way.
Because even as the sting of her father’s death had healed, the reality of what she’d done, the fact that she’d pulled the trigger and killed a person, weighed on her now more heavily than ever.
She finally found the keys, unlocked the door, and went for her bag. As soon as she had it, she left the truck and started for the house again.
She had them.
The pills that would help her sleep.
45
Tessa reentered the house. Stomped the snow from her boots.
Patrick didn’t know about the secret wound she carried.
Almost immediately after the shooting she’d decided it was something she needed to work through on her own, but that hadn’t gone so well. She’d even tried seeing a psychiatrist a few times on Thursday afternoons, skipping her seventh-hour study period, bugging out of school and cruising over to the guy’s office before heading home, using the money she’d inherited from her dad to pay for it.
But her shrink was a one-trick pony telling her over and over that getting her feelings out into the open was good for her, when in reality all it had done was churn up the pain and harsh memories and then leave them choppy and gray on the surface of her life when the fifty-minute sessions were over.
She’d stopped seeing him after three weeks.
She hung up the keys, shed the coat and boots, and then took her bag to her room.
Yes, that man she’d killed had a gun pressed against her head, yes, it was self-defense-she knew all of that intellectually and had tried to reassure herself that she wasn’t guilty according to any law.
But reassuring her conscience was a different story.
“Tell me how you feel,” the psychiatrist had said to her in their last session.
“Like I’m sinking.”
“Into what?”
“Myself.”
“And what does that mean? Sinking into yourself?”
It means I’m losing. It means it’s getting harder and harder to breathe, to see a place where hope is real again. It means I’m sinking into a place I can’t climb out of on my own.
She stared at him. “Is that what they teach you in graduate school? To just ask follow-up questions? Just active listening, reflecting back to me what I’m saying?”
Where were you on career day when they brought that little gem up?
He rolled his pen between his fingers. “It’s okay to be angry,” he said. “And it’s okay to be disappointed.” He paused and she waited. She wasn’t going to make this easy for him. At last he said, “But you have to learn to forgive yourself.”
“That again.”
“Yes.”
“Really. Forgive myself.”
“That’s right.”
“What does that even mean?”
“To forgive yourself?”
“Yeah.” She’d had enough of this. “And if you ask me what I think it means, this session is over.”
He took a breath and then hesitated, and she could tell he really didn’t know what to say.
Nice. He tells you to forgive yourself and then he can’t even explain what he means.
“Obviously,” she told him, “it’s not just marginalizing the event or simply acknowledging the pain and then doing your best to ignore it, it’s gotta be more than that or ‘self-forgiveness,’ if there even is such a thing, would just be a casuistic form of denial.”