“Yeah.” They’d talked about this before.
“What else has been going on in your life?”
“I kind of met this woman. She’s got twins—a boy and a girl—that are almost three. Her husband was a pilot and was killed in Iraq.” Hell, he’d probably told Esri enough for her to know which woman he was talking about.
Scarlet Springs was a tiny town, after all.
If she knew, she didn’t give it away. “Are you dating?”
“I don’t know that I’d call it that. I’ve never wanted to be a father. I’m not into kids, and she has kids, so that kind of rules out anything serious.” He told Esri how he and Ellie had met, how Ellie had invited him over for a glass of wine, and how he’d babysat for her yesterday so she could help at the hospital.
“You babysat?” Jesse had never seen surprise on Esri’s face—until now. “That’s really stepping out of your comfort zone, isn’t it?”
He nodded. “You could say that. Toddlers, little kids—they’re so helpless.”
Helpless.
The word echoed, reminded him of what he’d said a few minutes ago.
“What is it? You’ve got a faraway look on your face all of a sudden.”
“Do you think babysitting could explain the nightmare?”
“What do you think?”
Until yesterday, he’d have said that the idea of babysittingwasa nightmare, but it hadn’t been that bad.
“It was strange. I could’ve gone home after she got back from the hospital, but I didn’t. I grabbed some stuff out of my fridge—we’re neighbors—and made dinner for them. I could have gone home after that, but I didn’t.”
“What does that tell you?”
“I don’t know. That I really need to get laid?”
“Maybe it says that you were enjoying yourself, that you were getting something out of spending time with them that you didn’t expect.”
He remembered how it had felt to hold Daisy, to sit on the floor playing dump truck with Daniel, to see Ellie’s face when she inhaled the scent of his meat sauce.
“Have the two of you been intimate?” At the expression on his face, Esri held up a hand. “I’m asking for professional reasons, not to gossip about it. Nothing you say to me goes outside this room.”
“Not yet, but we did kiss and stuff.” He would leave it to her to decide what “stuff” meant. “I care about her. I care about the three of them.”
The moment he said it, he realized it was true.
Esri seemed to consider this. “Sometimes when we’ve shut off our emotions to try to stop feeling bad things, we stop feeling altogether. Then, when we let ourselves have good emotions again, we turn on the spigot and the dark stuff comes up, too.”
Wasn’t that just fucking convenient?
“So that’s it then?”
“It’s possible. You’re looking for a one-on-one correlation for the nightmare, a single cause. You don’t want to have that dream again. No one would. But I’m working on a puzzle, trying to help you put the pieces together, and there are a lot of puzzle pieces you haven’t shown me.”
Shit.
Chapter 10
The bus crashhad shaken Scarlet Springs to the core, and people were doing what they always did—coming together.
As Ellie drove to work Friday morning, she passed homemade signs of wood and cardboard that had been spray painted with the words, “Protect our kids from drunk drivers!” and, “Thank you, first responders!” Flowers were piled at the base of the flagpole outside Peaks Elementary School. Posters were tacked to utility poles announcing a benefit at Knockers tonight to help the Kirby family cover funeral costs. She would have to bundle up the kids and take them there for supper this evening.