A Deeper Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page B

wouldn’t escape him tonight.
    She went back to the computer and looked up the online stories again, the same ones she’s stared at when she got off the phone with Eleanor. They were sparse on details, long on color. Donovan was the twelfth carjacking victim in the District so far this year. He was driving through an area that wasn’t well known for violence; the community organizers were in a frenzy. That was it for the crime. The rest was local hero stuff. There was a lengthy history of his time in the service, which brought all the horrible feelings Sam had stuffed into the boot heel of her heart back to the surface.
    Donovan had enlisted out of high school, done his tour in Desert Storm, then came home and went to college. Sam met him the first week of med school. He was part of her Gross Anatomy team of first-years. They took turns egging each other on to make that first cut into dead flesh, learning the depersonalization skills that were so vital to their intended career paths. But then the war started again, and he got noble, started entertaining the notion that he wanted to go back in, this time as a Ranger. He would be a tough guy, infantry. On the front lines. Leading the 11 Bang-Bang into battle. And if his medical training could help save lives in the bargain, so be it.
    She couldn’t shake him from his path, which seemed to her a death wish: infantry sustained the highest number of casualties in a war. She had to admit, part of her was so hurt when he chose the military over her that she let him walk away. The night on Key Bridge, when he’d kissed her, said he loved her, then told her he was leaving and broke her heart in two.
    She could have promised to wait for him, but she knew that would be a lie. She had another, one who loved her desperately, one who wanted her home, wanted to share her life. One who put her life plans first, who called daily telling her she was missed. One she’d already committed to. In truth, even though heartbroken, Donovan reenlisting gave her permission to move back into her life the way it was originally meant to be. Donovan was simply a diversion on the road.
    She told herself that, and eventually came to believe it. Mostly. She pushed the feelings down into a tiny deflated ball, flat and meaningless, a spot of black on an otherwise perfectly red and juicy heart.
    She turned off the computer, careful to check that the surge protector was on, then went back to her bedroom. Shadows danced across the walls as she moved, slowly, numbly, to the bed and lay down. Got up and washed her hands. Lay down again.
    A different woman might have been tempted to open up the closet door, drag out that brown box she kept—the before box—and look through for a picture she knew was in there.
    But she didn’t. Samantha Owens wasn’t the type of woman to look back.
    She kept telling herself that. If she repeated it enough, it might even come true.
    Relief came a few hours later, when the alarm began to buzz. Shower, coffee, cornflakes, a relatively quick drive across town. The airport wasn’t crowded, the lines for security mercifully short. She glided through—apparently women weren’t being X-rayed this morning, only the men—and had plenty of time to grab another coffee from the Starbucks.
    She lined up dutifully when her time came, got on the plane, sat and pulled the bottle of Purell from her plastic bag. She rubbed the antibacterial gel into her cracked palms, and remembered the last time she was supposed to fly. Their vacation had been a spur-of-the-moment thing, and she realized she’d never called the airline to let them know they weren’t coming. She may even have a credit. She’d have to check. It went into her mental database of things to do that she’d never really remember, the file that flitted through her life like little birds hopping up and down the branches of the river birch in her yard. She told herself that she remembered the things that mattered. That made her