The Color of a Promise (The Color of Heaven Series Book 11) Read Online Free PDF

bolted for the door. I heard him shout at someone in the corridor. “He’s awake and he’s in pain! We need help!”
    Nurses and doctors came rushing into the room. The sight of them in such a flurry of activity around my bed only served to increase my anxiety.
    “Where am I?” I asked the nurse who was pumping me full of something with a needle in a port. It was attached to a tube that entered my bloodstream, somewhere.
    “You’re in Landstuhl, Germany,” she replied in an American accent. “We’re happy to see you awake, Mr. Peterson. You’re a very lucky man.”
    Lucky?
    I’d never known such excruciating pain before, and over the next several hours, as I learned the extent of my injuries, I found myself wishing that I had not woken up at all.
    o0o
    It wasn’t easy for me to comprehend what the doctors were telling me, because I was pumped full of morphine and my brain didn’t seem to work very well. But I did my best to make sense of it—that I had been in a coma for the past twenty-four hours and major reconstructive surgery had already been performed on me. They told me I was fortunate because the accident had caused no brain damage or other permanent injuries. Most of the damage was to flesh and bone, which I was told would heal—eventually.
    According to the doctor who stood over my bed explaining all of this, my left femur was broken and my knee had been shattered. My face was a bloody, swollen mess from broken glass and flying bits of steel, while my arm was broken in two places. What concerned them most was my torso, which was blistered with third degree burns around my ribcage.
    “You’ll have a rough road ahead of you,” the doctor said. “I won’t lie. There’s going to be a lot of pain and the rehabilitation will take time, but you will walk again Mr. Peterson, and you’ll get your life back. You have a lot to be thankful for.”
    Thankful. The rational part of my brain knew he was right, but I was not concerned with my future in that moment, for nothing seemed the least bit relevant outside the tremendous pain I was in now. Not just the physical pain, but the knowledge that Paul, who had been my closest friend over the past two years, had not survived the accident. Nor had the other two soldiers who were driving in the Hummer with us. I was the only one they had been able to pull from the wreck.
    Naturally, I wondered why.
    Why me, and not them?
    o0o
    “Why are you here?” I asked Aaron after the doctor left us alone in the private ICU room.
    I hadn’t meant to be rude, nor was I trying to pick a fight with my brother. I simply found it odd that he, of all people, was the person who had come.
    “Mom and Dad are on their way,” he explained. “They got on the first flight out of Chicago as soon as they heard, but I was in Amsterdam. I was closest.”
    My brother owned a successful boatbuilding company based in Maine, with offices and factories all over the world, so he traveled a lot. He was known mostly for his champion racing schooners, and he was a multi-millionaire, married to the woman I had once wanted for myself.
    That was Katelyn. The one who had the cycling accident, whose life flashed before her eyes.
    “Is Katelyn coming, too?” I asked, hoping the answer would be no, because I didn’t want her to see me like this.
    I told myself it was not because I was still in love with her. I had worked hard over the past two years to accept that she and Aaron would always be together, and that I had to move on. But she was the reason I had requested this long-term assignment in Afghanistan—because I couldn’t bear to watch them together, so unbelievably happy.
    I believe Katelyn was well aware of my reason for leaving. Aaron didn’t know about this, but when I left the country, she rushed to the airport at the last minute to see me off and hug me tight. She had cried and told me to take care of myself and stay safe. She never wrote to me after that. I believe she knew I needed