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

time and space to forget her and move on.
    I imagined she was feeling pretty guilty right now.
    “No,” Aaron replied. “She can’t fly.” He gestured with his hands, indicating the size of her belly. “She’s due in a month.”
    I breathed deeply, while my heart thumped heavily in my chest.
    “Listen, Jack…” Aaron said, bowing his head and slowly shaking it. “I’m really sorry this happened to you. When I got the call, I was scared you weren’t going to make it.” His eyes lifted, and in them, I saw a look of regret. A desire to say he was sorry for all the times we fought—both in this life and in others.
    Strangely, I felt nothing as he spoke. No sudden wish to bury the hatchet. No burning desire to become best friends with him, at long last. As far as I was concerned, nothing had changed. There was simply too much water under the bridge, too many horrendous conflicts in the past that could never be erased. Things I couldn’t even speak of now.
    “I know we’ve never been close,” Aaron continued, “and we’ve been at each other’s throats for most of our lives, but you’re still my baby brother, and I want you to know that I’m here for you…whatever you need. We all want you to come home, Jack. Katelyn wants that, too. You know she thinks the world of you—she always has—and she’d like for our children to know their uncle. I want that, too. If we could just…”
    I was afraid he was going to bring up those old conflicts and try again to work things out, but there was no point. There was nothing he could say to make me understand where he was coming from. And hadn’t we agreed, years ago, not to talk about it, because it was another life? We were not the same people.
    Thankfully, he didn’t go there.
    “If we could just… start over ,” he said.
    Even with the heavy dose of morphine I had been given, the physical pain in every part of my body had not abated, and for that reason, I could not feel sympathy for Aaron’s regrets—if that’s what they were—nor could I make any decisions about my future. I simply could not think. I was too focused on enduring the throbbing agony in my leg, my arm, and the burns on my left side.
    Although…for Aaron to say that we had never been close was the understatement of the century. I closed my eyes, supposing that my accident had been a wakeup call for him, too. It had forced him to consider how fragile life was. Obviously, he wanted to mend what was broken between us. But the last thing I wanted was to return home to the United States in this mangled condition, with a great deal of suffering ahead of me, and have to watch, up close, his perfect life with the woman I had always wanted.
    Always.
    “I appreciate the sentiment,” I said, clenching my teeth and feeling the weight of this conversation take a toll on me, both physically and emotionally, “but I need to rest.”
    The burns on my side were excruciating, and all the cuts, bruises and swelling on my face made it difficult to speak.
    “Of course,” Aaron replied, sitting back in his chair. “I’ll leave you in peace.”
    Peace? I wished there could have been peace, but there was only the constant hammering agony in my body and troubling thoughts of my friend Paul and the two American soldiers who had perished, while I, for some reason, had been spared.
    I was no stranger to loss, but I wish I had known, in that moment, about the extraordinary events that were looming just over the horizon, and the miracle that was about to touch my life. It might have made the pain of those first few days easier to bear.

Chapter Nine

    My parents arrived in Germany that night and came straight to the hospital from the airport. They cried when they walked into the ICU and saw me in bed with my arm in a cast, my leg in traction, and a face looking like someone had taken a sledgehammer to it.
    I tried to assure them that I was fine and my wounds would heal. “It’s not too painful,” I lied.
    My