Page 41 of Shielding Instinct

She was a writer, someone who put words on paper in the form of stories. By design, nothing she wrote was for public consumption, and she had no desire to expose herself to public scrutiny.

She wrote because, at night, her mind liked to ruminate, to go over every conversation to pick it apart, to second guess, to dig up some memory from her past. Memories from when she was two years old and that thing that happened.

That thing that someone said.

Ruminating. Ruminating.

Too often, the topic set on replay was from her time in Afghanistan, listening to the soldiers vent to her in their counseling sessions about the horrors that they lived through—about their friends who didn’t live through them. About holding their buddy's arm and then realizing it wasn’t attached to their friend’s body anymore.

She didn’t have PTSD.

She had neurodivergence, and the processing and reprocessing and the reprocessing of the repossessing was all part of that packaging—not to say that one diagnosis precluded the other. Just to say that Petra personally didn’t fit the criteria for PTSD.

What Petra had was an overly rambunctious mind.

Petra started writing following Rowan’s good counsel from back in their days at university, when he told her he handled the memories of his time in the military by writing about it.

When Petra could motivate her butt into a chair and her fingers around a pen, it had proved a successful strategy.

Instead of gnawing at the bone of some emotion, witnessing injustice, or re-evaluating some conversation, Petra could give that experience to her characters, and her characters could work it out.

Petra could chase down all the different ways things could have turned out and follow them to their likely conclusion.

A cognitive trial-and-error written out in long hand.

Petra knew she’d picked that bone clean when she was bored and wanted a new experience.

And so, with the Kennedys as friends—Rowan, the private writer, and Avery, the public editor—it made sense for Petra to make her public cover story that she was an author when she wanted the anonymity of an unexposed life.

Petra had both the lived experience of struggling to get words on a page, and all of the background words and industry updates in her back pocket to sound convincing as she told people things like what she was now saying to Jenny as they sat side by side with their feet in the tidepool, “I was talking a bit with Herb on the way here and he says you like military romance novels.”

“That’s true and rather an unusual subject of conversation.” Jenny scanned the area until she found Herb on a stone, slathering sunscreen on his beer belly. He positioned his things in a place where he couldn’t possibly see the children. And he looked like that was where he planned to stay. That left the kids to Jenny alone.

“He asked me what I did for a living,” Petra explained. “I told him I was an author.”

Jenny suddenly looked interested. “Have I read something you’ve written?”

“I write in a different genre. But I have a friend who’s fairly successful, Holly Smokes.”

“Reverse harems with SEALs and Delta Force operators. She’s talented.”

“Amazing at what she does.” Petra had never actually read Holly’s work, so she needed to move the conversation in a different direction. “I brought Holly up because your husband says you do adventure racing. I was wondering if you knew her from that?”

“I didn’t know Holly was an adventure racer. And there aren’t a lot of women who compete at my level.” Jenny turned in Herb’s direction.

He was sliding a ball cap protectively over his receding hairline.

Then Jenny scanned for her children. The water wasn’t deep. There was no current here. There were plenty of family-looking adults. She seemed satisfied that all was safe.

Jenny slid her sunglasses on. She looked like she wanted to lie back and end the conversation.

Since Petra was only talking to learn the story of the matching necklaces, before the “go away, please” vibe got too strong, Petra ventured, “On the way here, I noticed Herb was wearing a necklace with such an interesting design. And now I see that you and the children are wearing the same. They must be meaningful.” Petra had no reason to be nervous, but she found herself stimming to self-soothe, rubbing the ends of her hair between her fingertips.

Jenny’s gaze swept over her children, then up to Herb, who was staring out at the adjacent cove, paying zero attention to his family. Her gaze moved back to her middle child, the daughter—Petra didn’t know if any of these relationships she had mapped were correct. They seemed right, though.

And that middle daughter scowled back at her mother with ferocity.

Their eyes held for a long time.

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