Page 5 of Midnight Secrets

In a moment she could remember only in her nightmares, her life had been swept away and what was left was the husk—a shell of a woman who couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, could barely walk.

She made it past the gate and after a moment’s hesitation turned left. It was a shorter walk to the park, there was no way she’d make it to the Green. Already her body was screaming for her to turn around and go back home. Close her front door behind her, curl up on the couch and stare at the wall until the light faded.

No. Keep on walking.

There was a stone wall fronting her house and she put out a hand to steady herself. It was in pristine shape, thanks to her incredibly helpful next-door neighbor, Joe Harris.

She’d left her largest pot filled with boeuf bourguignon on Joe’s doorstep. She could barely choke down yogurt herself but having Joe to cook for made cooking fun again. Running through her endless list of recipes for something Joe might enjoy was the one bright spot in her day, though she probably didn’t need to stretch and be creative—he seemed to like more or less everything she cooked for him.

Joe was always so incredibly grateful, as if she’d gone out, sheared wool off sheep, carded it, spun it and knitted him things. Or butchered the cows and harvested the wheat. As if she’d done this amazingly complex and elaborate thing just for him. It was only cooking and it kept her sane. Well, sort of sane. Sane had gone out the window on the night of the Massacre.

It barely compensated Joe for what he did for her. Everything in her house was in perfect condition. Joe would scour the place for things to fix or improve. She didn’t trust herself to drive but last month Joe had started driving and he drove her everywhere she wanted.

He’d been as messed up as she was when she’d moved here three months ago. But Joe had moved on. He’d used a cane that first day and he later told her he’d been on crutches the week before. The cane disappeared a few days after she arrived and every day after that he celebrated some milestone in putting himself back together again.

He was still thin but he was all muscle.

Yeah.

A wave of heat shot through her. Just thinking about him made her weak at the knees and her knees were already weak.

When doing repairs, Joe wore an ancient tee that was soft and thin from so many washings that every single muscle was visible through the thin cotton. When she’d first set eyes on him, thirty pounds ago, he’d been all muscle and sinew. Now he was even more muscle and sinew. Even when thin, his shoulders had still been the broadest she’d ever seen. Though, of course, in her previous life, muscles weren’t important in her crowd. She’d known more men with money than men with muscles.

Muscles were better. Who knew?

She often caught herself staring at him as he stretched or reached for something, trying to keep her jaw from dropping. He was just…magnificent.

Watching Joe move became her new favorite thing at a moment when all her favorite things had been taken from her.

He was pure sex, whether standing still or moving. Such a waste to have a guy like that for a next-door neighbor. Enticing, but out of reach.

Because the fact was that sex had fled from her world. There were the occasional non-menopausal hot flashes when Joe was doing something manly around the house but they were rare. Mostly, she felt numb. And cold. Dizzy spells would come and go, leaving her shaken and sweating.

She had continuous flashbacks of when she’d woken up in the hospital, completely alone because her entire family had been wiped out. The nurse who had told her that had burst into tears. That horrible moment was never covered by the gauze of memory. No. Horribly, her flashbacks carried the emotional weight of living through the horror, again and again.

Isabel carefully masked what she felt about Joe because, well, what would a man as vital as Joe want with a shell of a woman like her? He’d put himself together in three months and she was exactly as he’d found her that first day—dazed, halting, wounded.

She wasn’t getting better. She was getting worse.

These were thoughts she had a billion times a day. Buzzing round and round and round in her head like angry bees. It took an almost physical effort to wrench those thoughts in another direction. Joe was off-limits because she had no business yearning after him, not in the state she was in. That day—the day she found out she lost her family, the day she lost her life… She backed away from those thoughts as fast as she could. Don’t think about that.

So many things she couldn’t think about. Things she chased from her head the instant they appeared.

No past, no future. What was left was the here and now.Pay attention to the here and the now,she told herself constantly, because it’s all you have.The here and now, though, was vicious. She suffered from crippling bouts of dizziness that attacked her without warning. In the supermarket, shopping, in bookstores, in the bank, even at home. She’d suddenly feel the world swirl around her, no shape or meaning to anything. The ground would feel shaky under her feet. The only thing to do was freeze. She’d done that in the bank and in the supermarket and it had taken everything she had not to faint.

She’d stood in the middle of the bank’s lobby and in the frozen produce aisle, unable to move, feeling nauseous and dizzy, and wishing with all her heart she could just press a button and be home, in her bed, with the covers pulled up over her while she waited for her wildly pumping heart to slow down.

It had felt like a heart attack and she’d gone to the emergency room twice. It wasn’t a heart attack. It was her craziness, it was her broken heart. No hospital in the world could fix that.

Fix it. How? Nothing short of the miraculous restoration of her family to life could work. She was in a deep hole and it kept getting deeper, blacker. The second time she went to the hospital in an ambulance, she found herself hoping she was about to die. Just put an end to it.

That really scared her. As much as the outside world did.

The outside world terrified her, because she could never be sure she wouldn’t simply pass out.

Think of something else.

Okay. What?

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