Loving Jessie Read Free Page A

closet or monsters under his bed, never been afraid of things that went bump in the night, maybe because his family had come complete with a real live monster in the form of his father’s drunken rages. It was only now, a couple of years short of his fortieth birthday, that he’d learned to fear the things that lurked in the dark.
    The nightmares had started three months ago, shortly after he got home from the hospital. They’d come occasionally at first—once or twice a week, jerking him from sleep into sweating, shaking wakefulness, half-remembered images floating in the darkness before his eyes like red-tinged bits of film cut from a horror movie, memory and imagination so tangled together that it was difficult to separate the two.
    He’d tried to ignore them, the same way he ignored the ache in his shoulder, shoving both into a sort of mental closet and slamming the door tightly closed. It worked. Some of the time. Whole days went by when he could almost convince himself that he was just taking a little time off before going back to work. He could half forgetthe nightmares and the bullet hole in his shoulder and pretend not to see the dust settling on his camera case. But there was something about the black, after-midnight hours that stripped away the lies and exposed the cold, white bones of truth.
    He wasn’t taking time off. He was burned out, drained, empty, wrung dry—you could take your pick of clichés. It all boiled down to the same thing. The life he’d spent the last fifteen years building was crumbling around his ears. The camera that had been his almost constant companion felt clumsy and alien in his hands. The city, this apartment, everything that should have been safe and familiar, was suddenly strange and hostile.
    Matt swirled the tumbler, watching the amber liquid slosh against the plastic. It didn’t take a medical degree to make a diagnosis. These days, any moderately intelligent fifth-grader could probably have told him what was wrong. Post-traumatic stress disorder was the term currently in favor. It had been called other things—shell shock, battle fatigue, delayed stress. He could have talked to his doctor, asked her to prescribe some nice little pills to make him feel better. That would have been the smart thing to do, he admitted. He hadn’t tried to dig the bullet out of his own shoulder. So why did he feel compelled to deal with this on his own?
    “Macho idiot,” he muttered, lifting the tumbler to his lips. No pills for him, by God. He was going to do the manly thing and just abandon his entire life in hopes of hiding from the shadows. “When the going gets tough, the tough run like hell.”
    At least it was an organized flight, he thought, looking at the neat stack of boxes. And he actually did have somewhere to go. Two weeks ago, when he’d talked to his older brother, Gabe had casually mentioned that he coulduse some help with the house he’d bought and was rebuilding from the ground up. Matt had made noises about needing to get back to work, pick up assignments that had been put on hold when he found himself being airlifted out of Kosovo. Places to see, pictures to take , he’d said.
    Gabe had accepted his excuses at face value, but, the truth was, there were no assignments and he didn’t much care if he ever went back to work. Let someone else risk his neck to document the world’s increasingly rapid descent into madness. He’d been there, done that. It was time to move on to something else.
    “That’s a good one, Latimer.” His mouth twisted in a sharply mocking half smile. “Pulitzer prize–winning photographer trades in cameras for hammer. A perfectly reasonable career choice. No one will suspect you’re falling apart at the seams if you do that.”
    Maybe he could talk Reilly McKinnon into giving him a job on one of his construction crews. Twenty-five years of friendship ought to be enough to get him a job. He could spend his days building houses and whistling