There were signs that Brie had taken no notice of. Christine didn’t date or talk about men; a year after her divorce, their phone chats had become fewer—but Christine was very busy. It wasn’t easy being a single, working mom. And Brie’s job was demanding, her hours long, so she was usually the one unavailable for girlfriend time. If she were honest, she could admit Christine had always done most of the phoning, inviting. What was still impossible for Brie to grasp was that Brad’s behavior had never seemed to change. They talked on cell phones several times a day, were together every night Brad wasn’t on duty, making love as often as before. Up until the time he told her he was leaving, that he needed some space, she had no idea anything was wrong.
Brie didn’t know how it started between them, but Brad admitted it had been going on about a year. “I don’t know,” Brad said with a helpless shrug. “A couple of lonely people, I guess. Glenn was gone, you were always working and Christine and I were pretty close friends to start with.”
“Oh, you are so full of shit!” she railed at him. “You never once asked me to take time off! My hours were just what you needed to pull this off!”
“If that’s what you have to believe, Brie,” he had said.
It had knocked the wind out of her. The only thing worse than the pain was the shock and disbelief. Six months after the divorce was final, she’d thought she’d made some important headway in dealing with it, but it was as though the rape brought it all back; her depression over the divorce seemed suddenly brand-new. Robbed, again and again, she kept thinking.
Most of the time all she did was watch TV, snack, sleep, tidy up the house. Her concentration wasn’t good enough to read a novel—something she had craved when work had been so consuming. Working a crossword puzzle was out of the question—she couldn’t focus; she used to do the Sunday-morning crossword in ink before Brad even got out of bed. She couldn’t even go to the mall. But she made it to those lunches with Mike. She came to think of them as her secret lunches, almost the only thing that brought her away from herself, away from all the blows of the past year. Her father’s silence on the matter intrigued her; she hadn’t even whispered of these meetings to her sisters. It was as if that would take the magic away.
She didn’t even recognize the woman she’d become. She’d been so tough. Some people—mostly men—thought of her as hard. At the moment she was limp and frightened. She was paranoid and afraid it would never pass. She’d been dealing with the victims of crimes for years now, and a number of them had been rape victims. She had watched them wither, paralyzed, unable to act on their own behalf. As she cajoled and coached them for their testimonies, she would become frustrated and angry by the reduction of feeling that seemed to weigh them down, overwhelm them. The helplessness. The impotence. And now she was one of them.
I’m not giving in, she kept telling herself. Still, it had taken her weeks. Months. “I need some exercise,” she told Mike during one of their lunches. “I can’t seem to get out of bed or off the couch if I don’t have a specific appointment or lunch with you.”
“Have you asked anyone for an antidepressant?” he asked. “I thought it was pretty routine after a crime.”
“I don’t want to go that route if I can help it. Up to now, I’ve always had so much energy.”
“I went that route,” he admitted to her. “I didn’t think I needed to, but it became clear I was depressed—a combination of major surgery and being the victim of a violent crime. It helped.”
“I don’t think so…”
“Then you’re going to have to think of an alternative or this thing can swallow you up,” he said. “Brie, fight back. Fight back!”
“I am,” she said weakly. “I know it doesn’t look like it, but I am.”
He touched her hand gently and said, softly but earnestly, “Fight harder! I can’t lose you to this!”
Well, she couldn’t jog anymore—she was afraid to be out there alone, even in broad daylight. It couldn’t be a gym or health club—she couldn’t have men looking at her right now. She remembered with some longing how she had loved being looked at. She had a small, compact, fit little body and lots of long, silky hair that she braided for court but let swing freely down her back the rest of the time. It made her heady with power to garner the stares of attractive men. Now if a man looked at her, it threw her into panic.
But she wasn’t going down without a fight—so she joined a women’s gym and started running on the treadmill and lifting weights. If she couldn’t have a full life, she was at least going to fake one.
The joke was on her—a couple of weeks of vigorous exercise and she was sleeping better and eating better. She felt it put her into the next stage of recovery, every day a tiny bit easier than the day before.
There were times she thought that if not for Mike’s attention right now, she’d be lost. Oh, her family was amazing—the way they managed to hold strong for her, encourage her and make themselves constantly available should she want to talk. But Mike, the very man she had vowed would never get near her when she recognized his flirting last spring, was the only thing in her life that allowed her to feel like a woman. For that she would be forever grateful.
Tommy Booth was the new kid in town, just checking in for his senior year at Valley High School. His father, Walt Booth, had just retired from the Army and had given Tommy his choice—a military academy, a nonmilitary private academy or Valley High. Tommy chose to live with his dad for a couple of reasons—he’d lost his mom in a car accident a few years ago and it had just been him and his dad since, a couple of bachelors who got along fairly well for father and son. And his older sister, married and pregnant and separated from her husband by the Marine Corps, was going to come to Virgin River to live with them until Matt, his brother-in-law, got back from the Middle East. She was going to have her baby there—and Tom was secretly a little excited about that. Plus, there were his horses, which he couldn’t take to a private school.
Tom’s father, a retired three-star general, had found this property a couple of years ago; the general had a younger sister and niece a few hours south in Bodega Bay and had looked all over California for the right spot, not too far away from them. Aunt Midge was sick; she had been sick several years, bedridden the past three. She was worse than sick—she was terminal, with Lou Gehrig’s disease, and her daughter, Shelby, was her full-time caregiver. Walt Booth had been ready to settle in Bodega Bay to be there for her even though he was more of a forest and mountains than beach kind of guy. But Midge had convinced him not to choose Bodega Bay because of her presence there—she wasn’t going to last more than a couple of years. She might be gone by the time Walt retired from the Army and if she was not, he could visit. Thus, Virgin River—close enough to see Midge and Shelby as often as he could, but the kind of place Walt wanted to put down his final roots. It had begun to look as if Aunt Midge was right—she couldn’t possibly have much longer. By the time Walt and Tommy got to Virgin River, Midge needed twenty-four-hour care, and Hospice was on the scene.
While Walt finished his last assignment at the Pentagon, he’d had the house renovated via long distance and the new stable and corral constructed. Tommy had seen it only once before actually moving in, but he loved the land—the enormous trees, the rivers, the coast, the mountainsides and valleys through which he could ride.
Classes started in late August. He wasn’t that jazzed about the high school. The kids sure weren’t as sophisticated as the D.C. kids. And Tom was a little bit on the shy side until he got to know someone. This being a small-town high school, all the cliques had been established ages ago, so fitting in was going to take a while. He was a big kid, athletic, but he’d been too late for football.
He met a kid in first period right off—Jordan Whitley, a funny guy. Kind of skinny and hyper, but really friendly. He hung out with him a couple of times after school. Jordan lived pretty close to the school, while Tom had to drive his little red truck all the way from Virgin River every day. Also, Jordan’s parents were divorced, he was an only child and his mom worked—which freed up Jordan’s house until about six. As long as Tom got home before dinner, in time to take care of the horses, it was no big deal to go over there for a little while after school.
Tom also learned that there were frequent keggers at an abandoned rest stop area right at the edge of Virgin River. Weekend parties that Jordan really wanted him to attend, but Tom always had an excuse. He didn’t know anyone but Jordan. And he was quiet about the fact that he had a house to himself for a few days every other week or so while Walt went to Bodega Bay. He wasn’t about to be overrun by Jordan and his tribe—if Walt ever found out, he’d be dead meat.
Jordan somehow managed to score beer at his house. After-school beer. Tom was very careful about that because if the general smelled it on his breath he was toast. But the other thing Jordan had going on was girls. He seemed to always have a different girl. So far Tommy hadn’t seen one that got him excited—Jordan didn’t seem to draw the really pretty ones. But it was kind of fun to go over to his house and get all the flirtatious attention bestowed on him, being the new kid and not that bad looking.
“Come on over to my buddy Brendan’s Friday night,” Jordan invited. “We’re gonna get lucky.”
“Yeah?” Tommy grinned. “Who you gonna get lucky with?”
“I’ve got this girl who wants me so bad she can’t hold herself back. And she’s on the pill.”
“So you want me to come over and watch you get lucky? I might have to pass on that,” he said with a laugh.
“She’s bringing a girlfriend,” Jordan said.
“I might come by for a beer,” Tommy said. “Let me think about it. I don’t know this Brendan guy.”
“He’s cool,” Jordan said. “He graduated a couple of years ago, and when his mom goes out of town, which she does a lot, the house is his. And if we get lucky, we can get lucky all night long, if you get my drift.”
“Oh, I get your drift,” he said. And he was thinking, you idiots. You don’t go banging the local girls who advertise they’re on the pill. He wasn’t stupid—that’s how you got stuff. Bad stuff. An image of telling his dad he had the drip sent shivers up his spine.
But he went. He popped the top on two beers, total, without finishing either one; he knew better than to drink anything out of a keg or punch bowl. There was a little pot floating around, though not everyone indulged. Tommy didn’t get near that shit. Too risky for a kid planning on West Point; too risky for a boy with a father like Walt, who would dismember him before killing him.
The girlfriend who was earmarked for Tom if he was interested was way too aggressive and ready for anything, and he just couldn’t see it. Plus, Jordan and Brendan were busy getting everyone as shit-faced as possible, as quickly as possible, and there was nothing quite as funny to watch—but inevitably boring. He finally slipped away about nine without anyone really noticing he was gone.
The next Monday morning at school Jordan excitedly asked, “Where’d you go, man?”
He shrugged. “I had to get home. My dad is pretty strict.”
“Yeah, but we had beer and girls!”
“I had a couple of beers,” he said. “And the girls… Well, I didn’t meet one I really liked.”
That made Jordan laugh almost hysterically. “Well, so what? You’re not…? You don’t still have your cherry, do you, man?”
In fact, he did. “’Course not,” he said, because what do you say to something like that? Tom hadn’t made it with a girl, but not because he couldn’t. Because he was very careful and he and the last girlfriend back in D.C. had barely graduated to some petting before he moved away. He was in a desperate hurry to find a great girl, but she’d have to be a great girl, not just someone who’d put out. In fact, a girl who put out was kind of a put-off. And if he found a great girl, he was going to be a great guy to her, not someone out for himself.
