Page 80 of Haunted

“I need for information about this.” I know there’s a tone creeping into my voice, but Jonny hasn’t tracked it yet.

“I got robbed in Varanasi. A guy followed me through a night market in Chiang Mai once. Bar fight in Goa I didn’t start. It happens. Bad luck can happen to anybody.”

“It isn’t only bad luck I’m worried about,” I say. “Nash is here. He turned up at my door two weeks ago, and he does not take no for an answer, and I lived with that man for four years. I am telling you he is capable of hurting somebody.”

“Okay.” Jonny says it evenly. “But he doesn’t know me, Lance. He’s never met me. He has no reason on earth to do anything to me.”

And that is exactly the problem, and I do not have the words for why.

Bad luck. Something goes cold and hard behind my sternum. I pull out of his arms and turn around so I can see his face.

“Yeah.”

“You went alone. Into countries where you didn’t speak the language, didn’t know the exits, didn’t have a soul who’d notice if you didn’t come back—and you’re calling it bad luck.” I hear my own voice flattening into the register I used on nineteen-year-olds who didn’t check their gear. “That’s not bad luck, Jonny. That’s walking into a threat environment with no plan and no backup and calling it a lifestyle. You could have been killed. You could have disappeared and I would never even have—” I stop. Too late.

And there it is. His face sets, and every bit of the warmth goes out of it, and when he speaks his voice could take the skin off a wall. “I already asked you once,” he says. “Two minutes ago. I’m going to say this one more time. I am not one of your Marines. You do not get to debrief me on how I survived the last ten years without you. I did survive them. Alone. Unprepared, by your standards, and alive anyway.” He picks the towel back up. “Go take a walk, Lance. I’ll be here when you get back.”

I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say. I get my running shoes and think about how easy it was to slide into that mode—the interrogation, the escalation, the need to break him down so I could build him back up. That’s not love. That’s training.

He walks past me into the bathroom. “Go for your run,” he says, without turning around, “and get a grip on yourself.”

I lace up my shoes and head out into the late afternoon. The air is warm and the campus smells like cut grass and the faintest trace of honeysuckle. I run the loop around Black Lake—the same path where Alice walked every morning, the same path where everything changed—and I think about what just happened.

I was seventeen when I decided I was going to be strong enough to protect Parker Bishop. I joined the Marines to become the man he deserved. And somewhere along the way, I stopped being a protector and became a handler, and I didn’t know the difference until a man with a smoky voice and a phoenix tattoo sat across from me and said, in the gentlest possible way, that I was doing it again.

He didn’t just leave. That’s the thing I keep coming back to. Parker would have left. Jonny went into the bedroom and shut the door.

Oh God. What if he’s packing his bags?

I don’t know if I can do that. I don’t know if I know how. But as I round the far side of the lake and see the boathouse in the distance, still wrapped in police tape, I think about what Jonny said: “Be aware.” Not “be different.” Not “be better.” Just: be aware.

Maybe that’s where it starts.

I run the second lap faster. My lungs are burning and my legs are screaming and I feel something loosening in my chest that I didn’t know was clenched. I don’t know if I’ve blown it. I don’t know if the man in my apartment is packing a bag while I run circles around a lake. But I know that he told me to come back, and he’s never told me that before. Every other time—every single time—he was the one who left.

By the third, my lungs are burning and my legs are screaming and I feel something loosening in my chest that I didn’t know was clenched.

I acted like his commanding officer instead of the partner he needs me to be. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I do need help, and maybe I’ve needed it for years, and maybe every single person who ever tried to tell me that was standing exactly where he was standing.

I’ll do whatever it takes. Just please let him be there when I get in.

I slow to a walk. I catch my breath. And I go home.

Chapter twenty-eight

Jonny

I’m ten minutes early and already wishing I were somewhere else. The auditorium is one of the larger lecture halls, but it’s only half full—maybe fifty students, arranged in tiered rows with their laptops open and their expressions ranging from bored to predatory. The instructor, a woman in a navy pantsuit whose name I forget the instant she says it, greets me and the other panelist with the effusive warmth of someone who’s been promoting this event for weeks.

The other panelist is a young man glaring at his phone. He looks up as I approach. “India!” he says.

“Sorry?”

“You’re on the panel this weekend, right? The India guy.”

“Right. Yeah.”

“Ryan Otto.” He shakes my hand and glances at my phone. “You’re probably the most interesting speaker we have this weekend.”