Jason was quiet for a moment before asking, “Heard it before?”
“No.” After another few seconds of silence, she asked, “Why? What does it mean?” Sitting up, she pushed her hair back. Fred scrambled to his feet, excited by her movement. “And why lock my doors? You scared me.”
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said heavily. “Mac wouldn’t… I mean, intentionally, he wouldn’t—”
“Hurt me? You thought he might hurt me? Why would he even bother to come over here?”
Jason was quiet again. Then, “He doesn’t have a gun.”
Becoming more alarmed, Cassidy swung her legs off the sofa. “Is that supposed to be comforting? Are you saying he’d shoot me if he did? What the hell, Jason?”
“No, Cassie, not you. I just… What do you know about PTSD?”
Cassidy remembered the scars on Mac’s back. “Next to nothing. Elijah wanted to research it for one of his books, but I have no practical knowledge of it.”
“So polytrauma would be a reach.”
Cassidy was the one to pause this time; she knew the words. “Poly is many. Many traumas.”
“Right.”
Biting her lip, she said, “His back.”
Jason asked sharply, “When did you see his back?”
“I went to pick up Fred yesterday morning; he’d been watching him. He turned around; I saw his back.” She asked, trepidation sinking in, “Did the same thing happen to you and Grady?”
“No. Grady and I were in the vehicle behind him. We saw it; six guys and one dog, his K-9, Kota. Four guys survived out of the six. Kota didn’t survive.”
“So, he relives it?”
Jason answered, “He has nightmares. He sustained head trauma when the explosion happened. Combined with the burns and his PTSD, the condition is called polytrauma.”
Cassidy absorbed the information. “Okay, but what does that have to do with locking my doors? Or assuring me that he doesn’t have a gun?”
“I mean, you don’t have any reason to be afraid, personally.” His tone was steady. “Sometimes, though, someone with PTSD reacts differently to certain things.”
“Are you talking about flashbacks? What you see on TV?”
“Not like TV, no. But memories can be triggered by certain situations, events, smells. Sometimes it just happens. Not something you can fit in a box, you know?”
“Is that what happened to Josie?” His cousin.
Another lengthier pause, a definite hesitation, before he blew out a breath. “That was… No, it wasn’t… I mean, you don’t hear about that happening because that doesn’t happen. Josie was horrible and tragic but not… It’s not what happens. That’s not typical. Can there be violence? Yeah, but… Mac isn’t going to hurt you; let’s focus on himright now.I’m not going to speak to every person in this situation because I don’t know everyone’s state of mind, even my own half the time.”
But ithadhappened to Josie. Cassidy thought about what he’d told her about Josie, about how her fiancé had been lost in a traumatized nightmare and strangled his partner in the middle of the night, depriving her of oxygen long enough to cause brain death.
“Bad shit does and can happen, but it’s usually inward-facing. That’s one of the reasons why Mac doesn’t keep a gun around.” Jason paused. “Suicide is—”
Cassidy dismissed the notion outright. “He doesn’t strike me as the type.”
“Cassie,” Jason gently rebuked, “there is no type. He’s a soldier.We’resoldiers. Seen shit, been through shit. Sometimes that shit backs up, and you go to a really dark place. And we’re expected to come home and act like none of it happened, and we’re told everything will be all right—that everythingisall right. And when that’s not our fucking reality, it becomes a whole other realm of not all right, especially when you’re injured. But I won’t go there with you. Like I said, he doesn’t keep weapons around, so there’s no reason to fear that he’d use them on himself or anyone else.”
More shaken than she wanted to admit because she knew the dark place he was referring to, she said quietly, “There’d be no reason for him to be over here, so—”
“Sometimes he wanders. It’s kind of like sleepwalking, except he’s not sleeping; he’s awake. It’s rare, but it’s happened.”
“Well, freak me out all over again, Jason!”