The Good Race

Chapter 13

DANNY ENJOYED THE fresh mountain air. He took deep breaths as he sat in the rocking chair on the front porch. Jackie had gone inside the house to open it up and check on supplies. She had hired a cleaning woman and asked her to come make up all the beds and stock the kitchen. Danny could see her moving around inside through the floor to ceiling windows on the front of the house.

The cabin was the quintessential log home in the mountains—dark cedar logs with stone face. He slowly lifted himself out of the chair and walked the short distance to the front door and into the house. Despite the size and the airy open floor plan, the house was cozy. The interior was a mix of logs, cedar planks and drywall painted a soft eggshell. The living area had large white linen couches arranged in a comfortable, conversational arrangement before a fieldstone fireplace with a chimney exposed all the way to the top of the cathedral ceiling. Somehow, despite the exterior and what a person might think to find inside a log cabin, the house was anything but rustic. The latest technology merged with the charm of mountain living. Danny suddenly couldn't imagine himself anywhere else.

Odd, he thought as he slowly lowered himself down onto the plush, white couch and leaned back with a sigh. The last place on the earth he expected to be happy was New Hampshire. Other than the brief time they had together at Trent, the mere name of the state made him tense. Of course, it wasn't New Hampshire itself—it was a beautiful state—but it was what it represented that was the problem. For twelve years of his life, it had been a prison. It had come to be a stark symbol of everything Danny lacked—a home, a family, a normal childhood, someone that actually loved him and gave a shit about what happened to him. None of that existed for him in New Hampshire—or anywhere for that matter— until Jackie came. And when he was pulled away from it, New Hampshire became a reminder of everything he had lost.

He was devastated when she didn't answer his letters. Now, of course, he knew she had never gotten them. But then, her silence meant only that she couldn't forgive him for leaving her without saying goodbye and wanted nothing to do with him. What she had awoken in him died with that realization. From that point forward, he did nothing but go through the motions of life. That he joined the Army to piss off his father was true enough, but it wasn't the only reason. Danny could admit now that maybe he had a bit of a death wish. He didn't care if he was sent to war zones because he had nothing to lose. Nobody was waiting for him at home. Nobody cared what happened to him.

But none of that turned out to be true, and now he was here in New Hampshire with Jackie again. It all still seemed like a dream. Sometimes he thought that maybe he was in a coma and he'd wake up and discover she was never there and he was all alone in life again.

Well, alone with the exception of Eric. They'd served in Afghanistan together and were closer than brothers, but relationships between men were vastly different than between a man and a woman. Eric was there both times Danny was shot and they were the only two instances in almost a decade that Eric had ever seen Danny vulnerable.

Danny watched Jackie in the open kitchen and eating area from his vantage point on the couch. How could this feel so new yet at the same time so familiar? She was really there. He had found her—albeit not the way he wanted to—and they were here in New Hampshire together.

So what exactly was his plan? He resigned from the force in New York and had let Jackie whisk him away to New Hampshire and her new life to recover. But what was he going to do after that? Stay in New Hampshire, obviously, because that's where she was. And do what? He hardly touched his inheritance, so he could, in theory, do nothing. If he wanted to, he could go back to being a burden on society, but that wasn't for him anymore. He liked police work. But small town police work? Would that interest him enough?