Patchworked Hearts {SAMPLE}

Chapter 12

Helen woke up only a few hours later to the sensation of fingers running through her curls carefully.

She was back in her bed, with Ginger curled against her front and another, familiar warmth against her back. "Pat?" she asked, even though she knew it was him.

He hummed in acknowledgement, his fingers moving down from her head and over the side of her face. "Yeah, sweetheart?"

"Do you think I need therapy?"

His ministrations stalled for only a split second, but Helen still noticed. "Do you think therapy would help you?" he asked, his tone free of judgement.

She chewed on her lower lip for several beats, mulling over the options and possibilities before admitting, "I think it would help a lot, but I'm scared. I don't want to talk about it again, especially not with a stranger."

"It's okay to be scared," he reminded her, his soothing touch shifting to her neck, where he began to massage lazy circles against her skin. "If you tell your story to a therapist, what do you think will happen?"

Helen considered his question, bringing up one of her own hands to stroke Ginger's fur in an effort to calm her sputtering heart. "I think it will be hard and dredge up a lot of painful topics that I don't want to remember."

Seeming to know she was going to continue, Pat remained silent; Helen released a sad sigh and added, "But once I talk it out, I think I'll be able to work through it and, uh, maybe even . . . come to peace with it, I guess."

"So?" A single word, a simple question, asked with no expectations whatsoever.

Moving her hand from Ginger's silky fur, Helen reached past her own shoulder to grasp at Pat's fingers, smiling slightly when he immediately clutched her hand in his own. "Will you drive me to my appointments?"

"I'll sit in the waiting room, if you'd like." Her smile grew at his response; that was her Pat, always so sure and giving with himself and his time.

"I'll look for one today."

"You can go to mine, if you'd like."

His response brought her up short.

Pat has a therapist?

There was no shame in the fact, of course (something she would no doubt be coming to terms with shortly), but . . . Pat? Pat was so steady and quick-witted and wonderful and—

"I was in the navy," he began, his thumb rubbing circles over the back of her hand.

"For ten years," she recalled from one of their recent conversations, in which he'd confided small details about his service; he'd entered when he was eighteen and had left only four years ago.

"Right," he agreed. "But I never told you why I left, did I?"

She shook her head as best she could, mentally pondering the connection between Pat's exit of the navy and the limp she'd grown used to seeing over the past two weeks. "No."

"Well," she could hear the slight smile in his voice, "I probably should. I wasn't planning to leave until I was old and bitter, but there was a slight change of plans. Four other guys and I were in a helo, returning to the carrier, but there was an equipment malfunction; it ended up coming down on the flight deck."

Pat blew out a tired breath, but his movements against her skin never stalled. "Two guys got out with minor abrasions, one broke his spine, and one died; I got knocked out when we hit, and I woke up in a hospital with a system of pulleys holding my leg together. Found out later that my tibia was shattered, my fibula was sticking out of my skin, and I completely dislocated my femur from my hipbone."