Chapter Ten
“I’m listening,” Tess said gently as she laid down her utensils. “Go on, please.”
“Okay.” He set down his fork and knife too. “Warning you again though . . . some of it’s ugly.”
“I can handle ugly, Logan. You don’t scare me.”
“I bet very little scares you, actually.”
“You’d be dead wrong. But go ahead.”
He nodded, trying to figure out where to start. He took a long sip of water, feeling the cool relief of it slide down his suddenly tight throat. Then he said, “Rachel and I met in our junior year at Tulane, in a psych class. Love at first sight, immediate connection, the whole nine. Within two weeks, we were inseparable. I proposed the week after we graduated, and we got married the next spring.”
“So young,” Tess murmured. “How old were you both, twenty-three?”
“Barely.” He picked up his fork again and started pushing around the brussels sprouts on his plate. “Her degree was in psychology, mine was in social work. We both wanted to help people. It seemed like a perfect match. Maybe at first, before I blew it sky-high, it was.” He shrugged, not lifting his gaze from the plate. “We had an apartment in downtown New Orleans. She got a job in a medical center that catered to higher-end clientele, working there while she started her master’s. Me, I was working down in the poorest areas of the city, also while getting my master’s.” He felt the wry twist of his lips. “But it pumped me up. The work, I mean. I was so idealistic, thought I was making a difference.”
“I’m sure you were,” Tess said. “Sounds like admirable work to me.”
“I don’t know. Maybe I did. I was young and naïve. Rach and I didn’t have any money, but we had each other. She was going to eventually make lots of money, and I was going to change the world. Our future looked bright.” He noticed how still Tess had grown. When she listened, she really listened.
“We both got our master’s degrees, she started working with a private practice, and I was down in the ditches. Soup kitchens, homeless shelters, community centers, all of that. I felt like I had a purpose. I was crazy in love with my gorgeous, brilliant wife. Life was good for a while.” He stopped, drumming his fingers on the table. He hadn’t thought of the good times in a long time, and doing so now didn’t bring any warm fuzzies . . . more like a hollow feeling. Like it’d all happened to someone else.
“So what happened?” Tess’s voice brought him back to the present.
He blinked as new memories crashed into his head. With a tight sigh, he said simply, “Katrina happened.”
“As in . . . Hurricane Katrina?” she asked tentatively.
“Yup.” Again, as it had a thousand times before, the image of little Rodney Parsons’s body floating in the murky, filthy water assaulted him. Logan briefly squeezed his eyes shut, willing it away. “I was right in the thick of it. Where I was working . . . those people had nothing, or close to nothing. So when the storm hit . . . in a nutshell, we had no idea what hit us. And I tried to help people, I was frantic, but I couldn’t do anything for them. Not enough, anyway. And people I knew died.” His eyes met hers. He saw the empathy there, but she sat quietly, listening raptly. “Whatever you saw on TV? It was worse. It was a true circle of hell, what we lived through down there.”
“I can’t imagine,” she murmured. “I won’t insult you with platitudes. It sounds horrific.”
He raked his hands through his hair. His chest tightened and his blood pulsed in his head, the familiar signs of his demons trying to rear their vicious heads. “I’m not going to go into details now, all right?”
“Sure. Whatever you want.”
“Good. So . . . um . . .” He edited in his head, trying to decide what to share and what he wanted to keep to himself. There was so much . . . and he didn’t want to talk about any of it. But Tess had trusted him with some of her secrets, and he wanted to do the same. He wanted to place some trust in her, and he wasn’t even sure why.
“I can tell you still carry it with you,” she said quietly.