“But you didn’t.”
“Only because you stopped me.” Because Matt was the only one in that room who could have stopped him. He’d tackled him, pried him off. And there’d been many hours, sitting in the dark, drink in hand, when he’d hated his brother for that.
“I would have killed him with my bare hands without one ounce of remorse. It’s near enough the same thing.”
“No. It isn’t at all the same thing.” Matt’s eyes met his in a level stare. “I’ve killed.”
“But you didn’t get any joy from it.”
“God bless, Stephen, you haven’t killed anyone!” Matt raised his hands like he wanted to shake him.
“But I want to, and the difference is a very thin line.”
“A line I think many people walk. The woman you loved was hacked to pieces, for God’s sake. Hell, I wanted to kill him.”
“But do you still? Do you dream of it? Spend hours imagining how you would do it? Do you practically get hard fantasizing about torturing someone?” His family probably thought he’d turned to alcohol out of grief, or so he wouldn’t think about the crime-scene photos. They’d be wrong. He drank until he passed out to shut his mind off against his own depraved thoughts, so graphic, so perverted, no Hollywood horror could ever come close. He turned to stare out the glass at nothing. “It almost destroyed me before.”
And what had finally begun to dim had been revived by Hannah. “Fuck, Matt. If you could have seen her face, describing the things he did to her.”
“Who? Hannah?”
Stephen nodded. He’d been flattened. Crushed. Tossed back to his absolute darkest days. But at the same time he was there, in the present with Hannah. “It was bad. So bad I could see it. The blood on her body, the slashes. It was so much like before, only worse, more. She told me and I left.”
He looked down at his hands. Seeing her like that, hearing the words, broke him apart inside just when he was starting to feel not broken. “I don’t know if I can do this again.”
“It’s not again. Hannah is alive. And I have a feeling she needs you as much as you need her.”
He doubted that very much.
Chapter 23
The next day Hannah found the government building easily. With a clear head and new resolve, she parked and circled through the rotating glass.
After a brief exchange at reception, she was told to wait.
Hannah sat in a blue- and cream-upholstered seat and looked out the window at the city buildings. She hated that she wondered if Stephen’s office was nearby. Hated that she still thought of him at all. But she did. And as she’d replayed that day, repeatedly recalled the look in his eyes, she knew it wasn’t all his fault. She’d seen herself, after all, and it wasn’t pretty.
“Ms. Walker, Mr. Goodwin will see you now.”
Armed with letters from doctors praising her work and pictures of the children she helped, she followed the woman down a long, windowless hallway.
Mr. Goodwin didn’t rise from his desk when she entered. In fact, he barely looked up from his computer, only grunting an acknowledgment when his secretary announced her presence.
She forced herself to smile at the top of his balding head. “I’m here to talk to you about my farm on Highway Thirty-two.”
Heart pounding, Hannah made her case. Her nerves ran wild and so did all her carefully planned words. She went out of order, spoke too fast. But she laid out the pictures she’d brought. Children standing for the first time, walking when they’d been told they never would. The councilman gave them no more than a careless glance.
“While I sympathize, Ms. Walker, I’m afraid the land just isn’t yours.”
“But I have this letter from the original owner.” She pulled it out.
“That’s right. You have a letter. A letter is not a will. There was no passage of ownership. No living relatives of the deceased. No legally certified document.”
“Then why was I told to come down here? Why send me the letter saying I could state my case?”
He gave her a long look. “That was before we had all salient information. I apologize for your inconvenience.” Without so much as a shrug, he reached across his desk and pushed a button. “Eileen, see Ms. Walker out, please.”
Five minutes later, she left the building the same way she’d come in, but where she’d been full of hope a short time ago, she was now completely deflated. Since the first day she’d gotten the letter, she hadn’t believed it. Standing in the safety of the barn, surrounded by horses and familiar scents, the possibility hadn’t seemed real to her.