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that he could feel her pain.
    She cried out to him, and he knew it, and each time she called his name was like a whip lashing his soul. She ached because he was gone, and a thousand billy clubs beating him unmercifully couldn’t have injured him more.
    He’d never meant to hurt her.
    She’d said,
I love you.
    The words were killing him and saving him at the same time. When he was snatched away, her whisper had flown after him into the dark. It had wrapped itself around what passed for his heart, and it held him fast now, like a string anchoring a kite to earth. Sometimes his consciousness flashed along the path of the string and he could see things. Not her—but things she could see.
    Lightning glimpses of a hospital room, the interior of an airplane, her house.
    So tantalizingly brief. So meaningless and yet—
    Each one sharper than a thousand knives.
    He had little doubt that he was deliberately being shown her life in snapshots as it was happening, as she continued on without him. The glimpses were a means of softening him up.
    One day he wouldn’t be able to take the pain.
    Holding on to her hurts.
    His life had never been about love. He’d never really believed in it. He’d had bedmates, buddies, fellow Marines who for a time had become the closest thing he’d had to family. The men in his small unit—he’d cared about them. Band of brothers and all that.
    But love was something deeper, something more profound. Other men seemed to experience it, but not him. He supposed it sprang from an openness and vulnerability that he didn’t possess. At its core his heart had remained a cold and distant place that allowed no one in.
    He could have gone his whole life like that. But then he’d gone and died.
    She’s better off without you. Let her go.
    More insidious voices in his head, more attempts by the monsters to fuck with him. If he did what they wanted him to, if he closed his mind to her, if he let the words she’d sent winging after him into the dark fade from his consciousness, there would be nothing left to hold the monsters off.
    The thing about it was, though, he was starting to feel like the voices might be right.
    She was better off without him.
    He wanted her to be happy.
    Alive, he thought he could make her happy, but that airship had gone the way of the Hindenburg.
    Dead, he got in the way of her living her life. He was always going to get in the way of her living her life.
    She was grieving for him. He could feel it. Her grief was torture to him.
    But people got over grief. She would get over him.
    Maybe they’d both be better off if he just gave up and let go.
    Took what was coming to him.
    Let the darkness win.
    We can take away your pain. You can set her free.
    For her sake even more than his own, he was tempted.
    But then he thought,
No: I’ll never stop fighting. They’ll have to destroy me to win.

CHAPTER FOUR
    By the time Rick Hughes appeared in the doorway of Charlie’s office at a few minutes after three p.m. the following day, nobody could have told that she had spent much of the previous night in a shivering huddle on her kitchen floor. Nobody would have guessed that she had phoned Tam, told her about what she’d seen, and begged her friend to send her psychic feelers out into the universe in search of Michael one more time, only to have Tam report back that she could find no trace of him anywhere. Nobody would have known that Charlie had managed no more than a couple of hours of sleep, only to give up and get up as soon as dawn was streaking the sky and cut a big armful of sunflowers from those that remained in her backyard. Then, when she’d taken them to the cemetery, a light rain had started to fall as she’d piled them on Michael’s grave.
    Can anybody say, tears from heaven?
    Call her stupid: she
knew
that nothing of him that mattered was in that grave. But she’d covered his grave with sunflowers from her garden anyway, because she wanted him to have something from