Total pages in book: 144
Estimated words: 135382 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 677(@200wpm)___ 542(@250wpm)___ 451(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 135382 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 677(@200wpm)___ 542(@250wpm)___ 451(@300wpm)
She thought about lying, but she needed this to work. “Sex.”
“Ah,” he said, a chuckle to his voice. “Sex is as good as anything else. It can be a safe place when the partner is right. You’re warm and safe and in his arms. I want you to keep that thought in your head. If the memory is too much, you come back to this place where you’re wrapped up in him. He’s there with you, even while you’re in the memory. He’s waiting for you.”
Brody. Brody would be there. She stared at the flame, but she could feel his big hands on her. “All right. What do I do next?”
“You listen to my voice and let your mind open. Let all the other sounds fall away. You can select them out like turning off lights. Turn off the switch that allows you to hear the hum of the air conditioner.”
In her mind’s eye, she flipped the switch and the sound faded. She did it again with the sound of trickling water from the fountain, bringing down the distractions one by one until only his voice was audible.
An odd sense of peace settled in her limbs. Her muscles felt relaxed, her whole body soft.
“I want you to open a door for me,” Kai said quietly. “We’re going to walk down a corridor and when we get to the end, we’ll open the door and you’ll be back in Africa, back at your clinic. We’ll walk out into the day that the soldiers came.”
“Yes.” Somehow the candle flame became a long corridor. She walked down it. The first door she came to pulsed with life and beckoned her. Her safe room, the one where Brody made love to her again and again. She could come back here and find respite.
She touched the door but didn’t open it. Stephanie forced herself to move, walking past other doors. Some she knew she would never open again. They were best locked and barricaded. But there was one at the end of the hall. Light came from under the door, streaming in enough to show her the way.
“Have you found it?” Kai’s voice seemed to come from far away at first.
“Yes. I think this is the one.” She touched the door. It was warm and there was a white flower on the floor in front of it. They grew all over in the woods outside the clinic.
She was here.
“Open the door and step through. It’s all right. This is only memory and nothing on the other side of that door can hurt you now. You’re not inside this memory. You’re on the outside and you’re looking in.”
She knew what he was doing, trying to give her a bit of psychic distance. It was exactly what the hypnosis was supposed to do, allow her to relive the memory without feeling all the pain, allow her to be objective.
She didn’t want to go. She glanced back down the hall and wanted to run back to the room where Brody was.
She had to be stronger. Braver.
There was nothing inside that could hurt her. Not now.
She opened the door.
White-hot heat blasted against her.
“What do you see?” Kai asked and he was suddenly beside her, as though her mind couldn’t quite stand the idea of some voice talking to her like a heavenly overlord. He was standing there in his khakis and button down looking completely out of place in the Sierra Leone heat.
She looked around. They were standing in the courtyard. “I’m in the clinic. At least I should be at this time of day.”
“You are wherever you were. This is a movie that’s going to play out the way it happened. You’re merely an observer.”
“Then I know what happens next.” As if on cue she heard the squeal of tires and the rumble of a huge engine. “They pulled into the courtyard. I was standing inside with both my nurses. Anya and Keniyah. We heard the sound of a Humvee. Two, actually. We looked out the window.”
She glanced over and sure enough, the thin curtains pulled back and she could see her own face staring out. Her eyes widened in pure fear and then another odd look came over her.
She shivered even in the heat of day because she remembered what she’d thought.
“What happened next?”
She suddenly found herself inside the clinic, the scene shifting with the ease of a movie.
“Keniyah, get the children out,” she was saying in a firm voice.
The nurse nodded and hauled the child they’d recently vaccinated up into her arms.
The back door opened and a handsome man strode in. He was roughly six foot two and had a broad build and sandy blond hair. There was normally a wide, expressive grin on his face, as though he found the world continually amusing, but today he frowned.