Page 72 of Sheltering Instinct

Levi held back his, “I remember.” He wondered if that was the easy part of the story and if there was something difficult that she’d left unsaid.

Nights for Tess had always been tricky times.

When she’d been on the run in Ghana, Tess had explained, she learned not to make any noise. Mama Ya told her that emotions rode the wind. Sobbing could be heard at long distances. Crying out at night could get someone killed. Tess knew that during the war, she hadn’t made a noise, or MamaYa might have had to abandon her to save herself and her own children. As an adult, Tess could understand the peril that this woman took on for a stranger.

In Ghana, sleep was silent.

Once Tess arrived in America to live with her aunt and uncle, they’d turned to medication for both Tess’s sake and for theirs. But Tess hadn’t liked the way it left her foggy for most of the day. As soon as she went to university with her own apartment, she stopped taking it.

Her roommate, Shanti, slept with a face mask and noise-canceling headphones anyway, so that hadn’t been a problem.

Back when Levi and Tess were dating, and Tess had her ankle twist on the mountain, and they started living together more-or-less, she’d been embarrassed to wake him and offered to take the medications for his sake.

Levi refused.

He was afraid that Tess would still be having nightmares but would be so deep under the influence of the medication that he wouldn’t know. She might experience the terror and not be able to wake from it.

After Levi got to Afghanistan, that kind of night terror activity wasn’t unusual for his fellow service members, especially if they’d been on more than one deployment. It was just better hidden because bases ran twenty-four-seven, and there was always the noise of activity.

Levi considered that it was possible that the events of the last few days made Tess feel vulnerable to nightmares, and she didn’t want the noise to call attention to her.

Maybe it was him. Maybe he triggered her.

Or maybe he was overstepping and jumping to conclusions. After all, Tess had always loved the night sky and the stars.

He didn’t have to make this hard.

In fact, it was doing her a disservice.

She reached through the window and grabbed a handful of the sky, felt it with her fingers, and scanned the bowl of the Milky Way. When she focused back on him, she said, “That’s a bemused look on your face.”

“When you do that, I think you’re an air whisperer.” He grinned.

At first, she returned his smile. “Sounds magical.” Then the smile fell off, her brows furrowing in the middle. She said quietly, “Yeah, there’s something down low in my gut.”

“Parasites?” Levi raised his eyebrows toward his hairline. “You’ve been eating the game meat.”

“Yes, but it’s cooked.” She started to roll up her window. “Nice seeing you.”

He left his hand on the top of the glass. “Tess, I was teasing. Come on now. I want to hear. And I want you safe. This isn’t a country either of us is used to visiting. You don’t know what you don’t know until it’s damned dangerous that you didn’t know. And you’re thinking of sleeping out here all alone?”

“Okay.” She lowered the window again. “I think I followed that. You look like you’re going for a run. It’s—what do you call it?—zero dark thirty? But if you and Mojo want to ride out with me away from the vineyard lights, I see no reason you shouldn’t.”

He ran around to the left-side passenger seat and climbed in.

Mojo insisted on sitting between them.

“Hello, Mojo, sweetest of all the sweet boys.” Tess crooned. “Are you getting along with Levi?

After Levi pulled the door shut. She lifted her foot off the brake, and they rolled forward.

Mojo laid down and put his head in her lap.

Watching her profile as she drove out, Levi’s pain started to lose its barbs. He had high hopes that he could get some of his questions answered.

He'd always understood that there was more to the story than he was being told. He had always believed that she truly, deeply, cellularly loved him. He just couldn't understand, under those circumstances, the betrayal of her marrying another man.

But this wasn’t just any guy. This was Abraham.

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