You can breathe. Just breathe. Breathe in and out slowly. You can breathe.
Slowly, bit by bit, she drifted back to the present and into her body. Closing her eyes, she let herself appreciate the little sensations she was now aware of—the cold leather of the seat pressed against her back, the icy breeze from the air conditioning blowing refreshingly on her face.
Leaning her head back against the headrest, she felt the weight of her chest rising and falling. Her arms felt heavy. Lowering them to her sides, Katie was vaguely aware that the paper bag had slipped from her hand and landed on the console beside her, but she’d maintained a firm grip on her picture.
After several minutes, her breathing returned to normal and the ringing sound in her head grew sporadic. Katie searched her memory in an attempt to identify if ‘sporadic ringing in the head’ was a normal post-panic attack side effect. She hated that these horrible attacks used to occur with such frequency that she actually had a personal database of experiences to check her symptoms against.
Nope, she concluded, the sporadic ringing is new.
Turning her head to take in her surroundings, she saw cars whizzing by on the interstate. She squinted against the glare of the sun shining brightly down on the pavement and bouncing off the car windshields speeding by.
Setting her picture carefully on her lap, Katie retrieved the paper bag and folded it up. She didn’t love the thought that she might need to keep it handy for future use, but better safe than sorry. Katie had always dealt in facts, and the fact was she’d been off the plane less than an hour and had barely started down the highway towards Harper’s Crossing when a panic attack hit her hard. Did she really think she would be getting through the rest of the weekend unscathed? Not likely.
As she placed the paper bag inside her gigantic “in case of emergency” carry-on bag, she discovered the source of the ringing.
She felt like an idiot. On the bright side, at least she didn’t have to add tinnitus to the long list of symptoms that characterized her panic attacks. On the flip side? Apparently, she no longer recognized her own cell phone’s ring tone.
Picking up her iPhone, she swiped the screen to answer, saying warmly, “Hey Sophiebell!”
“Katie, where are you? I just called the house and they said you weren’t there. I’m running last minute errands with Bobby, but I thought you would be here by now. Was your flight delayed? I can’t wait to see you!” Sophie squealed, the words tumbling out of her mouth one over another.
Katie smiled to herself. She had always thought that Sophie Hunter could paraphrase that old Army motto to adopt as her own: “I say more before nine a.m. than most people say all day.”
“The flight was fine. I am on my way, and I will be there in less than an hour. I can’t wait to see you, too.”
“Okay, hurry,” Sophie pleaded but then followed it up with the firm command, “but drive safe.”
“I will. See you soon, bride-to-be.” Katie tried to cover the stress in her voice with ebullience as she said goodbye and hung up the phone.
After returning the phone to her purse, she gently lifted the picture she’d chosen for her object of security. It was of her and Jason Sloan, both eleven years old, at science camp. A knot formed in her throat and she bit her lip.
Why? That was the one word question that always filled her mind when she looked at this picture or her thoughts drifted to the boy whose big brown eyes belonged to the scrawny kid with his arm thrown around her as they posed in front of Whisper Lake, the summer before she’d met Sophie’s brother Nick. Before she’d been Nick’s girlfriend. Before Nick’s accident. Before Nick’s funeral. Before the night of Nick’s funeral.
Why?
Why had she let that night happen? Why had she done what she had? Why hadn’t she been able to face up to and own her actions? Why had she let one night define the last ten years of her life? And considering all of those things, why did this picture bring her the comfort that nothing else could?
Taking a deep breath, Katie tried to mentally prepare herself for the fact that this weekend, whether she wanted to or not, she was going to have to face her past and the brown eyes that had haunted her for the last decade.
Jason Sloan.
Jason had been her friend. Her best friend. At least, until that fateful night when she made the biggest mistake of her life. Jason had also been Nick’s best friend. The entire town lovingly nicknamed them “The Three Musketeers.”
The same town that she hadn’t returned to since the day they buried Nick.
It’d been ten long years since Katie Marie Lawson had set foot in Harper’s Crossing, the town of her childhood and her youth. She had never meant to stay away this long.
When she originally left for school in California a decade ago, her plan had been to come back at Christmastime. Sitting at LAX, waiting for her flight that first holiday away from home, Katie experienced her first panic attack. She never got on the plane. The next episode occurred as she booked her flight that same year for spring break. That time, she hadn’t even made it to the airport. Then, they started to happen more frequently any time she was under stress. It took several years to get the episodes under control, during which she refrained from making travel plans.
Then, after she graduated from law school at Pepperdine University, she immediately started working at Wilson, Martin, Gregory, and Associates, a very prestigious law firm in San Francisco.
The first three years at the firm flew by in a blur. Katie worked 80+ hours a week and even worked every holiday, including Christmas. She’d barely had time to breathe, let alone go out of town.
Last year, even though she was on the fast track to make junior partner, she’d taken a vacation. The plan had been to take a few days for herself—to decompress—and then head back to her hometown. She had booked her flight and the experience had been incident free.
That was progress at least.
Katie then spent the first four days of her vacation in her apartment, so it was really more of a “staycation”—but still. She cleaned, cooked, slept, and had a Julia Roberts movie marathon.
At the end of the four days, the morning she was scheduled to fly back to Illinois, she was called into work because a fellow associate had come down with the flu. And well, if she was being honest, she’d been more than happy to go back to work on Wednesday instead of being on a direct flight from SFO to O’Hare.
Bottom line, she hadn’t made it back home since “the incident.”
Until today.
She was here. In Illinois. Headed back to Harper’s Crossing. She’d done it. Because this weekend wasn’t about her—it was about Miss Sophie Hunter, who was getting married to Bobby Sloan, Jr., the youngest of the five Sloan boys. Sophie had called her, ecstatic, three months earlier to announce her engagement to Bobby and to ask Katie to be her maid of honor. Bobby was Jason Sloan’s youngest brother and Jason was the best man in the wedding.
Nerves, unlike any she’d ever felt before, bubbled up inside of Katie. Looking down at the green LED lights on her dashboard, she saw that it was 8:30 a.m. Today was Thursday and her return flight to California wasn’t until 7:00 p.m. on Sunday. All she needed to do was get through the next four days—preferably without having a nervous breakdown—and then she could wing her way back to her lovely, safe, predictable life in San Francisco.