“Do you still have it?”
“No.” I suddenly regret the loss of that coin. “I lost it somewhere in all my moving around.”
“How many places have you lived?”
“I can’t remember. I lived in Berlin for three years, but it was easier not to be rooted to any one city. To be able to go wherever I needed to.”
She studies me, her eyebrows drawn together. “Did you ever get married?”
“No.” I slosh the liquor around in the glass. “Lived with a few women…not all at once… but they had a hard time with my job. When a story broke, I’d leave immediately, get on the next plane to wherever. They’d never know when, or if, I was coming back. I never knew. Sooner or later, they all decided they didn’t want to live that way, so they moved on.”
“How many women?”
“Don’t know. Five or six. Over the span of twenty years.”
“Did you move on too?”
“I guess I was married to my job.” I shrug and swallow more scotch. “I always ran toward battles, insurrections, riots, gunfire. Anything for the right shot.”
“But when you run toward something, you’re also running away from something…or someone,” Nell says.
I lift my head to look at her. She’s leaning forward, her hands clasped and her gray eyes intent on my face, like she’s trying to solve a puzzle.
“Exactly.”
“Did you ever regret it?”
“Running toward conflict?”
“Running away from someone.” She clears her throat. “A woman.”
“There was one.” A muscle in my jaw tightens. “Marie. She was French, from a little village in Bretagne. A news producer with France Four. Beautiful and smart as hell. We had a great time. Lived together for two years. I thought that was it—we’d figured it out, learned how to deal with our careers. She was in the same business, so she knew from the start what to expect. Eventually she wanted to get married and have kids. Even started planning how we’d make it work. Then war broke out in Somalia, and I took off. I was there for two months. When I returned, she told me she didn’t want to do this anymore. She’d found another guy and left.”
Nell frowns. I can almost see her mind working—clicking and snapping the pieces together.
“Somalia. Wasn’t that where you were shot the first time?”
I don’t respond. She sits up, a spark of anger crossing her features.
“She left you after you were shot?” Nell shakes her head in disbelief. “And for another man? That was a terrible thing to do.”
A strange appreciation for her outrage fills me. No one has ever been angry on my behalf before.
“It would have happened anyway.” I set my glass on the table. “The bullet just sped up the process.”
“Still, her timing was awful.” Nell’s gaze slips from my face down to my chest. “You were shot in the shoulder, right?”
I gesture to my left shoulder. “Bullet went clean through, which was good. Missed any major arteries. I wasn’t so lucky the second time. That was in Chechnya. Went through my lung.”
“And then your leg and your abdomen.” Nell grips her hands together and lets out a breath.
“How do you know that?”
“I followed you as best I could.” She gestures toward her father’s office. “Dad stopped me from using the computer after Mom died, but sometimes at school, I could find out something about you.”
I don’t know how to feel about that. Whenever I visited, she wanted to hear stories about my work and travels, but I’d always sanitized it for her. I still don’t want her to know about the worst parts of my experiences.
“I was at school when I saw the headline that you were taken hostage.” Her expression clouds, and she worries her lower lip with her teeth. “I was so scared for you. And after the initial flurry of information, there was nothing for so many months. Dad couldn’t find out what was going on or what had happened to you. For ages, we didn’t even know if you were still alive.”
I drag a hand down my face, blocking whatever shit in my brain is trying to slither up through the scum. “Negotiations were in progress. But they’re not newsworthy unless an agreement is reached.”
“Why didn’t they reach one for you?”
I gaze at her for a minute, struck by the beauty of her face. I’ve seen and photographed countless women and girls—stunning in their strength and courage.
But so few of them, even the little girls, had been innocent. They’d seen too much, heard too much, been forced to do things no person should. They’d learned to do whatever it took to get through the day, to survive.
Nell has too. With a volatile mother who was intensely loving and caring one minute and in a rage the next, Nell learned to hide in herself to survive. She’s been the victim of attacks and cruelty. She’s been institutionalized. She moves cautiously through the world, knowing danger lurks around every corner.
And still, somehow, she has a pure, clear innocence. Like there’s a part of her that will always be untarnished. It’s in the directness of her gray eyes, her artless gestures, her unhidden curiosity.
Have you been kissed, Nell?
The question appears suddenly in my brain. Shoving it back down, I grab my glass and take a long drink.
Wherever the fuck that came from, I need to shut it down right now.
“Was the government involved in the negotiations for your release?” she asks.
I force my attention back to what we were talking about.
“There was a state representative involved.” I rub a hand over the back of my neck. “Just didn’t work out.”
She looks as if she wants to press the issue, then appears to think better of it. She gestures to my chest.
“Did you have a ton of therapy and rehab when you got back?”
“Some, yeah. Found out I did better on my own though.”
“They said you were…” Her slender throat works with a swallow. “Tortured.”
I don’t know what to tell her. Thousands of people in the world are tortured every day by violent individuals, repressive regimes, wars, illnesses. Getting through the day for them can be torture.
“My captors needed to keep me alive,” I finally say. “But sometimes they wanted to make a point. Or to see if they could push the ransom demand. That could be rough.”
Her eyes darken. She gnaws at her lip again. I want her to stop doing that. It looks like it hurts.
“But what I went through doesn’t make me different or special,” I say. “It was bad luck. Wrong place, wrong time.”
Sort of. I’d been targeted. Both because I was a high-profile, experienced journalist and because of my father. For all the good that did any of us.
“Were you shot when they captured you?” Nell asks.
“No. Threatened. The last time I was shot had been a year or so before.”
“Do you still have the scars?”
“Sure.”
“Can I see them?”
Tension grips my chest. I don’t care about my scars—I care that I survived—but I don’t like the idea of Nell seeing the evidence of violence.