himself. The irony was painful: a psychiatric nurse, who had seen him at his very nadir, was the sole witness to his sanity.
"I see you," she said slowly, "and it's like I see myself. I know we're as different as can be." She closed her eyes for a moment. "But there's something we've got in common. I don't know what."
"You're my port in a storm."
"Sometimes I think ports welcome storms," said the nurse.
"A virtue of necessity?"
"Something like that," she said. "Speaking of which, it was Desert Storm."
"Your ex."
"Ex-husband. Ex-Marine. It's kind of an identity in itself, being ex-Marine. It never really leaves you. Any more than what happened to him in Desert Storm ever really left him. So what does it all mean? Am I just attracted to trouble?"
"He wasn't post-traumatic when you met, was he?"
"No, not then. That was a long time ago. But he got shipped out, did two back-to-back tours, and came back different."
"And not in a good way."
"Started to drink, a lot. Started to hit me, a little."
"A little is too much."
"I kept trying to reach him, like there was a broken little boy inside him and I could somehow make him all better if only I could love him enough. I did love him. And he loved me, too. He wanted to protect me was the thing. He got paranoid, started to imagine enemies everywhere. But he was afraid for me, not just for him. Only thing that never occurred to him was that, for me, he was what there was to be afraid of. That gun on the wall-he put it there for me, insisted I learn how to use it. Most of the time, I forget it's there. But sometimes I thought about using it to protect myself-"
"-against him."
She closed her eyes, nodded, embarrassed. She was silent for a while. "I should be terrified of you. I don't know why I'm not. It almost scares me that I'm not scared of you."
"You're like me. You go by your instincts."
She gestured around her. "And see where it's got me."
"You're a good person." Ambler spoke simply. Without thinking about it, he reached over and placed a hand on hers.
"That what your instincts say?"
"Yeah."
The woman with the green-flecked hazel eyes just shook her head. "So tell me, is there a shell-shocked vet in your background?"
"My lifestyle wasn't conducive to deep relationships. Or shallow relationships, for that matter. Hard to keep a lover if you're going to be disappearing for seven months in Sri Lanka, or Madagascar, or Chechnya, or Bosnia. Hard to have civilian friends when you know you're dooming them to an intensive period of surveillance. Just protocol, but when you're in a special-access program, a civilian contact is either somebody you're using or-the fear is-somebody who's using you.
It's a good life for a loner. A good life if you don't mind relationships that come stamped with an expiration date, like a quart of milk. It was a sacrifice. A big one. But it was supposed to make you less vulnerable."
"And did it?"
"I've come to think it had the opposite effect."
"I don't know," Laurel said, the recessed overhead lights burnishing her wavy hair. "With my luck, I would have been better off if I'd always been alone."
Ambler shrugged. "I know what it's like to have people change on you. I had a dad who drank. He was really good at holding it, and then he wasn't."
"An angry drunk?"
"At the end of the day, most of them are."
"He beat you?"
"Not much," Ambler said.
"Not much is too much."
Ambler looked off. "I got good at reading his mood. With drunks, it's tricky, because they can turn on a dime. Giddy, laughing, then suddenly it's smack, with an open hand or a closed fist, depending, and the expression on his face blackens into a kid-you-got-a-smart-mouth-on-you scowl."
"Christ."
"He was always sorry afterward. Really, really sorry. You know what it's like-the guy says he's going to change this time, and you believe him because you want to."
She nodded. "You have to believe him. Like you believe that someday the rain's got to stop. So much for instincts."
"I'd call it self-deception.
Ignoring your instincts. See, if you're that little boy, you get real good at watching your old man's face. You learn to recognize when he seems to be in a bad mood, but it's only because he's down on himself. You ask him then if you can have your allowance, if he can buy you a new action figure, and he looks at