Healing Hearts (New Hope Falls #6) - Kimberly Rae Jordan Page 0,9

in the camp.

And when he finally laid down to sleep, even exhaustion couldn’t keep the nightmares at bay. The cries. The fear in the children’s eyes.

Ryker woke with a jerk, his heart pounding as screams faintly echoed in his mind. He swung his feet over the edge of the bed and sat up, scrubbing his hands across his face.

Even knowing that nightmares would be likely after seeing the fear in Bryson’s gaze, he still hadn’t expected that. It had been awhile since he’d had one quite so vivid.

He tried to utilize the coping techniques Nick had taught him early on in their counseling sessions, but nothing helped him cope that night.

Well-meaning friends and family kept telling him to get on with his life, but they just didn’t get it.

There had been just too many people who hadn’t been able to get on with their lives.

They hadn’t asked to be born in a war-torn part of the world.

They certainly hadn’t asked to be forced into refugee camps where sufficient food and clean water were hard to come by. Not to mention medical care.

Those people had just been trying to survive as best they could, given the circumstances they’d found themselves in.

Too many of them hadn’t been able to just get on with their lives.

Even the ones who had managed to survive had still been left in horrible living conditions. It felt wrong for Ryker to move forward with all the plans he’d had for his future as if the horror of the attack at the refugee camp hadn’t fundamentally changed him.

He was back living in a safe place with plenty of food and clean water. It seemed that to strive for more was downright selfish. But more than that, he wasn’t sure that he could actually carry out the job that he’d trained for so many years to do.

Though he’d done okay helping with Vivianne so far, he hadn’t done more for her than the average person would have been able to do.

After seeing Sophia’s little boy earlier and the fear in his eyes, something in Ryker had frozen. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that if he’d been required to treat Bryson while he’d been looking at Ryker that way, he wouldn’t have been able to.

What would happen if he froze when a child’s life was on the line?

He hadn’t frozen that day in the refugee camp, but he was sure that was only because he hadn’t had a chance to process everything. In the days following the attack, he’d struggled greatly to help the people, often needing the prodding of the other doctors there to stay focused.

The day he and Lydia had climbed on a plane to return to the US, he’d felt a mixture of relief and guilt. They had never really talked about what had happened on that day or any of the days that followed. Nick was the only one who’d managed to get him to open up even slightly about what he’d experienced and how he felt.

With a sigh, Ryker picked up his phone off the nightstand to see the time. 1:23. He’d been asleep for just over three hours, but he felt like he hadn’t slept at all.

He pushed up off the bed and left the bedroom, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to fall back to sleep right away. If at all.

The light over the stove in the kitchen was on, chasing away enough of the night that he could find his way to the fridge easily enough. He pulled out the jug of orange juice and poured himself a glass before putting the jug back. Carrying the juice, he went over to the glass doors leading to the small balcony of his third-floor apartment.

He slid the door open and stepped out onto the balcony, inhaling sharply at the chill in the air. It was nearly the end of April, which meant that while the days were fairly nice, the nights could still be chilly. Thankfully, he’d worn sleep pants and a long-sleeve T-shirt to bed, so it was only his extremities and face that felt the cold.

On any other night, he would have worried about the cold waking him up too much to go back to sleep, but a nightmare was always guaranteed to wake him up completely.

He slumped down in one of the lawn chairs he kept on the balcony and stared out over the neighborhood. It was a quiet part of New Hope. Not that any part of