of land was a premium. She pulled her overnight case from the back of the car and slid her purse over her shoulder before setting the alarm. Then she stood on the sidewalk, her face tilted into the salty wind. Her eyelids fluttered closed. She was tired. She was hungry. She had just six hours before she was due at the rehab center, but this moment was restorative. The damp sea air was like a spritzer.
This afternoon she would work an eight hour shift, taking her well into evening. It’d be midnight by the time she returned to her apartment. The moon would be a huge silver coin in the sky and the sultry air would wrap around her with comforting familiarity. She would sleep for five hours and begin her work day again. Ivy loved her schedule—it was demanding and rewarding and kept her moving forward.
Holly had started working again a year after the accident. Half days at first. She’d told Ivy that some days she started strong but ended up using her cane. It disappointed her, Ivy could tell. But Holly was so happy to have some normalcy back. She was a counselor who dealt with addictive behaviors. Sometimes she helped teens through drug dependency, lately, though, she’d confided in Ivy that many of her clients had cutting or other self-mutilating issues. Holly had talked about an upcoming conference—three days in San Francisco—with keynote speakers whom she respected. They would lay out new strategies for helping adolescents deal with the challenges and pressures in their lives. Holly wanted to go. They had brought up the website and Ivy had encouraged her to sign up. It would be her sister’s first trip since the accident and there would be some unknown challenges to her mobility—things Ivy took for granted, like walking up the skyway. And even if they thought it through, tried to puzzle out every possible roadblock and its solution, they were sure to miss a few. Holly would have to deal with them alone. Ivy knew she could do it. Her sister was ready.
It didn’t surprise Ivy that both she and her sister had ended up in careers where they helped others. Sometimes it’s that shared experience—of having hit bottom, of having nowhere else to go but up—that helped pull another person out.
Holly got as much out of her career as Ivy did. She’d noticed a change in her sister’s spirits since she’d returned to work. And that was probably why Holly had recently moved into a more demanding schedule, adding hours and even home and school visits to support her clients. She had daily physical therapy or gym time with a trainer specializing in sport rehabilitation. Her body was getting stronger and she was getting better with her prosthetic—good enough that she was already being fitted for her sport leg. A plaster mold had been completed and her visits with the prosthetist were coming more frequently. As grueling as Ivy’s schedule was, her sister’s seemed far more exhausting.
Ivy climbed the stairs to her apartment and told herself that she was going to grab a quick snack then climb into bed without thoughts of Jake tempting her into a state of arousal. She’d spent much of her shift fantasizing about the man and right now she needed sleep.
There’s a thin line between confidence and casualty. Jake thought over his words—meant as cautionary advice to Ivy. He had no trouble applying the sentiment to work, and even to family, so why was it so hard for him to apply the sentiment to women? He was thirty years old and had had several meaningful relationships, a few of which he’d thought had the potential to become something more. No one was more surprised than Jake when they fizzled out. Most of the time, he’d come to realize that he had had very little in common with the woman he’d chosen to hold close. He’d moved too fast into relationships that had turned out to have no ballast.
It was the time between ports. It always moved at warp speed, leaving scant seconds to meet, to get to know a woman, and to build a relationship that lasted. So he jumped in like a damn paratrooper, expecting the best and treating any other outcome as nonexistent because failure wasn’t an option. And yet that’s always where they’d ended up.
But he was stateside now for twelve months. He’d peeled through three of those already. Still, it was the longest stretch home that