He walked over to me and put his arms around me, giving me a warm, reassuring hug.
“I know that you must be scared. I mean, who wouldn't be?”
“It's not just that,” I said. “It's the fact that... That I'm stuck, that I'm like a prisoner now. I have to look over my shoulder, I have to worry all the time about where he is, whether he's about to pounce. It's horrible Everett, it really is. I can't live like this.”
He squeezed me tightly.
“I know it is, and I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. Nobody deserves this, nobody. But rest assured, I won't let that creep get within a hundred yards of you.”
“I know that, but you can't be around me 24-7, Everett. And even if you could, I would want my independence anyway. But that psycho, that evil asshole, he's robbed me of that!”
Again, I felt like crying, but Everett stroked my head gently and hugged me, and I drew strength from him and managed to keep myself together.
“He'll eventually get caught, you know. I don't know how he wiggled his way out of a jail sentence before, but now he's committed a serious crime. Breaking and entering with the intention to do someone harm is not something that the courts will take lightly. And on top of that, he was breaking a restraining order, multiple times – Mrs. Dobbins will surely testify that she's seen him hanging around your house a few times. And he can be tied to the break-in and threatening message left at your daycare. When all of that is added up, he'll be looking at some serious prison time.”
“I just hope they can catch him. I really hope they can.”
“He's going to slip up eventually. They always do.”
“I just hope that it's soon. Like I said, I can't go on like this. I really can't.”
“Come, let's not dwell on this too much. Let's go sit down and scroll through things to watch. It'll be a good distraction to get your mind off all this stuff.”
I nodded and took his hand, and then we went over to the sofa and sat and scrolled through Netflix's offerings.
“Oh, there's that movie The Hurt Locker,” I said as the image for the film came up. “About the war in Iraq. It won a few awards, didn't it?”
A strange expression immediately came over Everett's face. This time, though, I didn't let it slide.
“And I can see that any mention of war makes you clam up and get all weird,” I continued. “You don't have to talk about it if you really don't want to, but... Don't you think that you and I know each other well enough now to talk about this? I mean, how much longer do you intend to keep me in the dark about your past? If we are going to give this a go, don't you think I deserve to know these things?”
Something inside me felt really worked up all of a sudden. Maybe it was all the worry and fear about Simon and everything else that had happened recently coming to a head.
Everett looked at me and sighed. “Yeah. You're absolutely right,” he conceded. “You do deserve to know. Well, here it is – the 'doctor' who helped me, Jimmy, he's a buddy of mine from a very different time. The time when I was a Navy SEAL.”
My eyebrows raised in surprise. I hadn’t seen that coming at all. “Wait, what?! You were a Navy SEAL?”
He nodded. “I was, yeah.”
“Wow. Okay. So many things make sense now.”
“I know. It's pretty crazy when you think about it. I mean, here I am, principal of a high school, it's about the farthest thing from what I used to do that I could imagine.”
“And what made you want to be a Navy SEAL in the first place?” I questioned.
“Well, there was this girl.”
I smiled warmly. “It’s always a girl,” I said trying to lighten the weight of his words.
“Isn’t it?” he said with a slight smile. “Thing is, the relationship we had, it really messed me up. Long story if I were to really get into it, but the short is, she was having a long-term affair behind my back, she was a real piece of work. And when I found out, I just had all this anger and these feelings of betrayal inside that I didn’t know what to do with it all. I had always been someone who had lived for adrenaline rushes, and pushing myself to the absolute limits, so I guess I wanted to do something that would really push me to the absolute limits. And somehow I ended up in a recruiter’s office and eventually signed up to be a Navy SEAL.”
“And then... and then you were sent to Iraq.”
He nodded. “That's right. And I... when I was there, I saw things, things you can't imagine. Things you can’t forget. It's worse than any of these movies show. Way worse. And I lost so many good friends there. Good, good men who died too young, whose lives were cut far too short.”
I squeezed his hand. “I'm happy that you made it back. And I'm sorry you had to go through such a terrible, terrible experience.”
“Thank you,” he said. “You know, no matter how many medals or honors I won for my actions there, it wasn’t enough to mask the experience.”