Cynthia went to deal with the bureaucracy, being far more used to it from the same perspective as Amanda and more likely to gain sympathy from the middle tier employees. Hannah, despite her reservations about being someone Amanda would talk to, went to ask about people who might be trying to get something from her. At least she could plead military bluntness if it turned out to be the wrong tack to take.

She didn't expect the door to be open, which it wasn't, but she also didn't expect Amanda calling out "It's unlocked!" and to be able to open the door and walk in as easily as that.

Nothing looked out of place, as much as she could tell that about a home she had never been in. But nothing was knocked off a surface or over on its side, there were no piles of dirty dishes or laundry or trash lying around. In fact the room looked like a livings advertisement, which struck her as odd until she thought that maybe this was how Amanda coped. Cleaning everything to within an inch of its life so she didn't have time to stop and think about what had happened. If she didn't live in the barracks, Hannah could see herself doing something similar.

"Hello?" She'd ask, but Amanda didn't seem to be in the public areas. "Erm. Amanda?"

After a moment Amanda did come out and Hannah was glad she'd closed the door behind her. The tiny and now pallid woman wore a bathrobe and a towel around her hair and nothing else, in stark contrast to the put together appearance both at the memorial party and when she'd come to visit later at the barracks. Both of which, she realized, were more stressful than being visited in one's own home, on one's own ground. Or maybe that was just Hannah.

Her eyes were red and her body marked with tiny welts that could have been from scalding hot water, Hannah couldn't think where else they'd come from. It still didn't explain why she was only in a robe. "Is this a bad time? Should I, um..." Come back later. Flee? Retreat? Any of those things would be an option.

"What? No. No, it's all right." Amanda drifted into the kitchen to pour a glass of water. Hannah stared at her. Watched her tug the robe closer around her body and shiver a little as she did, either from the mental cold or from feeling cold. Gooseflesh on her arms, so it might be both. Cold caused by shock, Hannah remembered. Dry mouth. Washing herself in scalding hot water.

Every man and woman who entered the military received a lecture on the symptoms of a victim of sexual abuse, in case they noticed such symptoms in their fellows. Part of a week long seminar in looking out for your partners, watching their backs, men and women had that one separately, and then individual interviews. It was widely considered one of the most labor intensive parts of training. But it did accomplish the goal, never letting you forget what it looked like when one of your teammates was in pain. They didn't catch all of them, and they didn't even catch all the bad ones, but she remembered that lecture and all the little signs they told her about. Amanda's body language screamed it.

Now there was the approach. Dangerous terrain, you had one of two choices, you could go barreling forward and hope to cross it as quick as possible and in one piece, or you could take your time and pick your way through it. Hannah judged her defenses pretty far down right now; she barreled through.

"Who is he?"

Probably a he. Amanda didn't lean towards women, people tended to be more afraid when they were attacked by known things and more confused when attacked by unknown. And this was fear, focused and self-protecting, not confusion. Amanda's fingers stiffened around the pitcher, and she almost overflowed the glass. "I don't know what you're talking about."

Liar. "Yes, you do."

She took a long drink of water before she said anything at all. "It wasn't like that. He was... nice. He didn't do anything like that."

"Nice doesn't have you trying to peel your skin off with hot water," Hannah pointed out. There were affairs and there were one night stands, there were all kinds of ways in which two people could hook up. The good kinds didn't leave you feeling like you wanted to get rid of everything that had touched the other person. "What did he do?"

She shook her head. "He just poured me a drink."

This was out of Hannah's bailiwick. She shook her head, reached for the pitcher and poured herself a glass as she noted Amanda's flinch at the action. "Who is he?" Just to confirm the suspicion.

"We met at the party," Amanda took a long gulp of water before she said it. "Dr. Rushman?"

"Uh-huh."

"He wasn't that bad," she said, didn't quite shout but there was volume in her voice. "He even asked me out to dinner, to make sure I was doing all right."

"Uh-huh. This drink, there was alcohol in it?"

Amanda gestured up to the top cabinet; Hannah didn't go looking to see how strong it was or what kind or what was in it, she had some pretty good ideas. It would be the stuff they had kept for special occasions, maybe something that reminded her of her husband so she could cry more, and he could comfort her. With little touches and soft voice, Hannah had seen the type in at least a couple of soldiers looking to take advantage of grieving widows in the field. Hell, she'd seen the type in some of the people who came to the bars and picked off her fellow pilots who'd lost teammates. It was ghoulish and infuriating then, and it was twice as much of both now.

Her hand not holding the glass clenched into a fist. She imagined it punching halfway through Rushman's weaselly face. "All right. If you're all right..." She had to let it go, Amanda wasn't in a place to press charges right now. And she had to find out what Cynthia knew. No point in pushing when it'd just make Amanda even more upset.

She could come back later and ask. Amanda nodded, both hands around the glass to keep it steady while she took another drink, and when she set it down Hannah poured her some more water, refilled the pitcher before sticking it in the cooler.

"Thank you," Amanda whispered. Hannah rubbed her shoulder a little, and this time the younger woman didn't flinch. So that was something, anyway.

"You give me a call if you need anything, okay?"

The meeting gnawed at the back of Hannah's mind. How Amanda had looked, what she had talked about. What she hadn't talked about, Hannah realized as she keyed open the door to their bunk room, having managed to lose the whole bus ride to her thoughts. Which, granted, made it better than coming into the emptiness and feeling the weight of all that space and silence, but not by much. Within an hour the contrast only made her more aware of her lack of anyone to talk to about the problem. Except Cynthia.

So she made another call. It was late, but by the speed with which Cynthia answered neither of them was able to sleep. She was still dressed, too, going through a number of flickering screens and taking notes on her datapad. "Did you find anything out?"

"I found out Dr. Rushman is a scheming, manipulative..." There were stronger words in there somewhere but she'd only had them a second ago, and then they were gone. "He was over at her place. I don't know how hard he pushed for her to sleep with him, but he was definitely heading that way."

Cynthia stopped sorting through whatever it was she'd been looking at and stared over the bottom screen and into the camera. "Oh really."

"You should have seen her, she looked like she'd jump out of her skin every time I moved anywhere near her. She'd just come out of the shower, she didn't care about how she looked being in just her robe. Um. It looked like she'd been trying to boil her skin off." Hannah's fingers splayed open and danced by her temples, then curled into claws in front of the camera. "I swear, Cyn, when I get my hands on him I won't need a Sidewinder, I won't even need a pistol, I'll rip his ..."

"Hannah."

She froze. Cynthia said her name the way the commander had, with quiet authority and expectation of being listened to. Until that point she'd never heard it from anyone else and the yes, sir was automatic even if she bit it back. She dug her palms into her eyes and stood, pacing around the bed until she came back and flopped down from the opposite side she'd left.

"I don't like him. I don't trust him, I don't like him, I think he's after something from her, something more than just cheap lech-y tricks, I don't know what..."

"Whatever he's after, he's going the right way about getting it," Cynthia made some gestures out of sight and, on Hannah's computer, a little icon started to flash. File transfer. "Look, I did some digging? He doesn't just consult with the military, he owns the whole consulting firm. He provides resources, helps in cover identities for Special Operations personnel, support materiel... he is neck deep in all of this. I haven't gone too deep into his past yet, but what's there..."

Her hands raked through her hair. "No wonder he acts like he can take whatever he wants... No wonder he can freeze her death benefits and pension..."

Cynthia nodded, grim and with crisp diction. "If he's that far into Special Operations he knows people, and he knows how people have secrets. Even if he didn't have any legal recourse for it, he'd probably be able to bribe or blackmail the accounting department over something in order to get the paperwork misfiled or snagged."

Hannah's fingers danced over the keyboard as she opened up the files Cynthia had sent. Records, mostly financial, of who was tied up in what and where. "I think I feel sick."

"You know that's probably not even a small part of it. His whole company is ..."

"Corrupt."

Soft and tired sigh as the older woman leaned back in her chair. "Maybe not corrupt according to the letter of the law, but certainly exploiting loopholes. He's up to something. I'll keep looking, see if I can figure out how he got ..."

Into power. Neither of them wanted to say it, the man held no elected office, no promoted rank in the military, he shouldn't be as influential as he seemed and yet he could walk into the home of a soldier's widow and tell her things and do things to her that had her shivering in a scalding hot shower five minutes after he left. And no one would press charges against him, nor, Hannah suspected, would they be able to make the charges stick if they tried. Into power was the right phrase for it.

Hannah pressed her fingertips to her forehead, dug her thumbs into her temples and rubbed. "You keep looking. I'll ... I guess I'll keep an eye on Amanda, try and keep him from doing too much damage. Mitigate the damage he's already done. What does he want from her, anyway?"

Cynthia snorted. "What do most men want from a pretty, vulnerable young woman?"

Put like that, Hannah didn't see how it had escaped her, except it hadn't. Cynthia was only saying outright what she'd been thinking ever since she saw Amanda coming down the hall from the shower. It made her flesh crawl. "Why her?"

"Why not her? He probably saw the opportunity at the party and he went for it..." Not that Cynthia looked entirely convinced, but they were both too tired to dig into it any further. "Get some sleep, Hannah. You look exhausted. We can work on this some more in the morning. He won't come knocking on her door in the middle of the night, not yet anyway."

"Not yet?"

"Sleep. We'll talk about it some more in the morning."

Cynthia did come over the next morning, looking as though she had tried to follow her own advice without much in the way of success. Makeup reduced the sunken circles of her eyes to a tasteful suggestion, and her reactions were sluggish and tired. And yet for all the yawning and fumbling at her bag she still pulled out a number of files to go through. Hannah gave her a look that was equal parts impressed and rebuke. Cynthia blinked in confusion for a second, then shrugged and gave a non-explanation. "Let's just say there are more than a few people who would like to find out how your squadron ended up in precisely that place at precisely that time and leave it at that, hmm?"

Hannah snorted. "Fair enough."

Knowing that there were others looking into it took away some of the cold and the echo from the room. She'd been interviewed by two groups of investigators, one working within the military and another group of special investigators for a defense oversight committee, but their questions and their attitude left her with the impression that they blamed her squadron for getting into trouble and wasting millions of dollars worth of training and equipment in the first place.

She hadn't told Cynthia about that. Bad enough that she chafed at the implication that her comrades were to blame for their own deaths, her friend didn't need that kind of hurt compounding her grief. And she could be wrong, anyway. "I don't think they'll," Cynthia continued, sorting through papers and passing copies to Hannah. "I mean, I doubt they would imply that's what they're doing to you, not when you're part of the investigation. But they weren't shy about their opinions."

Hannah managed a small smile at that and turned over the idea that Cynthia could be right about their intentions as she flipped through document after document. Never having encountered a full investigation before, let alone two of them in one afternoon, she didn't have a textbook or a set of rules that told her how to interpret their questions. And everyone, or at least all the pilots she knew, were suspicious of internal investigators as a matter of habit. The police who patrolled their ranks had never been out there, piloting the walkers or the air units, having to haul around all the unwieldy and sometimes half broken equipment and make snap decisions that could result in people living or dying.

Which wasn't fair, and she knew that some of them had been pilots before they went and joined the investigative branch, but it didn't stop the rumors or prevent anyone from giving them attitude. Cynthia had a different view of them.

"Wait, you do mean the..."

"Defense oversight committee, the commander in charge of the Outer Rim Theatre," Cynthia's mouth twisted as she thought. "A lot of very powerful people have a lot invested in finding out why the intel was so bad."

Hannah had just run into that report, too. By the volume and dates of reports following it, they'd found out less than a day after her unit went down that the information was bad, the terrain wasn't what their maps said it was and the enemy forces were much more numerous and better equipped. In fact, it looked as though the enemy forces were better equipped than any of their intelligence suggested. "This isn't right," Hannah muttered. "This isn't ..."

"Which part?" Cynthia stopped paging through her set of reports and looked over.

"This, how could they be ... how could they even have that launcher? It's not even in production yet. I think." She'd known the date when she woke up and checked her mail out of habit, she always knew the date and often knew the time, and now she couldn't correlate that fact with the expected release date of that particular model of rocket launcher. For all she knew it had been in production a year ago.

"No, it's not," the sharp, surprised tones broke through her confusion. "Which means that someone is bankrolling them with access to military grade weapons that aren't from their military, and it also means that someone is covering it up. Maybe the same someones. Maybe they're just in on it together..."

She'd stopped in the middle of her sentence. Hannah waited a minute or two for her to go on, then gestured. "What? Maybe they're in on it together, yes, what?"

"I don't know..." Cynthia leaned in closer to the screen, then closer still, turning a bit on the bed to tuck her legs under her so she was kneeling on the stiff mattress. "That company name looks familiar."

"Ownership and board members are a matter of public record..." she moved the document they'd been looking at over while she dug for the ownership records, the list of members of the board. "Oh no. Oh no, no, no..."

"What? Who's on the ohhhh..."

They stared at the screen for several minutes. The information they had gathered in the last several days, in the last several hours for that matter, it all crowded into Hannah's head and sat there like a lump. "That's..."

"Yes."

Her skin chilled down several degrees again. This went beyond devious or suspicious and into full-blown evil. "His company created the weapons that are being sold to the enemy. He was an advisor on..."

Cynthia shook her head, copying and then closing the pages. "It's all circumstantial. There's no proof that he knew about the weapons sales, those specific sales among all the ones his company handles, all the clients. There's no proof that he knows what happened to the information, which..."

"Could be anyone who had access to that information, which was a lot of people, no, I know." Hannah laced her fingers together and pressed her forehead into her palms, trying to hold back the angry tears. "I know, just because he's one kind of bastard doesn't mean he's all the other kinds. I still don't like him."

"There's plenty of reasons not to like him, but if we go tossing accusations now before more evidence comes in, at best the investigation will get delayed, at worst..."

"We'll be steering them towards someone who didn't even do it, I know." Which didn't mean she had to like it. Her fingers curled against her forehead, digging into the ends of her regulation-short hair. Cold and then hot again, hot on her cheeks and cold on her arms; she wanted to rip his throat out. She wanted to punch in every tooth in that knife-like grin, and with remembering what Amanda had looked like even she wanted to scrub off her skin at the thought of him touching any woman like that.

She looked up after a moment. Cynthia watched her with pity and concern, two things that should have been normal but grated on Hannah's nerves at the moment, and she slid off the bed and started to pace up and down the row of bunks. Empty bunks.

"He must have something to do with it," she shook her head, leaning against one of the pillars on one of the bunks. "He must have something to do with something, he's gone to a lot of trouble to make sure she's in trouble and needs help."

"Maybe he just likes taking advantage of women in need," Cynthia commented. "The only thing we can really connect him to is setting her up."

"... Has he done that before? Is there any way we can find out who..."

Between one sentence and the next Cynthia was already typing. "We can look in the news feeds at least, the business ones, see who he's been photographed with."

"Cross-reference those names with ... with recent misfortunes, filings for bankruptcy, foreclosures, lawsuits..." Hannah's hands rubbed back and forth over her head as she tried to think. "Messy divorces. He hasn't been married, has he?"

He had, as it turned out, but the divorce wasn't nearly as messy as Hannah wanted it to be. She'd left him for another man, married soon after the divorce was finalized and they had a couple kids, and that was fifteen years ago or so. Nothing noteworthy there. Hannah pointed at the screen. "Go into his ..." Cynthia typed as she spoke, already opening up the gossip column versions of the business magazines.

"... That's, um."

"Interesting."

Page after page of articles, some ranging from accusations that a woman had called the police from his home after being attacked with a wine bottle to others accusing him of harassment and intimidation in the workplace. No charges were ever filed in the wine bottle assault and the woman later recanted her story as having made it up to explain why she left his office. "She just had a bad feeling around him," Hannah snorted. "I have a bad feeling around him, this need to put my fist through his..."

"Focus," Cynthia chuckled. "Having met him, can you see him chasing after someone with a wine bottle?"

"Yes. Or a beer bottle. Or a pint glass..."

"Let's not go further. All right..." she bundled all the copies of articles into several folders, organized through for clarity and then bundled them all into one folder and copied it onto a chip. "There. We should get some space between us and that before we look at it again, get ourselves a clear head between us."

Hannah heard the undertone of that. Cynthia thought she was too bloody-minded, too vengeance driven and wanted to calm her down before she did anything further. And the part of her that remembered the commander, with all he had taught her about combat with the mind before combat with the material and so on and so forth, knew that was important. She still wanted to hit Rushman in the face, throw him bodily out of Amanda's home, teach him that you did not mess around with people of her squadron, including the civilians. Not without incurring some kind of wrath, anyway.

Of course, that had been when she'd had the squadron to back her up. She'd been a part of something, she was still a part of something, but most of her connections were gone. Surrounded by empty bunks now, it was just her to defend their honor and their people, and that was too big for her to carry.

She did come close to exchanging blows or at least angry words with him later. Her psychiatrist took her out to dinner so she wouldn't be eating alone constantly in a bid to engage her with the outside world. She'd replied that she was plenty engaged with the outside world, she didn't need to be dragged out into it, but she went anyway. It'd make Cynthia happy to hear that she was seeing something other than her barracks and the machine bay.

They were heading towards dessert when she saw Amanda in another corner of the restaurant, a table next to the window with candles on and no one at the other side, though she saw a plate set for someone to join her. Dr. Halley was off in the ladies'; Hannah pretended not to be staring over in Amanda's direction and dropped her gaze down to her plate when she saw Rushman come back from talking to one of the maitre d's. He sat down between Amanda and the door, though not enough between them that Hannah couldn't see her. She looked out the window instead of at him the moment he sat down, folding her hands in front of her, crossed at the wrists. Thinner wrists, Hannah thought, or maybe that was the light and her paranoia. Amanda looked tired.

Dr. Halley followed her gaze over, then looked around at everyone else and the gap of tables between them and the rest of the patrons. "Something wrong?" she looked back over at Hannah.

"Wh--" she shook her head and stopped looking over at them, or tried to. "Nothing. Never mind."

The rumors came around a few days later. Hannah caught some outside her psychiatrist's office, in the NIMH building. Someone speculating that a relationship so soon after the death of her husband couldn't be good for Amanda; they referred to her by last name but Hannah knew who they were talking about anyway. Two doctors consulting with each other on their cases meant she couldn't interrupt and let them know she'd overheard, but she filed that away to tell Cynthia later. It wasn't just her imagination.

The next day she went looking for an apartment off base so she didn't have to rattle around the barracks anymore, a move approved by her psychiatrist and signed off on by the base commander. It didn't feel right, it felt like ripping another piece out of herself when she had few enough pieces left, but the stark white walls and empty bunks were chilling. It turned out she wasn't the only one, either. Amanda was selling her house, but she wasn't looking for a new house. At least, that was what the realtor told her when Hannah made noises about the two of them moving in together, perhaps.

"Oh, I think she already has a roommate. At least, she mentioned something about moving in somewhere ..."

All sorts of possibilities crowded into Hannah's mind at that point, most of them the sort that inspired an urgent need to scrub off. For the first time since she'd returned from the medical bay she cracked open her old mission logs, video diaries and letters they had sent home, recovered from backup and garbage files. She remembered how happy Jim had been, hunched over and babbling at the screen as he told Amanda about all the crap the squadron had gotten up to, everyone's little shenanigans, and the latest quirks and hiccups in his unit's operation as though it was some kind of pet.

Rushman wasn't like that at all. Rushman, as far as Hannah could guess, had never smiled at anyone with genuine feeling in his life. Everything he said meant at least two other things, one of them neither complimentary nor benign, and he exuded bad feeling the way a broke-down BIOsystem exuded oil fumes. With much the same effect.

"Why'd you have to go and leave her like that, you bastard," Hannah muttered to the neck-joint of her Sidewinder. Jim babbled on from the speakers on the wall in front of her about how they'd gotten busted putting laxatives in Garlan's chilled tea. "Why'd you have to go and die on us? All of you..."

For the first time in a week, and it startled her when she realized it had been a week since she'd thought of it, she missed having the Commander to talk to. The nights they had spent curled up in bed and talking, his voice low and deep above her head while she listened to it resonate in his chest. She closed her eyes and curled up against his pillow, resting her cheek on the surface but it wasn't the same at all. No warmth, no solidity, no vital sense of movement. His scent, if it had ever remained in the fabric, was long gone. Behind her unit, the video kept playing.

Cynthia found her after the videos had ended and turned to static, sweat pouring down her face from the effort of balancing on top of her Sidewinder and half asleep from the heat of the maintenance bay. "Hannah?"

She lifted her head, tucked the tool in the crook of her leg and scrubbed the back of her hand over her brow. "Amanda's moving in with Rushman." Two more connections and she'd have the top of the cockpit back together again. It wasn't pretty, but it would do.

"You're going to have to speak outside of the pilot cavity, you know, I can't understand you when you're..."

Hannah pulled her tools away and swung her leg over the shoulder of the BIOsystem, dropping down to the floor in a single motion that would have been smoother if the landing hadn't jarred her to her teeth. At least she hadn't dropped her tools. "Amanda's moving in with Rushman." More brow mopping, rocking for a second on her heels. Why was it so hot in here?

Cynthia stared. Hannah dragged her head up and made herself focus her eyes on the other woman. "Are you sure?"

"I'm fairly sure, the realtor was talking about her moving from her current place, and how she doesn't have anything new lined up. And she's not moving out of town, and I saw her having dinner with Rushman the other night."

That last came out mumbled, she didn't want to think about what happened after that dinner. Or how she'd found Amanda after Rushman's visit and that shower. Cynthia walked around and between the units, till she came to stand by Commander Mikkelson's old Drakken-250. Hannah stayed standing back, by her sleeker Sidewinder, letting Cynthia have her moment. Eventually she looked back around.

"This is..." Cynthia struggled for words.

"This is a shit situation is what this is," Hannah rapped out, stalking back to the diagnostic computer and running through the list of repairs. The screen refused to resolve itself into anything more than a suggestive blur, which told her how bad the sweat was dripping into her eyes. "This is him being a manipulative bastard and..."

"And drawing her into an abusive, controlling relationship, I know. I've met his kind before." She stalked away from the Drakken-250 and over to the other side of the diagnostic computer, staring fixedly at the wall.

Hannah stuffed down all the questions she wanted to ask. The weight of the commander's protectiveness pressed down on her shoulders. Despite or perhaps because of the affair, or because of any of half a dozen factors she didn't know about, his relationship with his wife was one thing he was unwilling to compromise on. She'd questioned how uncompromising he could be, with the whole being unfaithful thing, but only once. Somehow it worked out. She still didn't know for certain if it worked out before or after he took up with her.

And that was neither here nor there, although before she stuffed those thoughts away too she wondered for a brief moment of surprise if Cynthia meant the commander. "So what do we do?"

"Apart from telling her what we see, there isn't much we can do. He's not doing anything illegal, he hasn't committed any act more egregious than tastelessly propositioning a widow. Which, though ill advised, isn't illegal. He might not even be..."

Hannah gave her friend a flat-eyed stare.

"All right, we can be reasonably certain he either is sleeping with her or pressuring her into it, yes."

"Damn right yes." Skin red and raw from heat and scrubbing, she could be more than reasonably sure something had happened. "How do we even get her alone to talk to her? She hasn't been answering my calls..."

"Or mine. I'm not sure, but if you know some place you ... if there's somewhere you think she might be regularly, we could try and talk to her there, one of us could. It'd have to be that day," Cynthia added, pacing around the diagnostic computer. Hannah turned with her, uncomfortable with the fidgeting behind her as she ran through the list of what else she could work on today. "If he finds out we're trying to talk to her or ask questions, he'll shut that down as quickly as he can. Convince her that we're trying to undermine her new happiness or something..."

Hannah shook her head and made an effort to concede the rest of the day to her stress fever, or that's what she guessed it was anyway. "She seems to stop by the realtor's pretty regularly to make arrangements, I can look at that, maybe. I need to find base housing pretty soon anyway..."

Cynthia nodded. One hand rubbed over the other, dry-washing, a sign of nerves Hannah had only rarely seen, and not at all in the last few weeks. "Think about what you want to say to her. Remember, she's with him because she ... she feels adrift. And she needs to feel safe."

"Safe? With Rushman?" Hannah started.

"Yes, with him. He's good at that, he's probably worked on making people feel safe or at least distracted from whatever's troubling them for a long, long time. He'll have started off small, little things that really did help her, and over time it'll turn into things that help him more than her but by now she associates him with that feeling of safety, with not needing to make decisions because he'll make them for her..."

"I think I get the picture." Catching her friend in a moment of vulnerability she hadn't expected unnerved her, made her feel as though she were prying into hers and the Commander's bedroom without permission or something. Only it wasn't the Commander, it had to be someone earlier than that. "I'll be as careful as I can. If that doesn't work, you get to lead the intervention."

"Okay," Cynthia mustered a rueful smile, nodded. "All right. And hopefully whatever you say to her, it'll work."

She didn't sound too hopeful. Hannah didn't feel too hopeful herself, what she felt was a bloody need to pound Rushman's head into a wall a few times. And her therapist thought she was doing better with the grief and the anger. Then again, her therapist didn't need to know about this, did she? No, she probably did. Hannah didn't see how wanting to pound a smarmy bastard was at all a sign of trouble, though.

If she actually went out and did it, that would be trouble. But she had better impulse control than that. Pounding metal back into shape would have to suffice.

<< Back || Next >>