The space between us was making me realize how little I’d done for her. Sure, I’d been there to help with the physical things. The baby. The dog. But I hadn’t really been able to helpher. Not when I’d been grieving so much myself.
I hadn’t been able to pull her from the edge.
I’d just continually reminded her of where it was at.
“I’m glad,” I said, voice rough. My eyes burned, and my fingers were clenched, biting into the palm of my hand, but it was the truth.
“Are you?” she asked, trying to interpret my tone.
“Yes. It’s all I want. For you to be happy again.”
She sniffled, and I wanted to punch something because I’d made her cry again when she’d just been telling me she was doing better.
“You know that’s what he’d want for you, too, right?” she asked quietly.
I did. He’d had the best fucking soul of anyone I’d ever met. He’d give the shirt off his back to anyone. He hadliterallygiven the shirt off his back on one of our missions in Afghanistan when we’d stumbled on a group of kids shivering in the snow. He’d handed over his jacket, and we’d all followed suit and ended up just shy of hypothermia by the time we’d reached our extraction point.
“Why does it feel like betraying him?” I asked her, pissed that my voice cracked again.
“Because you blame yourself,” she said. I heard Hannah, her blathering in the background, and Tristan said something I couldn’t hear to someone else in the room, and then it was quiet as if she’d walked away from the baby.
“If I’d just been?”
“Stop! You can’t do that, Nash. You can’t. I can’t either.”
She was quiet for a long time, and then she said, “Darren couldn’t tell me much about the missions. I didn’t really want to know because I was scared shitless every time you guys were out in the field. Having him gone for months at a time was hard, but knowing you were actually out... I could barely breathe. But one time, about six months before…” Her voice broke, and she paused again before forcing herself on. “I don’t know what happened…all he told me was, ‘If Nash hadn’t been there, we’d all be dead.’”
I was shaking my head, even though I knew the exact mission she was talking about. We were somewhere we were definitely not supposed to be. Somewhere that would have started World War III if it ever came out. We’d been moving in to blow the place to kingdom come when I’d seen the flicker of a laser—a silent alarm we were about to trigger. I’d halted us all with one word into our headsets. Quiet, barely loud enough to be heard.
We’d stopped to assess the situation, knowing if we went any farther, we’d be sitting ducks with guns blazing down on us from above us in the entryway. The enemy would have had the higher ground. The fucking high ground was always the better ground.
What I’d done hadn’t been any big deal. I hadn’t pulled him from a fire or stopped the bleeding on an arterial wound. I’d just seen a flicker that wasn’t supposed to be there. A light my sniper senses had latched onto in a nanosecond.
“It went both ways,” I said finally.
“I know,” she responded. “But what I’m trying to say is you did save him. He saved you. And now we both have to save ourselves.”
“I want to be there for you,” I told her the honest, raw truth.
“I’m not saying you can’t be part of my life, Nash. God, I don’t even want that. I want Hannah to know you. I want you to be able to tell her stories…” Her voice completely broke apart, quiet sobs that made mine hit my eyes. “I want you to tell her stories about her father so she knows the kind of man he was.”
I ran a hand along my scar, the pain making it hard to speak, the silence allowing us both to gather ourselves back together. She was the brave one; she spoke first.
“You are absolutely one of the best people in my life,” she said. “I’m not letting you go. I’ve already lost too much. I love you. Maybe not as much as the dog…”
“The dog?” I choked on a laugh that she returned.
The sound released a feeling in my chest of a weight slowly rising from where it had been holding me down.
After a moment, she asked, “How’s Dani?”
“I completely freaked out on her.”
“You? No way.” It was half-serious, half-tease, because freaking out wasn’t my norm, but she was trying to keep the moment light and away from the dark place we’d gone.
I stared out the window at the myrtle trees, knowing the pond was beyond it. A nemesis I hadn’t overcome yet in my life.
“Can I give you a piece of advice?” she asked.
