“I am okay. As okay as I’ll ever be without him,” she said, emotions clogging her voice.
“You can’t live like this forever. It’s a half-life. Hiding behind Hannah, barely leaving the house. He wouldn’t have wanted that. He’d want to see you move forward. To feel happiness. To feel love,” I insisted.
“Stop!” she yelled. “That’s enough! Neither you nor Darren gets to decide how I grieve. How or if or when I move on. I get to decide what happens to me. And if I’m happy living the rest of my life hating him, and missing him, while at the same time honoring him, his memory, and our love, then I get to make that decision. It’s my goddamn life.”
Her shaky, angry voice made the baby go quiet. Even Molly had stopped thumping her tail. Tristan grabbed the wipes and cleaned off the baby’s face, but she left the rest of the mess, unlocking the safety straps and picking up Hannah. She had the baby on her hip when she turned back to me. We stared each other down, and―whereas yesterday, with Dr. Inez and Mac, I hadn’t blinked once―seeing Tristan’s pain and Hannah’s scared eyes as she took in her mom’s voice, it made me look down and away. Failure.
Tristan sighed a tormented sigh. “This isn’t working, Nash. You coming here, trying to assuage the guilt of losing him by trying to be some kind of savior to me. I don’t need to be saved. He did.”
Fuck. My chest turned inside itself, the scar across my collarbone felt like it had been opened up all over again. Burning. Destroying. “Tristan…”
She looked like she regretted her choice of words, but she didn’t apologize. Instead, she said, “Go home, Nash. Wherever that is. Go there.”
That just stabbed at me more because she didn’t know where I was from. Darren had been the only person since I’d arrived at Annapolis as an undergrad whom I’d voluntarily told. It was in my personnel file, but no one asked, and I didn’t tell. Darren had allowed me to make his family my own for over a decade. Because the place I’d grown up wasn’t a home at all. It was full of disappointments—mine of them, and theirs of me. People who’d let each other down.
I didn’t want my past to repeat itself. I didn’t want to let Tristan down.
“You and Hannah…you are my home,” I told her the truth.
Tears flew down her cheeks faster and faster. “You can’t take his place.”
Was that what she thought I was trying to do? Trying to be her husband? No wonder she scowled and growled at me. I didn’t want to be him, and yet, I did want to fill the void he’d left behind. It was a fine line to walk. And truthfully, it was probably part of the reason I’d panicked when Dani had been in my bed. Like I was a husband who’d cheated on a wife who wasn’t mine and who I didn’t want that way. We were so screwed up. I was so screwed up.
Maybe Dr. Inez was right that I had shit to figure out. Maybe Mac was right, too, that I needed to give Tristan space to heal some of her scars without me ripping them open.
Tristan stopped at the entryway. “I love you, Nash. You were his brother, and you’ll always be my brother, but I can’t look at you right now and not think of all the things I don’t have because he loved you and the SEALs more.”
“That isn’t true,” I growled.
“Isn’t it? I asked him to get out. After I got pregnant. I asked him…”
She couldn’t even finish without the tears turning into sobs, and I gulped, holding back my own. I hadn’t known. I reached for her, trying to comfort her, but she stepped away.
“He wouldn’t give it up… he wouldn’t leave any of you behind. But us. We were okay to leave behind.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. I didn’t know how to take an image I had of the best man on the planet and twist it to see that he’d somehow failed the one person I knew he’d loved most. I didn’t want that to be my image of him.
She left, and I let her go.
♫ ♫ ♫
“Fuckity, fuck, fuck!” The swearing brought me out of my light sleep in a bed I wasn’t used too. It took barely a second for me to place my surroundings: the loft in Mac’s apartment in D.C. with my military duffel by the stairs. It was all I carried with me when I was on the move, and now I was just that. Baseless. Homeless. I’d left the majority of my things at Tristan’s, in the basement with Darren’s boxes, because I didn’t know where to take them, and a part of me was still hoping that, with some time, she’d just let me move back in.
Mac and Georgie had been gracious enough to let me stay while I got my shit together.
I pulled on my cammies and a T-shirt before heading down the stairs to see Mac standing in front of the three TVs on the wall of the condo, remote in hand. The TVs were a leftover from Dani staying on top of the political world. I came to a standstill next to him, eyes drifting toward the televisions and freezing.
It was as if thinking of Dani had materialized her. Even though all I could see was the back of her, there was no mistaking her graceful sway and her dark silky hair. As she walked toward a limousine, a wall of red hit her in the head. She fell forward, the object on fire, falling to the ground, and exploding in a sea of sparks and sound. Dani flung off her smoldering jacket and scrambled into a limousine.
“What the hell, Mac?” I said, finding my voice while watching as a supposed security detail swarmed to put the blond country singer in
