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 had literally given 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.
“You will whether I want it or not.”
“Because that’s what family does. We keep each other from making humongous mistakes.”
My heart tugged because her words matched my thoughts. We were a family. We would always be that way, even without Darren tying us together.
“Go ahead, Doctor Phil,” I said, and she chuckled.
“Just tell her the truth.”
“About?”
“Everything. Anything. All of it.”
“I don’t know if I can,” I told her.
“Then you’ll never have what Darren and I had,” she replied.
“I hate that I told you that,” I said with a wry smile, remembering my drunken self after finishing sniper training, coming back to our apartment to find her and Darren tearing each other’s clothes off. I’d taken a walk and come back while Darren was in the shower. I’d told Tristan that, someday, I hoped to have what they had. The love that allowed you to finish each other’s sentences and could speak volumes with a look. I’d wanted it, and yet, I hadn’t because I’d seen what a love like that could do to a person when one of them didn’t come home. I’d been a mixed-up piece of shit.
I still was.
“I gotta go. It sounds like Hannah is pulling Molly’s tail again,” she said.
I smiled.
“We’ll talk again soon, okay?” she said.
“Take care of yourself.”
“You too.”
Then, she was gone.
I stared at the phone, emotions still raging through me as thoughts of family chugged through my burnt heart.
I picked up my keys and wallet and left the house by the back stairs. I got into the rental car and drove a route that took me closer to town. I pulled into the cemetery, got out, and walked toward our family’s mausoleum. The one holding my ancestors. The place that held the ashes of my mother and my father. The tomb I hadn’t visited since I was thirteen and had buried my second parent.
When I first walked in, the air was stale but cooler than
