Chapter 12

12

I stoppedmid-roll when I encountered something solid at my back. Then I stopped breathing when I felt something heavy draped over my side. Panic set in when I felt legs tangled with mine.

“It’s me, baby.”

I felt no less panic hearing Garrett’s gravelly voice behind me and had to take a moment to calm my racing heart before I could ask, “How’d you get in here?”

Yes, in my sleepy, no-longer-terrorized haze that was what I asked. Not, ‘why the hell are you in my bed?’ Not, ‘have you lost your damn mind?’ I also didn’t jump out of bed and threaten to call the police. But that was something to ponder for later.

“Picked your lock.”

“You picked my lock?”

“Yep.”

I didn’t bother asking how; I figured his years in the Navy probably taught him a lot of new things.

Instead, I focused on what I wanted to know.

“Why?”

Garrett’s arm tightened and he shoved his face into my neck just above my shoulder. What he didn’t do was answer.

The longer the silence stretched the harder it was to push aside the hurt. But that meant I had plenty of time to allow anger to creep in. Plenty of time to get furious he’d broken into my house again. Okay, so, the first night he didn’t have to break in per se because I’d forgotten to lock the door. But I hadn’t invited him in, and I certainly hadn’t given him permission to sit on my floor and watch me sleep. Though with our current situation I would be a fraction less angry if he wasn’t in bed holding me.

“Please leave.” I wasn’t proud of the way my voice cracked and, in that moment, I really wished I was one of those women who was strong and could harden their hearts. I really, really wished that a slew of memories of me falling asleep just like this hadn’t invaded to torture my thoughts.

“I was wrong,” he muttered.

“Damn right you were wrong. This is not cool, Garrett. You need to leave.”

“No, Mellie, I was wrong when I gave you an ultimatum. I was wrong when I asked you to choose. I was wrong when I was so blinded by my selfish need I walked away from us when I didn’t get what I wanted in the timeframe in which I wanted it. I was wrong for not loving you the way I should’ve loved you.”

I blinked into the darkness of the room and swallowed down the lump in my throat. Seventeen years ago, I would’ve died to hear those words. Hell, ten years I would’ve done anything to hear them. But now all they did was slice me to pieces.

“I don’t know why you’re telling me this now, but I don’t want—”

“I got that email you sent seven days after Finn Winters died. Seven days after I abandoned my team. Seven days after I failed, and a good man lost his life. I lashed out at you when really, I wanted to beg you to find me. I tried to convince myself I emailed you back all that bullshit to save you from the man I’d become. But really, I was too much of a coward to ask you for help. I was too scared to tell you what I’d done and how badly I’d fucked up. I needed you but I was too weak to let you see me broken.”

I was stunned into utter speechlessness. I had a thousand things I wanted to say but it was like my words had been ripped from my throat, leaving me painfully mute.

“I was ashamed of the man I’d become. Ashamed of what I’d done to you. Ashamed I’d allowed stubbornness or pride or just plain stupidity to stop me from coming back to you and begging you to forgive me. I was ashamed that you were my first thought when I thought I was going to die but I wasn’t man enough to reach out to you.”

I closed my eyes to block out the mental image of Garrett almost dying. Of course, I’d heard what happened. I knew it had been close. Neither Dave nor Marion went into detail, but I knew it was an IED that had taken out Garrett’s vehicle. I had been beside myself when Dave told me he was going overseas to be with Garrett. The only thing that had stopped me from going along was that him asking me to take care of Marion.

I knew Garrett had also had a bunch of surgeries. I hadn’t seen him in shorts since the explosion, so I didn’t know the extent of his scars, but I knew from Marion he’d been burned from ankle to thigh. It had been years since the explosion, and I still couldn’t think about it without feeling like I was going to throw up.

My stomach was still in knots when he went on.

“I hit send on that shitty fucking email and whatever good I had left inside of me, broke. I knew I was done. I knew I’d turned into someone you’d despise. At the time I thought that’s what I needed. It would be easier living with the hole in my heart if you hated me. But there’s not a fucking thing easy about living without you.”

Boy did I know that was the truth. I’d tried to hate him, and it didn’t make living without him any easier.

Not that I ever actually got to the hating part.

“Even now, here I am in the dark because I’m still too much of a coward to face you in the light. Too fucking scared to see your face when I tell you the man you fell in love with, the man you were going to marry, is nothing but a fucking failure. I know I hurt you, hurt both of us, but I gotta say, you dodged a bullet, baby.”

That’s when I snapped.

I’d heard enough.

I turned, dislodging his arm and pulling away from his face still buried in my neck. When I was facing him my hands clumsily went to his face. One palm wedged between the pillow and his cheek while the other cupped his jaw.

“You could tell me every day for the next fifty years that you’re a failure and I still wouldn’t believe you. You could tell me over and over again that you’re a coward and you’d never convince me.”

“Mel—”

“Shut up,” I demanded. “It’s my turn.”

I felt him nod his head and, in the dark, facing the man who had without a doubt shattered my heart, I told him the truth.

All of it.

“I forgave you for leaving me a long time ago. It took me a few years to understand but I got it. The year after you left, I started counseling and through that I learned how unhealthy my relationship with my family was. The following year when I was stronger, I asked my parents to join me. They did and we finally got the tools we needed to set boundaries. To say it was a rough couple of years was an understatement. My parents’ guilt was incredibly difficult to witness. They never saw the pressure they put on me to take care of them and Buck and Analise. It happened slowly over a lot of years until it was just normal. I was too young to understand I wasn’t being a good, loyal daughter, I was enabling them.”

I sucked in a breath and on an exhale admitted, “I was wrong, Garrett. I was wrong and took advantage of how much you loved me thinking you’d forgive me, so I’d be okay if I broke my promise to you. I thought I was doing the right thing staying in Montana to take care of my parents and I justified it by telling myself you were training and busy so you wouldn’t miss me being there. It was something I told myself to excuse my shitty behavior.”

I felt Garrett’s jaw clench under my palms, and I felt him shake his head so before he could argue with me I continued.

“I forgive you for sending me the email.”

I heard Garrett suck in a breath.

“Maybe if I’d been in a better place I would’ve read through your words and seen that you were hurting but…” I trailed off, not wanting to bring up my ex-husband, but seeing no way around it I went on. “I was feeling guilty and ashamed for marrying a man I knew I didn’t love. I told myself I’d grow to love him. He didn’t fight the divorce, he knew he never should’ve married me but also he couldn’t escape the ghost of you, and leaving him meant he could get out from under that cloud. I sent that email to you a week after my divorce was final. It’s not lost on me that both of us went through something traumatic at the same time. It was bad timing, me reaching out to you.”

Garrett remained silent. His big body next to mine statue-still.

And since he was staying quiet, I took my chance to address the real reason why he’d snuck into my bed in the middle of the night.

“You need to forgive yourself for what happened with your team.”

Garrett was no longer still—he was vibrating. I rushed on, “You are not a coward. Even the strongest of men stumble. They fall. They fail. They struggle. But they get back up. And Garrett, you got up.”

“No, Melissa, I ran and I’m still running from them.”

“Yet Cash is in Montana to take your back,” I reminded him.

“Yeah, he’s not running. I am. They’ve been back in my life for months trying to talk to me but I keep dodging them. And fucking Kira won’t give up.”

“Because she knows you’re a man worth fighting for.”

“Fuck,” he grunted.

“Stop running, honey. Let them help you heal.”

A painful rumble emanated from his chest as if it had swelled and combusted before he could contain it.

“There is no shame in needing the people who love us.”

I felt Garrett rest his forehead on mine. I could hear his breath coming in fast, choppy pants.

Neither of us said anything else. We silently lay there in the dark with my hands on his face and his forehead on mine, listening to each other breathe.

I don’t know how long it took me to fall back asleep. It was after I’d replayed our conversation in my mind. A long time after I wondered what could’ve been if we’d had this conversation ten or fifteen years ago. What would’ve happened had I apologized to him for the part I’d played in our breakup.

When I woke up in the morning, Garrett was gone, and it would be days until I saw him again.

And when I did, all hell broke loose.