Chapter Twenty-Three

Levi

That night after the safari, Levi was too riled to sleep. He tossed and turned, and Mojo kept lifting his head to check on him. Mojo seemed to be on edge, too.

Levi thought maybe taking Mojo for a run would help them both unwind.

Tennis shoes tied, Levi was dressed in fleece for the chilly night.

It was well after midnight when he rounded the corner of the vineyard, and he found Tess reaching for the handle on the pickup.

Where could she be going this late and alone? He wondered if she was retreating to Windhoek until Iniquus left.

He made sure that she could hear his shoes crunching through the gravel so that he didn’t startle her when he asked, “Where are you going?”

“Hey there. I thought I’d drive a bit to get away from the light pollution and take a look at the sky.”

“Alone?”

“Out here? Yes, who would get me out here?” She climbed in and rolled down her window before she shut the door.

“Who? I don’t know. Maybe you’re thinking of the normal dangers. I know for sure you’re the kind of a woman who would rather be alone in the woods with a bear than a man. Right?

“Statistically, that’s a no-brainer. But you’re the only man. And not a single bear to be found.”

“Other critters?”

“Maybe.” She pulled her hat lower over her ears. In the glare of the outdoor light, her nose was already pink from the cold. “I brought some pillows and blankets and thought I’d just go out, lay, and look.”

He peeked into the bed of the pickup—pillows, sleeping bag, hiking bag—it looked like she’d planned to camp.

“I was in bed, flailing around, unable to sleep,” she added.

“I’m sure you didn’t sleep much at the hospital either, not with all the nurses’ checks.” He kept his voice low so as not to wake anyone. And he kept his tone light so as to not impose his emotional upheaval on her.

“And the night before that, I slept in the car—”

“Your cheetah side adventure.” He smiled.

“Exactly. And the night before that, I was on a jackal-dotted search and rescue in the middle of the night to help a fellow traveler who was lost coming back from the loo.”

“Which is what one does for a fellow traveler.” He put his hands on her window sill. “You’re exhausted, Tess. Why can’t you sleep?”

“Too riled.”

“Me, too. I get that. And so you thought matter ...”

“The Metz have their exterior lights on so people can move about safely at night. I thought I’d drive out a bit, so it was just me and the stars.” She hitched her thumb toward the bed of the truck. “I sleep best when the air is cold, but I’m warm and snug.”

Levi held back his, “I remember.” He wondered if that was the easy part of the story and if there was something difficult that she’d left unsaid.

Nights for Tess had always been tricky times.

When she’d been on the run in Ghana, Tess had explained, she learned not to make any noise. Mama Ya told her that emotions rode the wind. Sobbing could be heard at long distances. Crying out at night could get someone killed. Tess knew that during the war, she hadn’t made a noise, or Mama Ya might have had to abandon her to save herself and her own children. As an adult, Tess could understand the peril that this woman took on for a stranger.

In Ghana, sleep was silent.

Once Tess arrived in America to live with her aunt and uncle, they’d turned to medication for both Tess’s sake and for theirs. But Tess hadn’t liked the way it left her foggy for most of the day. As soon as she went to university with her own apartment, she stopped taking it.

Her roommate, Shanti, slept with a face mask and noise-canceling headphones anyway, so that hadn’t been a problem.

Back when Levi and Tess were dating, and Tess had her ankle twist on the mountain, and they started living together more-or-less, she’d been embarrassed to wake him and offered to take the medications for his sake.

Levi refused.

He was afraid that Tess would still be having nightmares but would be so deep under the influence of the medication that he wouldn’t know. She might experience the terror and not be able to wake from it.

After Levi got to Afghanistan, that kind of night terror activity wasn’t unusual for his fellow service members, especially if they’d been on more than one deployment. It was just better hidden because bases ran twenty-four-seven, and there was always the noise of activity.

Levi considered that it was possible that the events of the last few days made Tess feel vulnerable to nightmares, and she didn’t want the noise to call attention to her.

Maybe it was him. Maybe he triggered her.

Or maybe he was overstepping and jumping to conclusions. After all, Tess had always loved the night sky and the stars.

He didn’t have to make this hard.

In fact, it was doing her a disservice.

She reached through the window and grabbed a handful of the sky, felt it with her fingers, and scanned the bowl of the Milky Way. When she focused back on him, she said, “That’s a bemused look on your face.”

“When you do that, I think you’re an air whisperer.” He grinned.

At first, she returned his smile. “Sounds magical.” Then the smile fell off, her brows furrowing in the middle. She said quietly, “Yeah, there’s something down low in my gut.”

“Parasites?” Levi raised his eyebrows toward his hairline. “You’ve been eating the game meat.”

“Yes, but it’s cooked.” She started to roll up her window. “Nice seeing you.”

He left his hand on the top of the glass. “Tess, I was teasing. Come on now. I want to hear. And I want you safe. This isn’t a country either of us is used to visiting. You don’t know what you don’t know until it’s damned dangerous that you didn’t know. And you’re thinking of sleeping out here all alone?”

“Okay.” She lowered the window again. “I think I followed that. You look like you’re going for a run. It’s—what do you call it?—zero dark thirty? But if you and Mojo want to ride out with me away from the vineyard lights, I see no reason you shouldn’t.”

He ran around to the left-side passenger seat and climbed in.

Mojo insisted on sitting between them.

“Hello, Mojo, sweetest of all the sweet boys.” Tess crooned. “Are you getting along with Levi?

After Levi pulled the door shut. She lifted her foot off the brake, and they rolled forward.

Mojo laid down and put his head in her lap.

Watching her profile as she drove out, Levi’s pain started to lose its barbs. He had high hopes that he could get some of his questions answered.

He'd always understood that there was more to the story than he was being told. He had always believed that she truly, deeply, cellularly loved him. He just couldn't understand, under those circumstances, the betrayal of her marrying another man.

But this wasn’t just any guy. This was Abraham.

And Abraham had sacrificed everything for her. The food from his plate, the last drops of his water. When she was weak and tired, he carried her on his back as the family made their way from space to space, trying to find a safe place to rest their heads.

If Abraham had needed her, Tess could do nothing other than to help him.

If she could turn away, she wouldn't be the Tess that he loved so ardently to this day, the pain still fresh and throbbing.

As a SEAL, he knew the debt he felt to his brothers who saved his life not once but time and again over the years. What would he do for them?

Anything in his power. Absolutely anything that they asked of him.

He understood. He’d understood for a long time. And there was the boulder, sitting on his chest.

Keep it light, man, Levi counseled himself. “How’s your family? The children?”

“Adam and Mordecai! You wouldn’t recognize them. When you saw them, they were toddlers, and now they’re men. It’s astonishing. Adam is working on a master’s in urban planning, and he plays bass in a jazz band. Mordecai is my athlete. He’s finishing his bachelor’s degree in physics. He’s applying to graduate programs.”

“Smart kids.”

“Humble, generous, kind children. They are a balm when life chafes. I’m so very lucky to have them in my life.”

“And you?” he asked, resting his hands on his knees.

“Me what?”

“Did you have children?”

“That’s not the kind of relationship that Abraham and I had. When he reached America, he was very ill. I think he waited too long to call me. Sometimes I think, perhaps, if … But had he called me sooner, I would have missed out on us. And that would have been a great loss.” She didn’t look at him when she said that. After a moment of silence, she added, “I don’t think that’s what you want to know. I think, for closure’s sake, you want to understand why my letter was so short with no explanation.” She threw a glance his way, then turned to stare out the windshield. “When I got the phone call from Abraham. Shanti said that you would never forgive me. And I believed that to be true.” She sucked in a breath and held it for a long moment before she said, “I knew the pain I was feeling, and I imagined the impact of my decisions on you. I was selfishly guarding myself. If you … I don’t know that I have the right words for this. I’m going to try. I knew where my heart and where my duty stood. Adam and Mordecai needed me. To abandon them would be impossible. And I owed you an explanation. But if I saw you, I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to follow through with my vows to Abraham. I was afraid of myself and what I might do.”

“He died.”

She looked out over his shoulder with a million-mile stare. “Yes.”

“Fourteen years ago.”

Her lips barely moved. “Yes.”

“And you didn’t look me up, Tess.” Levi couldn’t keep the wound—or the recrimination—out of his words.

“How could you have forgiven me for our past? And how would you forgive me if I showed up out of the blue? What if I stepped into your life only to remind you of pain and anger? And since I knew nothing about your life, I wondered if I would step in and possibly cause conflict in a new relationship. But there was more. When we were together, you were my priority in every decision I made. But fourteen years ago, I was a twenty-something-year-old single mother of two little boys who had lost their whole world—their mother, then their country, then their father. I made vows to Abraham and vows to myself. To keep those vows, I would have had to shuffle you into my family life, and that wasn’t a place that you would recognize. Would I ask that of you?”

“You stayed away to protect me.”

“Of course.”

She stopped the truck in the middle of nothing, put it in park, and climbed out.

And Levi was glad.

He wanted this conversation. But the pickup cab was too small for his big feelings.

Tess held her arms wide and began to spin around and around until she was stumbling sideways, and Levi caught her.

She used to call that being “drunk on starlight.”

Levi brushed the curls from her eyes and let his hands fall to her hips. He was looking for a reaction to an intimate move. Was that all right? He decided it wasn’t.

Instead, he rounded to the back of the truck, lowered the tailgate, and climbed in, sitting on the nest of blankets and calling Mojo up beside him. “Come sit, Tess. Let’s have this out. Okay?”

Without answering, she clambered up to sit across from him. Folding her legs into a crisscross.

And there they were.

Time passed in silence.

Someone needed to start talking so he took this approach, “I remember this, the meditation of sitting in silence, looking into your eyes. On particularly hard nights in Afghanistan, I’d recall those times, and it settled me. It's how I fell asleep.”

She pressed her lips together and looked down to rub the edge of a blanket between her fingertips.

“Knowing your heart like I did, I can't imagine the weight you've borne. It occurred to me from time to time that it was a kind of compliment that you thought I was strong enough and resilient enough to take on the burden of your decision.”

“Did you doubt my feelings for you?” she whispered.

“That no, never. Which might have made it harder in some ways. I knew there was a damn good reason.” Did he want to go there with this conversation? Yeah, he did. “When we went to Momma Ya's funeral, and I met the Ya family, the ties were palpable. But you know, at that time, Abraham was married with a third child on the way. I liked him, I respected him, I felt nothing but deep gratitude to him.”

“Yes,” she murmured.

“So when you told me you were marrying him, let's just say I was deeply conflicted. And I'm not proud of my thoughts or my emotions. Fast forward to when I found you on the hilltop. I was so damn pissed at you. Not about the past and not about what happened to our relationship. I was just so angry. My thoughts? The moment I saw you again, you were trying to leave me. It was irrational, I get that. But there it was. I didn’t want to lose you and mourn you again.”

Mojo crawled into Tess’s lap, and she looked down at him, stroking his fur.

Look at her. She is so beautiful.

Levi couldn't pull his gaze from Tess. He drank her in. Drank in all the changes from the last time he’d seen her.

Her intelligence shined through as always.

Tess’s mind had always been an aphrodisiac to him.

“I trusted that you were making decisions about something bigger than you and that you were acting selflessly. And I put that here on my shoulder with the good angel that whispers in my ear. You always lived on that shoulder.” When she looked up, he tapped his right shoulder.

“On the Angel side.”

“Yes, exactly.”

Her hands kneaded Mojo’s ears, and he let out long, low rumbles of pleasure. “Tell me about the other shoulder, the devil one.”

He caught her gaze and let it hold. “I'd rather not.”

Tess sat quietly, waiting.

“I've been angry, honestly.”

“Fair.”

“No, Tess. The rage I felt wasn't fair, which made me angry with myself, with life, and my future.”

“I'm sorry, Levi. In my mind, you mourned the end of our relationship and moved on.”

Levi monitored his tone to make sure he didn’t sound bitter when he asked, “What did that look like to you? Wife, kids, mortgage, and gutter cleaning? Beer and football?”

“A wife who was athletic and beautiful. I imagined you had three kids, and they were all adventurous like you. You’d pack the babies into backpacks and climb mountains. Black Diamond ski vacations with hot cocoa around a roaring fire. I pictured beautiful things for you because I wanted beautiful things for you. I wanted you happy. I wanted your wife to have come through a normal childhood without my baggage. I wanted you to forgive me and forgive the situation.”

“I’d told you you're my life,” Levi said quietly.

“I thought that was youth talking.”

“Well, as it turns out, it wasn't. And honestly? I tried for what you described. But whenever I was in a relationship, I’d look into the woman's eyes and realize I was trying to make it work, but it felt plastic and unnatural. And ultimately, it was unfair to let someone I cared about feel that, on some level, she wasn't up to being—"

“Me?”

“Yep.”

“You told women about me?”

“As a parting explanation. I’d explain that I felt unfaithful to you by being with them, and that was obviously my crap and had nothing to do with them.”

“You wanted them to move on to better relationships.”

“I did. But I didn't have to do that frequently. I mostly kept people at arm's length. Like I said, anything else felt like cheating.”

Tess nodded. “Same.”

“Since you were married, that must have sucked.”

“Abraham had stage three testicular cancer. It sucked for sure, just not for the reasons you’re imagining.” She sighed. “I’m sorry for all that. For everyone involved. I’m sorry that there has been so much pain and heartache and that it seems to spread like ripples in water. Touching so many people.”

“You're not responsible for my emotions, Tess. I'm a big boy. I'm just calling it like it was for me. Seeing you, I'm suddenly standing alone in a storm with no shelter.”

“Same.” That word sat between them. Then she asked, “What happened after you got my letter?”

When he learned that Tess would marry Abraham, her choices hollowed him.

His heart was a rock dropping in a well, pinging against his insides with its descent.

Levi could guess the bigger picture was dire for whatever reason and that Tess was acting on the strength of her personal courage and sense of integrity.

Yeah, Levi understood what it meant to have an ethos. It was one of the things that had always made him feel a hundred percent comfortable when Tess said she loved him. A thousand percent comfortable that if he went to war, he would never get a Dear John letter.

For a long time after that letter arrived, Levi didn't give a crap if he lived or died.

He got all the ribbons and metals to pin on his uniform because he was the first to raise his hand and run into the fray. Frankly, he’d hoped a bullet found him and put him out of his misery.

But while he put himself out there, willing to die, it didn’t make him a loose cannon. Levi understood that poor judgment on his part would put not only his Team brothers but also the pilots and the PJs who’d

trained to make the rescue at risk.

If he were hit, his brothers would be responsible for his body, either saving it or transporting it.

Levi wasn't going to allow his misery to endanger others.

He credited the dogs he worked with for keeping him going. His work with the K9s was the only thing that tempered his grief.

“After the letter?” Levi asked. “I haven't gotten my feet under me since. I just roll from mission to mission, focusing on the three feet around me. Head down because there was no horizon line to focus on, I tried not to trip myself up. Yeah, untethered.” He rubbed his thumb along his jawline. “Seeing you was a gut punch, Tessy. More so because your life and limb were at risk, and I was right back in my gorilla emotions.

“Gorilla emotions.” Tess chuckled.

“You’ve heard of turning into a Mama Bear.”

“Been there. Done that.”

“So, for me, it's more like a silverback four-hundred-pound gorilla. I wanted to protect you with my life, for you to know that you were safe, for the nightmares, and the screams to stop. And my ego wanted it to be me that did it.”

She touched her left shoulder, “And your devil side thought that the reason I chose to marry Abraham was because Abraham had always kept me safe?”

Levi leaned forward to look deeply into her eyes. “Exactly. Abraham kept you safe, and I wasn't up to it.” He tipped his head back to see the heavens and to remember that in the grand scope of things, he was like a tiny speck of dust. When he lowered his head again, he added, “I believed for a time that that was why you married him. And then it occurred to me that there was more to the story, and I didn't know what it was. I got to the point where I thought you hadn't married him for your safety and your mental health stability because he would be a daily reminder and a daily trigger. But then I wondered,” he tapped his left shoulder, “the devil side wondered, why you wouldn't tell me the story? Tess, I didn't know you were bringing up the children by yourself. I didn't.” He shook his head. “I didn't know.”

“And had you known, you would have stepped in and been your guerrilla self.” She sighed. “During that time, I had the boys, and they gave me purpose. I had to get out of bed every day to make sure they ate. Did you have something? The dogs?”

“I have leaned into dogs, yes. But because the dogs kept getting rotated, I put up a wall. I’d just pretended that every dog that came through was one of those people you meet on vacation. You have a great time, you promise you'll keep up, and you all move on with your lives. I would talk to the dogs as we went out for our runs. And it helped, bark therapy. Tess, here’s the brutal reality—for a long time, I couldn't stand being in my skin. I'm telling you all of this because I think you need to hear my experience. I didn’t look you up during those years, either. Those gorilla feelings that would protect you from anything included protecting you from me.”

She looked at him with surprise. “Why would I need protection from you?”

“Ha! I'm trying to get up the courage to say this. I won't turn away from any fight, and I, by nature, run into any danger. But this feels … I don't really have a word for it, but here I go. One of the reasons why I was angry—and have been angry—is because your decisions deprived us both of love.”

Those words hung between them, and Levi held his breath. Was that too much? Had he crossed a line?

Tess’s words were barely audible. “Mama Ya always talked about how Fortune’s Wheel turns, and it feels like the wheel is right back to the top again. Like the time that needed to pass has passed, that the things that needed to be done on our own were done, and that we're back to each other. I want to ask you if you think that—now that our lives have shifted, now that the kids are in college, and you are out of the military—do you think it's possible that we can find our way back to each other?”

Levi leaned forward, capturing Tess’s face between his palms, painting his thumbs over her cheeks, then angled his head to kiss her.

Her lips, soft and chilly, radiated warmth through his whole system, and his blood pulsed with joy.