Hallowed Ground

The kid scurried, packing up his few belongings. “Uh, I packed up some stuff when I got here, it’s in tough boxes in the storage locker.”

“Thanks,” I muttered. At least I knew where my shit was.

Fifteen minutes later, he’d vacated, and I stared at the room I’d spent three months in. I had an instant, overwhelming need to burn it to the ground. Why not, you just fucked your entire life.

After I retrieved my footlocker of stuff and unpacked, I crawled up onto my bunk and lay down. I needed to catch a couple of hours of sleep and try to get myself on the right time schedule. I stared up at the ceiling.

Three days of traveling had left me exhausted, but sleep wouldn’t come. I ran my hand above my head, into the small opening construction had left in the wall, and sighed. They were still there. I pulled out the two worn pictures of Ember and shone my small flashlight on them.

Her smile warmed me in one, her eyes bright with love. The other, she hadn’t known that I’d taken while we were in Breckenridge a year or so ago, but the wistful look on her face as she’d looked out over the mountains was too breathtaking not to capture.

“I’m so sorry,” I told her. My thumb stroked her printed cheek, and I wished I was still close enough to really touch her, to pull us from the brink of disaster I’d brought us to. To undo the last three years and make all the right choices from the start, the ones that would protect her instead of putting her through another hell.

I had nightmares that night, but they weren’t about the crash, or even Will’s death. No, they were of the look on her face when she realized I was leaving, and my brain’s prediction that she wouldn’t be there when I returned.

I would have rather had the other ones.

My alarm went off after a shit-filled, five-hour attempt at sleep, and I climbed off the bed. I got dressed as Skype fired up, wishing there would be a certain redhead on the other end.

Instead, a middle-aged psychiatrist with glasses answered. “Ah, Josh! Good to see you.”

“Hey, Dr. Henderson.”

“Well, how does it feel to be back?”

I glanced around at the walls, my pinned pictures of Ember, and the smell of deployment. “Like I never left.”

My fingers traced over the map on my iPad. There were forty-five hundred miles between Kandahar and Ephesus. Hell, I could even drive, if I wanted to see the inside of an Iranian prison.

Ember had been in Turkey for a week now. I’d checked in with Jagger, made sure she’d gotten on the plane. He’d assured me that she had and reminded me yet again that I was a fucking moron. Maybe, but she was in Turkey. That’s what mattered. She was the closest she’d ever be during a deployment, but I’d never felt farther away from her. Was she set up there okay? Did she have everything she needed? I knew her internet was limited, so it wasn’t like I could even really check, but the worry was killer.

Was there someone there she’d rather be with? Someone who didn’t go to war or leave her alone for a year at a time? Someone who came home at five p.m. and didn’t force her to choose between the career she wanted and the one he already had? Someone who deserved her a hell of a lot more than I did?

I logged onto Facebook in a moment of supreme weakness and clicked her profile. Hell, at least it said we were still engaged. Her latest picture filled my screen, her hair in a knot on her head, her tank top and shorts dust-covered, and her smile wider than I’d seen in way too long, glowing.

She was happy in Turkey.

Happier than she’d been with me since the deployment started.

I flipped to the next picture and saw her standing in front of a huge ruin, another man’s arm wrapped protectively around her waist, and my pulse pounded.

Luke.

“They’re just friends. Shut the fuck up, or you’ll drive yourself mad,” I whispered to myself, shutting off the iPad.

She’d looked so damned…ecstatic. I wanted that for her—to live her dream, that kind of happiness filling every day of her life. She’d never have that if she stayed with me. Marriage for us would have way too many days with good-byes and tears that tasted like fear and missed holidays. Life with me meant struggling to get her PhD at one duty station, years of time we’d miss together, and burying our friends along the way.

The friends I’d killed.

Every tear she’d cried when Will had been killed was there because of my choice, my decision. Because I’d played God, and inadvertently chosen Jagger’s life over his.

It should have been me…but then Ember would have been alone.

Where the hell was the right choice?

God, she deserved that life she’d dreamed of, and I could never give it to her. But I could give her the freedom to choose it, if I could only kill my heart and give her up.

The threads of my soul were pulling apart under the strain, one half wanting to give Ember the freedom she deserved—the life she deserved with someone a hell of a lot better for her than I was. But the selfish half of me was screaming to hold on to her—to the love that had carried me through—because the thought of living without her was unimaginable.

But if I didn’t find a way to let her go, I’d end up breaking my promise to her father and crushing her dreams under my obligations.

I slipped Will’s ring from its home in my pocket and rolled it between my fingers like I could somehow channel him.

“You’re on today, too?” Rizzo asked, interrupting my thoughts as he kicked his heels up onto the table next to me in the office.