Chapter Sixty Tyler #2
“Not in person, how’s next week?”
“Sean Roberts,” Tessa calls as he instantly starts to backpedal.
“Baby, you know damn well I didn’t mean it like that—”
“Save it,” she counters, and I feel it the second she zeroes in on me. “Tyler Jennings, stop your feet this instant!”
I flinch in response, dread settling at the summons of one of the only women alive capable of effectively putting my balls in a vise. Turning, I brace myself to meet the gorgeous yet unforgiving watering eyes of Mrs. Tessa Roberts.
* * *
Stalking through the endless sea of wildflowers, I stand for long minutes as I survey the land.
Though so much of it is still familiar, the nostalgia that once accompanied it evaded me when I turned onto the road to reach it.
Even as I drove down the gravel road next to the house, whispers of visions came easily, but as the blue door and shutters came into view, they escaped me.
Even after I slowed, then stopped, studying the house, soaking in the history outside my driver’s window.
Remnants of a life that’s now so distant, it no longer feels like it was my own.
Now surrounded by the vast sea of blooms, my confidence to gain that comforting familiarity starts to waver as I search for the feeling amongst the flowers I took painstaking effort to plant.
The absence becoming more tangible, more painful, a significant loss of something I’ve always had within reach.
The ache of it undefinable and jarring. Something I can’t quite place, but I know, without a doubt, I want back.
Seven years ago, I lost her here. Six of those years I spent in self-imposed personal exile, casting myself out of the land of the living to live for others—taking shallow breaths to make it through each day.
Surviving with the mangled heart that still beats in my chest. Beating more solidly now with a new love that stokes it.
Day by day, making it stronger. But in taking deeper breaths now with her, I wait for the payoff it should bring—for some moment of clarity.
Instead, it delivers a gut punch as I place exactly what it is within heart-rendering seconds.
The loss of it sending me straight into a panic because …
I can’t feel her.
I can’t feel her here anymore.
She’s not here.
“No,” I croak as the truth of it blindsides me.
Anxiety ramping as I shake my head in denial, summoning every memory I can and finding them intact.
Every single one untarnished. None of the details forgotten, so why …
Closing my eyes, I harness every bit of my concentration to summon her, but no matter how hard I try, I can’t feel her with me.
“General,” I utter brokenly as the whirring of the biting spring wind lifts the flowers surrounding me. “I can’t feel you,” I croak before bowing my head as hot tears start to line my jaw. Reminding myself that she wanted a love for me. That she begged me to embrace her—love her.
Sinking onto my ass in confusion, I draw up my knees and plant my forearms on them.
I try to reason my way through the pain—or rather, the lack of it.
The ache of missing her still present, but …
less so now. But it’s her complete absence here that pains me most. No whisper of her voice to be heard clearly, no melodic notes drifting on the breeze.
Reality seeping in that now, it’s just a field of beautiful wildflowers that holds a ‘once upon a time’ …
She’s gone. She’s not here, she’s gone.
It’s that pain which shatters me as I palm my face and sob, chest pumping as I break against the loss of her.
This being the only place I had to feel any trace of her, now gone as I grieve it.
Though I’ve cried more in the last six months than I have in my entire existence, this bloodletting feels more cathartic than the others.
The hurt more intense, but the release is the same.
As I slowly stand and walk back toward my truck, I realize that somewhere inside the time I spent gradually joining the land of the living, I broke the mental barrier that kept me tethered to her.
The one that kept her safely with me. Allowing the pain to take hold for long minutes, I exhale through the last of that heartbreak.
I turn and stand at the edge of the field, whispering a truth to a presence I can no longer feel.
Just in case.
“She came.” I sniff. “And it happened exactly like you said it would,” I croak.
“I know you never made me promise myself solely to you, and I understand why now, Delphine. Because she is worthy, she’s so worthy—as is her heart.
So, if you can hear me, thank you for sending me my miracle.
I couldn’t understand how it was possible, but you could, and now I can too. Because I’ll love you both, forever.”
The lump in my throat stays with me, as does the melancholy, for the whole ride to the airstrip and during the entirety of the plane ride home. My spirits only lifting when I catch sight of the villa.
Dumping my duffel unceremoniously on the floor, I glance around, seeing scattered plastic toys on the unmade bed.
Noting other signs of life everywhere in the room as my veins start to hum in hunger and ache for the sight of her—for the sight of them all.
Stepping out into the courtyard, a flurry of red catches my eye, and I watch a cardinal land on a nearby blooming tree.
Eyes on the bird, I feel the comforting thread start to pull me in their direction, beckoning me as my need to lay eyes on them grows.
It’s as I round a corner in search that I catch the familiar sound of my son’s ear-piercing shriek.
My heart lighting as I wait for the next and hear a coo in between.
A softer version. Macey. It’s Larissa’s laughter that has me hastening my steps, rushing toward the sources of the noises lifting the heaviness from my chest. I’m stopped short by the sight that greets me when they finally come into view.
The three of them sit perched on a patched cotton quilt.
The sight of both babies bundled up and in their car seats only amping my growing smile.
Larissa’s silky hair blows in the steady breeze, blocking my view of her face just as she dips and Alexander … explodes into laughter.
Hysterical laughter.
Even more surreal is that a second later, Macey follows. Her peals shorter and less bombastic, but just as heavenly.
My bursting heart pounds into rhythm as I take a few steps closer to see Larissa animating and our babies’ riotous response, making the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard.
Far from the temptress who came to my door a year ago.
The woman who was dressed to lethally slaughter as she cooked in the kitchen, sprinkling spices into a bubbling pot.
A departure from the girl sniffing powders in camp and rubbing oil on her elbows as she glared at me.
But still very much the same. Both of us altered by one another—by our war.
Only a few seasons ago, we were different people—soldiers at war—and now, in the most surreal and utterly divine twist of fate, we’re in a much different, much better place. Happy, and in love.
This universe vastly different from the heaven I never imagined could exist anywhere else.
One I didn’t think was possible to dwell in again.
Looking every bit the part as the wind shakes some blooms free and they dust the picture of life laid out before me.
Enclosing the most precious of views. Giving me a glimpse of far more than surviving day-to-day, as my vision is freed from even more of the haze that’s shrouded it for far too long.
The need to see Larissa’s face overwhelms me as Alexander explodes into another fit full of giggles, and Macey’s laughter follows.
The need to capture each moment, to keep it safe, knowing its worth and, more so, its fleeting nature, sending me into a panic.
But instead of losing myself in it, I close my eyes and cement the sound into memory.
Knowing the soldier in me nearly cost me this in an effort to keep guarded from such fears. In turn, kept me from living.
It’s just as I acknowledge that, freeing myself to embrace this day, to embrace the picture rather than the fear of losing it, that a familiar whisper of a presence—one I sought out hours ago and which evaded me—sounds in my ears with crystal clarity from a million miles away.
A lifetime ago, from a different heaven.
“It’s okay, it’s okay now, Soldier. Don’t you see?”
“See what?” twenty-eight-year-old me snaps at her.
“We won. We’ve already won!”
“No, I don’t see,” I bite bitterly as she stares up at me, her eyes clouded with vision.
The vision of the heaven we created together, along with the one I’m looking at feet away.
Because she knew. She saw this vision. And as unlikely and as impossible as it might be, I swear I can feel her seeing it now, through my eyes.
Every hair on my body stands on end at that notion.
“Have faith, my soldier. You will. One day you will see.”
“I see,” I croak as I damn near hit my knees at the revelation. My day-to-day stretching into a wide future as I gaze at the woman now staring back at me. Continually filling me with more visions of our shared future within the weight of her return stare.
“I see it, General,” I croak again as my eyes burn with the truth. That my heart beats for far more now than just my brothers and my children—for me.
The love reflecting in her eyes injecting me slowly while steadily filling the debilitating spaces between each piece of my severed heart.
Molding it and reshaping it until it pounds solidly for the first time in seven years.
And inside that first liberating beat, she frees me of the pain from isolation.
Of the shackles of longing. From the ache of needing to belong as my new front door appears in the refuge reflecting back at me.
Safe in the knowledge that ‘winning again’ means finding someone you can bare yourself to, no matter the chaos of the world, or of your own mind.
The truth my mother wanted me so badly to see—that when you find that safe haven, that someone, you hold onto them with every fiber of your being because it’s the only real fucking thing worth fighting for.
The only thing that ever has been. So simple but forgotten so easily amongst the despair of an aimless, faithless, broken heart.
“I see it,” I declare as my soldier sparks back to life, in dire need of doing the job he was bred to do.
Tracing her face—the face of my future—I demand he reforge himself to coexist with the man I’ve become.
A fighter who’s resilient enough to be both man and warrior.
As cruel as life’s been, it delivered again.
My new heaven stretching out as far as the eye can see, paving solidly for miles and miles with her alongside me.
One I can so clearly see now as the very last of the fog of my war with life lifts as I take another enchanted step toward her. And another.
Left.
Right.
Fire in my heart, love flooding my veins, fog lifted, I release the last of the pain and anger for the future I lost to embrace the life gifted to me. The miracle given in vision from a different love, in a different life, which releases me to ‘win again.’
“Whatever possession we gain by our sword cannot be sure or lasting, but the love gained by kindness and moderation is certain and durable.”
—Alexander the Great