Chapter 35
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
HUDSON
The chair was not comfortable. Hudson had established that seventy hours ago and hadn’t moved from it since. He was physically and emotionally unable to leave.
The room was too quiet—nothing but a soft mechanical rhythm of monitors and a distant sound of chatter and movement beyond the door. It smelled of antiseptic and the now wilting lilies his mom and Taylor had sent.
Hudson had memorized all of it. The stain on the ceiling tile above the window.
The way the light from the corridor snaked in under the door in a broad stripe.
The tone and frequency of the beeps that indicated when everything was all right versus the sounds they made when nothing was.
He had learned to differentiate them on his first night here and he was pretty sure he would never forget.
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. It was 0300. He’d barely slept more than an hour at a time in three days. It didn’t seem like that was about to change.
Thirty minutes after Hudson had watched Elliot’s vehicle pull out from the operations window, disappearing into a dust trail on the horizon, Hudson was listening to Carver outline the differences between a Siberian husky and an Alaskan malamute.
Then the words roadside device and eastern road caught his attention.
His brain stopped. Just—stopped. Mid-thought, mid-breath.
No one said a word while Okafor listened to the voice in his headset.
“What road?” Hudson finally croaked. “Which checkpoint—”
“Captain—” Okafor started.
“Eastern road, which part? There are fifty klicks of eastern road between here and—”
“Captain Hale.” Carver placed a hand on his shoulder. “We’re getting information. Hang tight. Thirty seconds.”
“Is it his vehicle?” Hudson’s voice came out all wrong. It was too exposed. No one answered. “Major Okafor. Is it his vehicle?”
Those thirty seconds were the longest of Hudson’s life. With Carver’s hand still on his shoulder, he listened to Okafor talk to someone in his headset. He tracked the second hand on the clock on the wall.
Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three…
Around him the room had gone still. Marsh, Miller, Shaw. These were their people.
Okafor had his back to them, trailing his fingers down a map. Then he turned around and looked between his waiting personnel.
“It’s their vehicle,” he said. “We have a confirmed fatality.” He stopped. Swallowed hard.
It was probably not more than a second or two, but the pause tore at Hudson’s hope.
He loved Elliot. Had loved Elliot for six years. Didn’t know how not to love Elliot.
“It’s Corporal Marsh.”
The room absorbed it in silence. Someone behind Hudson said something low and unintelligible. Carver dropped his hand and sat down.
“Miller is okay,” Okafor continued. “Minor injuries.” Another pause. “Shaw is critical. Head trauma, unconscious. Medevac is en route.”
The word critical went through Hudson like a physical blow.
He was aware, distantly, of the grief in the room—for Marsh, for all of them. The specific weight of losing someone you’d trusted your life with. He felt it too, somewhere underneath everything else. He would feel it properly later. Right now there was only one thing on his mind.
Elliot.
“I need to get on that medevac,” Hudson said.
“Captain, you can’t—”
“I need to be on that flight, Major. I need—” His voice broke and he cleared his throat. “Please.”
Okafor searched his face. Then he nodded once. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Hudson remained in the middle of the ops room while the world moved around him—people on frequencies, someone already pulling Marsh’s file—and tried to breathe.
Getting to the military hospital in Germany proved to be a battle. It took two whole days that Hudson would never get back.
The first person who told him “no” was a lieutenant in the medical administration who explained, with genuine apology, that only immediate family was permitted to accompany injured personnel on the medevac flight.
Hudson had shot him a look and said, very carefully, “Define immediate family,” and the lieutenant had said spouse or next of kin.
Hudson had told him he understood and walked straight out to find Okafor.
Okafor had listened. Then he said, “I need you to define it officially. Your relationship to Shaw.”
“Partner,” Hudson said in a heartbeat. “Elliot is my partner.”
Okafor wrote it down without comment. “Let me make some calls.”
The calls took eighteen hours. Okafor made every single one without being asked, working through the night. Forms, approvals, someone at Landstuhl who needed authorization from someone above Okafor’s pay grade.
Hudson had spent most of the eighteen hours in Elliot's quarters, replaying their last conversation on a loop. The kiss Hudson hadn’t expected, right there in the open. The date invitation. He’d backed away. Smiling. Elliot’s mouth had done the corner thing.
When all of this is over and everyone is safe.
He pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes and waited.
Hudson opened his eyes at 0400 and scanned the bed.
He did this every hour or so—checking, confirming. It never hurt any less.
The right side of Elliot’s head was thoroughly bruised.
It had changed color over the days, moving from purple toward yellowish at the edges.
He had a long cut above his right ear held together by too many stitches.
His hands rested on the blanket, the scarred knuckles visible from where Hudson sat.
He was so still, Hudson had to look away.
A doctor had explained things to him when he first arrived. Traumatic brain injury, induced coma, swelling that needed time to resolve. Cautious optimism but no guarantees.
All they could do was wait.
Like that wasn’t its own kind of torture.
“Hey,” Hudson said, to the room, to Elliot, to whoever was listening.
“It’s been almost six days and I’m running out of things to say, which you know is not something that happens to me very often.
” He paused. “I’ve been thinking about the restaurant.
For our date. I’m thinking French. I know that’s predictable but I figure you’ll have opinions about the menu and honestly I want to listen to you have opinions about the menu.
” His throat tightened. “I also just—I need you to come back, okay?”
The monitors kept their rhythm. Hudson’s heart didn’t.
He pulled the chair closer to the bed and took Elliot’s hand in his. It didn’t really feel like his hand—too cold, too motionless—but Hudson didn’t know how else to feel close to him. He held it tight.
Bending his head, he rested it on Elliot’s arm. Tentatively. Tracing the tattoos with his free hand.
His eyelids fluttered shut.
Hudson woke to a small hand on his shoulder. He jumped, sitting up straight, eyes snapping to the clock on the wall. 0700. Three hours of sleep.
He turned around to find a small woman with silver hair pulled back neatly, and dark eyes that moved over him with a thoroughness that was immediately familiar. She looked like Elliot.
“You must be Hudson,” she said with a heavy French accent.
He scrambled to his feet. “Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m Marguerite.” She reached for his hand. “He has told me a lot about you.”
She walked around the bed to stand by her nephew’s side. Hudson watched her face. Her expression moved from horror to heartbreak in a few seconds. He knew the feeling.
“Mon chéri,” she said, stroking Elliot’s chin.
After a moment she sat in the chair on the side of the bed and folded her hands in her lap.
The silence wasn’t uncomfortable. It felt, strangely, like the right kind of quiet.
Marguerite's kind eyes never left Elliot. “He looks like his mother. When he sleeps.” She caught a single tear on her cheek with an embroidered handkerchief. “Isabelle was the same—very still. Like she was somewhere else entirely.”
Hudson wondered if Elliot was. Somewhere else entirely. He pushed the thought away.
“Were you close?” Hudson asked.
“She was my sister.” Marguerite’s voice was even, but a slight tremor moved underneath it. “I knew her very well. Not well enough, maybe, at the end. But… that's the thing with people you love. You always think you have more time.”
Hudson’s gaze was fixed on Elliot. “He didn’t talk about her much. To me, anyway. But when he did—” His eyes darted to her. “You could tell.”
“Oui.” Marguerite seemed to weigh her words. “He protected her. Even as a child. Too much responsibility for a small boy.” She shook her head. “He was always so serious. Even before things became—” She searched for the word. “Difficult. With The General.”
“Why did it get difficult?”
“His father—he is not a bad man, I think. But he does not know how to love without trying to own it.” She glanced at Hudson. “You understand what I mean, yes?”
“Yeah,” Hudson said. “I do.”
She nodded. “Elliot—he tried so hard to be what his father wanted. Too hard. I watched it happen and I did not know how to stop it.” Her mouth curved up slightly, revealing deep lines around her eyes.
“There was a summer—he was maybe eight, nine years old—his mother sent him to me in Lyon. He found my kitchen radio, old thing, very bad reception. He took it apart completely.” A breath that was almost a laugh escaped her.
“I was very mad. I told him, ‘you put this back before dinner or I will call your father.’”
“Did he?”
“Bien s?r. Every piece. And better than before. The reception was perfect.” She smiled. “He was—how do you say—pleased with himself. I could see.” She touched the side of her mouth. “He had this way of almost smiling.”
“I know that almost smile,” Hudson said.
Her gaze darted from him, to Elliot, and back again. “He loves you, you know?” Marguerite said. It was not a question. “C’est certain.”
“I know.” Hudson’s voice came out strangled. “I love him too.”
Marguerite reached over Elliot to put her hand on top of Hudson’s. Just briefly. “Bien,” she said. Like something she had needed to know was now confirmed.