15. Jake
15
JAKE
As soon as I hear the tread of footsteps in front of me, I know someone must have gotten off the trail. There’s no way anyone would come down this far out of choice. No, if they’re wandering about in the middle of the woods, they probably need someone to steer them back to where they came from.
Pushing my hand through my hair, I let out a sigh. I know this is what the patrols are for, but I had been hoping to get away without seeing anyone else, at least for today. My mind is a mess with everything that’s been happening with Vanessa, my brothers, and me, and I hoped that getting out into the woods for a while would go some way toward clearing my head.
“Hey,” I call out, mustering all the certainty I can as I follow the sound of footsteps and voices a few dozen yards away. It’s a bright day, and the sunlight dappling through the trees picks out the brightness of the grass and the green of the leaves around me. The view could have come straight from some postcard intended to advertise the place, though truth be told, I’d rather keep it to ourselves.
“Hey! Oh, thank God…”
I freeze on the spot when I hear her voice—I recognize it at once. How could I not? It’s her. Vanessa.
“Vanessa…?” I call out to her just as she emerges from a small cluster of trees, her cheeks flushed, her hair messy and tangled with a few snagged twigs and leaves. Callie is clutching her hand tightly, and the two of them look exhausted.
“I was so worried nobody was going to find us,” she remarks, shaking her head as she plants one hand on her hip. “But I should have known that one of you would be out here…”
“Why are you wandering around so far from the trail…?”
“It wasn’t my intention when I left the house,” she admits. “I…I saw this trail that led from the cabin to one of the viewing points, and I thought it would be a good goal to set ourselves to get up there today. But I guess I must have gotten turned around from the path, because suddenly we were in the middle of the woods, and…” She trails off, shaking her head. “I don’t know. But we need someone to get us back on track.”
I stare at her for a moment. I feel like I have managed to conjure her, just by the pure intensity of how much I’ve been thinking about her these last few days. Shit, I know I should be smarter than to spend time alone with her, after what happened the other day, but it’s not like I can just turn my back on her and leave her and Callie to wander around the woods with nowhere to go, right?
“Sure,” I sigh. “Follow me. You’re not far from the trail, but it’ll be a long walk back to the cabin…”
“That’s fine,” she replies, planting a hand on her chest to indicate how relieved she is. “As long as we’re out of here, I’m good.”
I lead the two of them back out of the forest and toward the long path that leads back down to their cabin. It’s not exactly a shock that she managed to get turned around, given how dry it’s been here lately. In the summer months, the dusty trails start to look like any other bit of turf, and it’s way too easy to wander off and find yourself somewhere you never intended to be. Exactly why we’re out every day keeping an eye on the woods. Even when it’s warm, one cold night out here when you’re not dressed for it could cost you everything.
Once we reach the path again, Callie takes off ahead of us.
“Don’t go too far!” Vanessa calls to her, but then she shakes her head.
“Shit, I don’t even know why I’m saying that.” She laughs softly. “I’m the one who got us lost in the first place. She’s probably better at navigating all of this than me…”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” I reply without thinking. “These paths can be a mess. You’re back on it now, that’s all that matters.”
She glances at me out of the corner of her eye—I can tell that she’s surprised I’m giving her so much leeway, but I don’t have it in me to get pissed at her for getting lost. She’s far from the first, and besides, it’s not as though she meant it.
“Thanks,” she murmurs, watching as Callie bolts on down the path, stopping every now and then to examine something she’s found by the side of the trail. Vanessa watches her fondly, a warm smile on her face, and I find myself watching her—there’s something about the way she looks at her little girl that reminds me so much of Jamie, our foster mother. That same loving care, that same attentiveness, as though there’s nowhere she’d rather be in the world than here and now.
“What are you staring at me for?” she teases lightly, when she glances around and finds me looking in her direction.
I clear my throat and swiftly draw my gaze away from her. “Nothing.”
“Oh, come on,” she shoots back, nudging me in the side. “I saw it. You can tell me.”
I hesitate. There’s a lot she doesn’t know about me, and in truth, a lot I don’t want her to know. I carry a hell of a lot of baggage, we all do—but sometimes it feels as though the weight of it lies heaviest on my shoulders. I’m the oldest, after all. I’m the one who should have been there for them when they needed me—but I wasn’t. No, I was on the other side of the world, fighting a war on someone else’s behalf, when the people who raised me needed more than anything to have their sons there to save them…
“You just remind me of someone,” I admit finally. That’s about the best I’m going to give her.
She cocks an eyebrow. “Of who?”
I pause again, my eyes fixed straight ahead. I guess, if she really wants to know, there’s no harm in telling her…
“My mom.”
“Oh,” she blurts out, clearly surprised. “I—I don’t…”
“My foster mom,” I continue before I can stop myself. “Jamie. The way you look at Callie, it’s just…it’s the way she used to look at my brothers and me, when we were growing up.”
“In a good way?”
“In a great way.”
She smiles slightly. “I’d like to meet her,” she says. “She sounds really sweet…”
“She was.”
The bluntness of my reply makes my blood run cold. I still hate how much I miss her, how much I miss both of them—Theo and Jamie, the two people who were there for us when nobody else was. Sometimes, it doesn’t feel possible for it to have happened the way it did, for them to be so far from us after we were so close.
“She’s…?”
“She’s dead. Her and our foster father, Theo.”
“Oh God, I’m so sorry,” she murmurs, shaking her head and reaching over to give my hand a squeeze. “I had no idea. I…”
She trails off. It isn’t fair for me to expect her to know how to handle the enormity of something like this. She just came out today expecting a walk with her daughter, not for me to dump the full weight of everything I’ve been through onto her shoulders.
“It’s fine.”
She falls silent for a long moment, the only sound our footsteps on the path below us.
“I know how it feels, to lose someone you thought would be a part of your future,” she murmurs finally. “When Johnny, Callie’s dad, died, I just…I didn’t know how I was meant to go on. I didn’t know if I even could. It all just felt like…like something that must have been happening to someone else, because I couldn’t make sense of it happening to me and my daughter…”
She trails off. I can hear the pain in her voice, and I hate hearing her like that. I wish there was something I could do to lift the weight of this from her shoulders, to give her some kind of respite from whatever she’s still carrying, but I know I can’t.
“It’s so amazing that the three of you were fostered by the same parents, though,” she remarks, instantly trying to turn the conversation around to something a little more positive. “I hear it can be hard, making sure all the siblings end up in the same place…”
I smile slightly, and nod.
“Yeah, Jamie always liked a challenge,” I chuckle. “When she saw the three of us, all dumped into the foster system after our parents died, she really shouldn’t have taken us in. She knew we were too old for her. There were too many of us for that little house, and we’d been through too much shit as it was, but she didn’t let that stop her. Told me that when she saw the three of us together, she knew nobody else would take us, and she had to do the right thing.”
“She sounds like a hell of a woman…”
“She was,” I agree. “So was Theo. They were both…I don’t know, they both just got us. Even when we were struggling, even when it seemed impossible for us to settle, they just kept things steady and made a home for all three of us when we needed it most.”
I swallow hard, blinking away the slight fuzz that pricks at my eyes when I speak about them.
“Can I ask…can I ask what happened?” she murmurs softly.
I shoot a look over at her. “Is this part of an interview?”
Her eyes widen, and she shakes her head at once. “No. God, no, Jake! I would never—I’m just trying to talk to you, that’s all. One person to another.”
I study her face for a long moment, trying to get a read on whether I believe her—but the utter sincerity as she stares back at me tells me I have nothing to worry about. She might be a journalist, but this isn’t some attempt to squeeze information out of me. She just wants to help.
And God knows I probably need it.
I pick up the pace a little so we can keep Callie in sight, and fix my eyes ahead as I start to talk.
“It was the wildfires, ten years ago,” I mutter. “They lived not far from the forest—they always used to bring us up here when we were kids. And when it started…shit, they should have gotten out. Everyone else was evacuated, but I guess they thought they could stick around and help. They dug their heels in and stayed, and all of us were abroad. We were still in the SEALs back then, and we couldn’t force them to somewhere safer, and…”
I can’t finish that sentence. I don’t want to. Even though I know it’s the truth, the thought of admitting it out loud is almost more than I can take. I’m still trying to make sense of it, all these years later—angry at them for not leaving when they did, devastated that we lost them, lost the house that was a home to us for so long.
“We came back as soon as we heard,” I continue, after a long pause. “We went back to the house, the house we lived in with them, and it was in ashes. Nothing left. Nothing left of the legacy they had made, just…everything had been wiped away by the fire.”
“Jesus, Jake, I’m so sorry,” she tells me, her voice laced with fervency. “You…you should never have had to go through something like that. None of you. Not after…”
She shakes her head, the enormity of what I have just said to her clearly more than she can wrap her head around. Once she has taken it in, she asks another question.
“Is that why you came out here?” she wonders aloud. “I mean, out to the woods, to help people?”
I nod. “Yeah,” I admit. “We pooled the money we got from our pensions to build the cabin, and we moved out into the woods to take care of this place. Make sure nothing like what happened to our parents happened to anyone else, not ever again.”
The words emerge with more sharpness than I intended—even all these years into doing this work, I’m still as certain that this is where I belong as ever, maybe even more so. I know Killian and Mason are a little more chill about the whole thing, but they don’t carry the same guilt I do—the guilt that I should have been there to take care of my parents, the guilt that I could have done more to save them.
“That’s amazing,” she murmurs, shaking her head. “Turning that pain into something so positive…there aren’t many people in the world who could do that, you know.”
I glance at her out of the corner of my eye.
“Yeah, well,” I reply. “It’s the least we can do. This place needs protecting. And if nobody else is going to step up to do it, we have to.”
At last, we turn the final corner of the trail that leads down to the back of the cabin. Callie comes to a halt and turns around, waving frantically as though we may not have seen it.
“I can see it, baby!” Vanessa calls back. “You want to go inside and get some juice?”
Callie flashes her a thumbs-up and then rushes toward the house, vanishing inside the back door a moment later. Vanessa comes to a halt at the bottom of the path, right where the yard meets the forest, and gazes up at me for a moment.
“I…thank you for telling me all of that,” she murmurs to me softly. “I know it can’t be easy to put it all into words like that, but…”
She gazes up at me. “You’re a strong person, Jake,” she adds. “Really strong. You and your brothers. I admire the hell out of that.”
“We’re just doing what needs to be done.”
“Yeah, but you’re still doing it,” she points out. “You shouldn’t play yourself down like that. Everything you’re doing out here, it’s important. The number of lives you’ve saved, the number of people you’ve helped over the years…”
“The number of lost moms I’ve helped get back on the trail,” I tease back lightly. She laughs.
“Yeah, well, that too,” she agrees. And as she gazes up at me, I can’t help but notice how close the two of us are standing right now—how easy it would be to just lean in and kiss her, pick up right where we left off the other day.
And it’s as though she’s read my mind. She reaches up and plants a hand against my chest, letting it rest there lightly for a moment as she nibbles on her bottom lip.
“I…I’m really glad that you found us out there,” she murmurs, her gaze flicking down toward my mouth. “I’m glad we got to have this talk.”
“Me too,” I reply, and I reach up to cup her chin in my hand. There’s something so small and delicate about her when she gazes at me like this—despite her gorgeous curves and statuesque figure, she seems to turn into something precious and breakable when I lay hands on her, something I need to protect.
And before I can think any more on it, I lean down and graze my lips against hers. It’s not the same kind of kiss we shared before. No, this one feels different—more careful, more considered, more intimate. Though our clothes are still on, there’s something about kissing her like this that feels like we’re drawing in even closer than before, closing the distance between us, finally coming clean about everything that has happened in our past so we can be honest with each other.
And when I pull back, I can tell from the look on her face that she feels the exact same way. She bites her lip again, so damn cute it takes everything I have not to kiss her once more, but I manage to resist.
“I should get in and make sure Callie isn’t causing too much chaos,” she tells me, her hand still resting on my chest. “But…but if you ever need to talk…”
“I know where to go,” I reply. “Which is more than I can say about you and that trail.”
“Hey!” she exclaims, landing a playful slap on the side of my arm. “We would have been fine. Eventually. Probably. I just needed a little help.”
“Right, right,” I tease. “I’ll let you go.”
“Speak soon, right?” she asks me, gazing up at me with those beautiful, bright eyes.
I nod. “Of course,” I promise her. Because when she looks at me like this, I know there’s not a damn thing in the world I could do to deny her—no matter how much I might want to.
And no matter how complicated I know this is going to make things.