Chapter 30 Elena
ELENA
For the second night in a row, I lie awake long after the house has gone still around me.
The refrigerator hums, and the heater kicks on and off. The settling house creaks now and then.
There are too many small noises, and too much room for thoughts between them.
I stare at the ceiling and replay everything Calder said yesterday and in our earlier conversations. About the panic, and the way certain words or sounds could drag him somewhere else without warning. About the fear in his eyes when he admitted he didn’t know if he was too broken for anything real.
My chest aches again, just like it did yesterday. For him. For Tyler. For T.J. For myself, in a way I haven’t let myself feel in a long time.
Three years.
Three years of living around a hole no one had ever properly explained. Three years of folded flags and careful condolences and words like sacrifice and classified and hero, while the truth was buried behind official silence.
Three years of building a life on top of grief that never made sense.
Tyler hadn’t died the way they told me, and Calder carries pieces of that night in his skin and bones. So do Buck and Weston. They’re all walking around with ghosts the Navy apparently found convenient to leave inside them.
And now the ghosts are hunting us down.
Tonight, anger burns hotter than fear. Anger at the military, at the lies, at the faceless officials who decided I didn’t deserve the whole truth about my own husband’s death. They could’ve at least given me a close version of the truth, scrubbed of names and locations.
Braided through it all, almost impossible to separate, is the memory of Calder looking at me like he was braced for rejection. As if he’d bared what he thought was the ugliest part of himself to me, just to get the inevitable over with.
As if he truly believed that was all I’d see.
I turn on my side and reach for my phone before I can talk myself out of it.
It’s late enough that I hesitate when my thumb is over his name, but I think about all the nights I’ve spent alone with my own thoughts, and all the nights he’s probably done the same, and I press call.
He answers on the second ring. “Elena? Everything all right?” His voice is thick and rough, but his tone is alert.
“I’m fine. Everything’s all right.” He lets out a breath. “Did I wake you?” I ask.
“No.” I know he’s lying to be kind.
“Can you come over?”
My question is met with a couple of seconds of silence. “Now?”
“Yes.” My fingers tighten on the phone. “If you want to.”
After another pause, he says, “I’m on my way.”
My heart is beating too fast when I set the phone down. It’s not fear and not exactly nerves. More like resolve or hope.
By the time his truck rolls into my driveway, I’m at the door in a sweater and leggings, my feet bare on the wood floor. I open the door before he can knock.
Calder’s standing on the porch in a black jacket and jeans, his dark hair tousled from the wind, his face shadowed and serious. He scans me quickly as soon as I open the door. “Everything okay?”
The concern in his voice warms me against the chill air as I step aside to let him in. “Yes. I just … wanted to see you.”
He comes in quietly and closes the door with care.
Even in the dim light from the lamp by the couch, he seems to take up all the space around him.
He carries himself with a restrained stillness that always makes me think of something powerful being held tightly in check.
I noticed it long before I found out who he was.
His eyes search my face as he pulls off his shoes. “You sure you’re okay?”
I give him a small nod. “T.J.’s asleep.”
“Okay.”
I needn’t have warned him, because he was already keeping his voice low, and something about the way he adjusted himself to my house automatically makes my chest tighten.
“Want something to drink?” After he takes off his jacket, I start leading him to the kitchen automatically, but when he shakes his head, I change my mind and turn toward the bedroom.
He follows me without question.
The light in my room is low, with only the small lamp on my dresser on, and it’s darker still when I close the door and twist the lock. When I sit on the edge of the bed, Calder remains standing.
“Come here,” I whisper, and he does.
The mattress dips under his weight when he sits beside me, and for a moment, neither of us speaks. Eventually, I say, “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about what you told me.”
He goes still, and I reach for him before I can overthink it. I lay my hand over his and warm his cool skin.
“I’m angry,” I whisper without looking at him. “At them. At everything they kept from me. At how much you’ve all been carrying alone.” My throat goes dry. “It all seems senseless.”
He flips his hand over so he’s holding mine in his. “You get to be angry,” he says quietly, and being understood helps more than comfort would.
I draw my feet up onto the bed and turn toward him fully. “Do you have nightmares?”
His eyes drop to where our hands are joined, then he looks back at my face. “Yeah.”
“I keep thinking about how long I’ve been holding everything together because I didn’t have another option,” I say.
“I’ve had to be fine. For T.J., for work, for everybody.
Then the threats started, and the fires …
I don’t think I even realized how much I was carrying until you said all that to me yesterday. ”
He’s quiet, listening in the way he always does, without trying to rush in and fix things too fast.
“What are they like?” I ask after a second. “The nightmares.”
Calder’s jaw goes stiff, and I almost tell him he doesn’t have to answer, but then he starts talking.
“Depends on the night. Sometimes it’s the mission, sometimes just pieces of it.
Fire, metal, sounds.” His chest expands with a heavy breath.
“Sometimes I wake up already moving. Sometimes I don’t know where I am for a few seconds.
” He glances at me. “Sometimes I know exactly where I am, and it doesn’t matter. ”
“How often?” I whisper.
“Enough.”
I move higher on the bed and stretch out on one side. After a second, he stretches out beside me, both of us on top of the covers, facing each other. The intimacy of it feels perfectly right in a way I’m not expecting.
I study his face from inches away, remembering the way his dark good looks had always caught my eye in town. Up close, the lines life has etched are more apparent, and he’s even more attractive. He’s holding himself too still, though, as if he can’t afford to make a wrong move.
“You’re not too damaged for me,” I say.
His gaze flicks away, then back. “Elena—”
I cut in, my voice low, but firm. “Don’t try to tell me what I can handle. I’m telling you what I see.”
When I reach out and touch his face, brushing my fingertips over the rough line of his jaw, he doesn’t pull back, but he doesn’t lean in, either. He holds himself there, like he doesn’t know what to do with the contact.
“I see a man who survived what should have broken him and still shows up when people need him.” I brush my thumb along his cheekbone. “That isn’t weakness, or damage that makes you unworthy. It’s pain.”
“Elena.” It sounds like it hurts him to say my name.
I move closer without thinking, closing the small space between us, my feet touching the legs of his jeans. “You told me the truth. You let me see it.” My voice drops even lower. “Do you know how much that matters to me?”
He looks at my mouth, then back to my eyes. “I don’t know what to do with this,” he says, and the honesty of it hits me once again.
“You don’t have to do anything.” I slip my fingers into his hair, slow and soothing. “Just be here with me.”
For one long second, he’s so still, I wonder if he’s holding his breath. Then he reaches for me in a way that’s so tentative, it doesn’t match anything else about him.
He touches my waist like I’m fragile, and when he kisses me, it feels like he’s afraid of taking too much.
His lips brush mine with tenderness as his fingers barely graze me.
It’s a question, not a claim, but when I answer his kiss by moving closer and pressing into him, his mouth changes.
His breath mingles with mine, and little by little, he shows me his hunger.
The splay of his palm widens and spans my hip, his fingertips press in, and his mouth takes more of mine.
There’s a broken sound in his throat as his kiss steals my air with the rough drag of his mouth.
I slide my hand around to the back of his neck and squeeze as I kiss him back with everything I have.
With my anger and grief, and with the certainty that I’m done letting fear tell me what I want and don’t want.