Chapter 6 #2
"Your brother talked about Montana," I said.
Callie looked at me.
"When we were deployed, he'd talk about home. The mountains, the rivers, the way the sky looked before a storm. He said there was nowhere else in the world that felt like Montana. He talked about it the way people talk about things they're afraid they'll never see again."
I paused. Looked out at the ridge, at the snow on the peaks, at the pines running dark and green all the way down to the valley floor. The same view Ryan had described to me in a dozen times, a thousand miles from here, using words I could still hear if I closed my eyes.
"When Ghost and Hawk and I got out, when we needed somewhere to disappear and start over, I remembered what he'd said about Montana and it seemed as good a place as anywhere. I found Forsaken, I drove through it once and I knew this was the place. I bought the land on the spot and told Ryan we were going to build something here.” I looked at her. “He never made it back to see it, but your brother brought me here. I built this club in Forsaken Montana because of Ryan, because he loved this place. He’s not here in body, but he is in spirit.”
Her eyes were wet. She didn't blink, didn't look away, didn't try to hide it. She just sat there, let the tears fall and looked at me with an expression that took me apart.
"He sent you here," she said. Her voice was steady even though her cheeks were wet. "And he sent me to you.."
"Yeah."
"He'd be so smug about that. He'd be insufferable."
I laughed. It surprised me. Short and rough, pulled out of me by the truth of it. Ryan would have been insufferable. He'd have grinned that crooked grin and said told you so and never let me hear the end of it.
"He would," I said.
Callie wiped her cheeks with the back of her hand.
She was smiling now, watery and real, and the grief was still there but it was different.
Warmer. The wound was still a wound. It would always be a wound.
But something had grown in it, something alive and stubborn and good, and for the first time in six years the ache of losing Ryan didn't make me want to close my eyes and disappear.
She reached over and took my hand again. Laced her fingers through mine and held on. Her hand was small in mine, warm, steady.
"I'm staying," she said. It wasn't a question.
“I’d like that," I said.
I looked at her. This woman who'd walked into my life with her whole life falling apart. Who’d broken open on the kitchen floor and put herself back together in my arms. Who'd seen the worst of what I was and the best of what I was and hadn't flinched at either.
I love her. The word had been sitting in my chest for days, waiting for me to be brave enough to look at it directly.
I wasn't going to say it yet. It was too soon and too big and she'd been through too much, and I wasn't a man who threw words around that he couldn't back up.
But I knew it. I knew it the way I knew my own name, settled and absolute, a fact that had been true before I'd recognized it and would be true long after.
She was mine. I was hers. And Ryan's sister, Ryan's Montana, Ryan's promise, all of it had led us here, to this porch, to this valley, to this quiet afternoon where two people who'd been carrying too much for too long finally put it down.
The sun moved across the ridge. The pines swayed. Somewhere in the compound, one of the guys laughed at something and the sound carried on the wind, easy and warm, the sound of a place that was home.
I held her hand, watched the mountains and I didn't let go.
Epilogue - Twelve Months Later
Angel
The room smelled like antiseptic and sweat.
Callie was propped up against the pillows, her hair plastered to her forehead, her face flushed and exhausted but radiant in a way that made my chest hurt.
She'd sworn at me twice during labor, told me she was never letting me touch her ever again, and gripped my hand so hard I'd lost feeling in three fingers.
I'd have let her break every bone if she'd needed to.
The midwife wrapped him, and he was tiny, impossibly small, and placed him in Callie's arms.
“A beautiful healthy baby boy," she said. "Congratulations, both of you."
A boy.
Callie looked down at him and made a sound I'd never heard from her before.
Soft, shattered, the sound of a woman meeting someone she'd been waiting her whole life for.
Her finger traced his cheek, feather-light, and he turned his face toward her touch.
His eyes were closed. His fists were clenched. He was perfect.
I stood there. This man who'd commanded soldiers, who'd built a brotherhood, who'd stared down threats without flinching, stood at the side of a hospital bed and came apart completely.
My vision blurred. My throat locked. My hands, my normally steady hands that had never shaken under fire, were trembling at my sides.
"Come here," Callie whispered.
I moved closer. She tilted the baby toward me, just slightly, and I reached out and touched his hand. His fingers were so small they barely wrapped around the tip of mine, but they gripped and held on. Tiny, fierce and brand new. He was holding onto me like he already knew I was his daddy.
I couldn't breathe. I couldn't speak. I just stood there with my son's fingers curled around mine and tears running down my face and I didn't wipe them away because I didn't care. Let them fall. Let every wall I'd ever built come down. This was the one thing worth being defenseless for.
Callie was looking at me. I could feel it, the weight of her gaze, the way she watched my face. She'd spent a year learning my silences, learning what I held back and why, and right now she was reading something I couldn't say out loud because the words were trapped behind everything I was feeling.
She knew. She always knew.
"Ryan," she said softly. "His name is Ryan."
The sound that came out of me wasn't a word.
It was something older than language, pulled from a place so deep I didn't know it existed until that moment.
I leaned down and pressed my lips to her forehead, then to my son's, this tiny boy with his uncle's name and his mother's courage and a whole life ahead of him.
Ryan.
He came home after all.