Chapter 15
Fifteen
SAM
When I woke up this morning, I hadn’t expected to be staring down the county commissioner, giving him what for over faulty sirens.
“The problem wasn’t only the siren,” he says. “You said yourself the sirens went off here.”
“Yes, they went off here. But they didn’t go off in the places that actually needed them. Namely, the trailer park near the county line.”
I watch him, daring him to say something that dismisses that park or the people who live there.
God bless him, he doesn’t.
“How do you know for sure they didn’t go off out there?”
“Deputy Wilkes!” I call out.
The mustachioed man looks like he’d rather fight a grizzly bear, but he doesn’t pretend not to hear me. How could he, after all? I’m practically yelling.
“Yes, ma’am,” he says, getting to his feet reluctantly. I’ve seen men look more eager to take the stand in a murder trial.
“Did the sirens near Jenkins Park go off before the storm?”
He looks from the commissioner to me, then back again. “They did not.”
I turn back to the commissioner. “There’s your answer.”
“Fine. But this is going to be?—”
“Messy? Expensive? Yes and yes. You should have thought about that before you cut corners on maintenance.”
He mumbles something under his breath as he walks off. I don’t bother wondering what it is.
“Damn. I’ve never seen that man walk away with his tail tucked between his legs like that,” the deputy says. “Nice work, Sam.”
Sam.
Not Mrs. Carlisle. Not Command. Not the woman who used to ride with Brooks.
Sam.
My phone buzzes beside my elbow.
I almost ignore it. Then I see the notification.
Storm Posse has tagged me.
For a second, everything around me keeps moving without sound. Petra talks to someone near the register. A lineman laughs by the jukebox. Deputy Wilkes scratches at his beard with the end of his pen.
I pick up the phone.
The first thing I see is a picture.
Me at twenty-three, sunburned across the nose, hair stuffed under a baseball cap, one boot propped on the bumper of the old blue truck while I argue with Brooks over a paper map spread across the hood.
My throat closes.
I swipe.
There I am in what was the command trailer before there was a real command trailer, wearing headphones too big for my head, a gas station coffee beside my laptop.
Another picture shows me crouched beside a probe, tightening something with a wrench while Hershel stands nearby pretending not to supervise.
Another is from a conference panel I barely remember, me pointing at a radar image while Brooks sits beside me, looking at me instead of the screen.
I read the caption in pieces.
Storm Posse didn’t start with one person.
No chase, no protocol, no field call, no piece of equipment carries one set of fingerprints.
Samantha Carlisle helped build this operation from the ground up.
I stop there because my eyes are burning, and I hate that they are. I hate that a social media post can make me feel like my chest is about to cave in.
This is not Brooks standing on a digital porch with a boombox over his head. It's not him asking strangers to tell me to forgive him.
It's quieter than that.
Worse, maybe.
He's simply telling the truth.
I swipe again.
Recent photos now. Ones from the years when I thought I had become furniture in my own life. Me at a table with three laptops open. Me talking to a new crew member. Me standing behind Brooks at some sponsor event, my smile polite enough to hurt.
But in the background of one shot, Brooks is looking at me.
Not at Luci. Not at the camera. Not at the sponsor shaking his hand.
Me.
I zoom in before I can stop myself. His face is soft in a way I don’t remember seeing that night.
Another photo. I’m explaining something to a local emergency manager while Brooks stands several feet away, arms folded, mouth curved with quiet pride.
Another. I’m walking out of frame. Brooks’s head is turned, tracking me.
Tom’s voice comes back to me.
He tracks you like radar.
I set the phone down too carefully.
Petra watches me from the bar. “You okay?”
"No," I say. "I'm upright and breathing, but that's about it."
Her mouth twitches. “Put that on a business card.”
I almost smile, but I can't quite make myself.
Because Brooks saw me.
That’s the awful part. It hurts in a way I can’t make sense of. He watched me leave rooms. He saw me standing right beside him.
He loved me.
Still, that didn’t stop him from hurting me.
How can a man watch you like you’re the most important thing in his orbit, yet make you feel so invisible you’d swear there was nothing left of you to hurt after it was all said and done?
The hurt hasn't gone anywhere. It’s just shifted. I rub my chest and hope like hell it eventually goes away.
I find him outside the temporary supply station behind The Funnel Cloud, looking over one of the storm vehicles at some damage it's recently taken.
“Brooks.”
He turns immediately.
Not quickly. Immediately.
Like some part of him was already listening for me.
“Sam.”
I hold up my phone. “You want to explain this?”
His gaze drops to the screen. Then back to me. “I should’ve done it a long time ago.”
“That’s not an explanation.”
“No.” He wipes his good hand on his jeans. “It’s just the truth.”
The wind moves between us, hot and full of grit. Somewhere nearby, a generator coughs, catches, and settles into a steady rumble.
“I’m not mad you did it,” I say.
Something flickers across his face. Surprise, maybe. Careful hope, before he buries it.
“I’m mad that it needed doing.”
His shoulders lower a fraction.
“For months, people watched Luci in my seat. They watched her beside you. They watched you rely on her. They watched me disappear from the story, and you let it happen.”
"You're right. I did."
It's not that I expected him to argue, but the agreement still knocks some of the wind out of my sails.
“I did,” he says again. “And I’m sorry.”
I look away because sorry still hits the bruise. It doesn’t break skin anymore, but it aches.
"Still, it's not nothing," I say. "I believe you meant every word. And I can see that you wanted to give me credit for what's mine."
“You deserve more than credit.”
“Maybe.” I look back at him. “But I still have a question."
"Okay."
“What happens next time?”
His face changes, all the blood seeming to leave it.
“What happens the next time you’re afraid?” I ask. “The next time I make a choice you don’t like? The next time some man looks at me too long and you decide there must be something happening because talking to me is apparently harder than ruining my life quietly?”
He flinches, but he takes it.
“What happens if there’s another pregnancy someday?
” I can barely get the words out. “What happens if you get scared again? Do you take away the field? Do you take away the truck? Do you decide what’s safe for me because asking would mean you might have to hear an answer you don’t like?
Do you get angry again and remove another bracelet I've given you to punish me? "
For a second, he looks as if the wind's been knocked out of him. “Sam.”
“No.” I take a deep breath because I feel like my chest is getting tighter. "Do we lose another two years because you don’t know how to be afraid without making me pay for it?”
He looks down at the gravel between us.
I want him to say no. I want him to swear he’ll never do it again and make it sound so certain that I can be stupid enough to believe him for five whole minutes.
He doesn’t.
“I can’t promise I’ll never be afraid,” he says quietly.
My chest tightens.
“But I can promise I know fear doesn’t give me the right to decide your life.”
I hate the little tremor that goes through me.
“If you don’t want me anymore,” he says, “I’ll step back.”
The words hit wrong. Hard and cold.
“So that’s it?”
His head comes up. "What's it?"
“You’re letting go?”
“No.” He takes one step closer, then stops himself. “God, no. Sam."
He lets out a breath that makes me think he's nearly irritated with me, but there's too much pain there to believe that.
"I’m letting go of the idea that loving you means I get to hold on any way I want.”
My fingers curl around the edge of my phone.
“If you want a life separate from mine, I won't keep you from it” he says. “If you want to stay here and build something with preparedness or emergency response, I’ll support it. Contacts, equipment, funding, whatever you need and whatever is yours to use. I won’t tie it to coming home.
I won’t tie it to Storm Posse. I won’t use our marriage or the business or money to keep you where I want you. ”
My throat works. “That sounds very noble.”
“It doesn’t feel noble.”
“No?”
His mouth pulls tight. “It feels like cutting my own chest open and standing here politely while you decide whether to walk away with my heart in your hand.”
I close my eyes for one second.
When I open them, he's still there. And I can't deny that he looks like he's aching.
“But I won’t lie to you,” he says. “I want you beside me. In every way. I miss you in the truck. I miss you at command. I miss waking up and hearing you complain about my alarm. I miss storms making sense because you’re reading them with me.
I miss reaching over at 1 a.m. and feeling you shift under my arm. "
My eyes sting.
“Luci was never you,” he says. “She was never even close to you. I didn’t want her. I wanted you safe, and I wanted you close, and somehow I kept tightening my grip until I shoved you so far away I couldn’t reach you.”
I swallow.
“The only way I know how to start fixing that is to stop gripping,” he says. “To stop trying to control the outcome. To let you choose, even if what you choose…"
He stops, and I can see his throat work.
"Even if what you choose isn't me."
“And if I don’t forgive you?”
His eyes shine, but he doesn’t look away. “You’re still the love of my life.”
My breath catches.
“That doesn’t change if you never put that ring back on.
It doesn’t change if you never come back to the team.
It doesn’t change if you live beside me or two thousand miles away.
” His voice roughens. “If you choose me someday, I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to deserve it.
If you don’t, I’ll still love you. And I’ll still do everything I can to make sure I’m never standing between you and the life you deserve. ”
I look down at my bare hand.
The skin where my ring used to sit looks too plain.
“I’m not ready,” I whisper.
"Okay."
“I don’t know when I will be.”
"Understood."
Someone behind us calls for more tarps around the corner. Life keeps moving in all its rude, practical ways.
Brooks doesn’t ask me to come home.
He doesn’t ask me to make this easier for him.
He just stands there with his hands at his sides, giving me the one thing I asked for too late and needed all along.
A choice.
And for the first time in two years, I wonder if he might actually understand what that means.