Chapter 23
Kenzi
We stay like that longer than either of us needs to justify it, hands together on a kitchen table in a safe house that isn't really safe, not fully, not with that message still sitting unanswered somewhere out there and eventually Dozer gets up to check the perimeter one more time before the night settles in properly.
His fingers leave mine slowly. I sit alone with the quiet and find, for once, that I don't want to fill it.
He comes back a few minutes later, shuts the door softly behind him, and instead of taking the chair beside me, he sits across from me like he senses I need the space to say something without him close enough to catch me if I fall apart doing it.
"You told me something tonight," I say. "About her. About why you stopped letting people in."
"I did."
"I want to tell you mine. The whole thing. Not the piece I almost said in the hospital, or the piece that slipped out at the file cabinet. All of it."
He doesn't say anything. Just waits, the same patient stillness he's given me every other time I've almost handed him something real, and I find, looking at him, that I finally trust the waiting enough to fill it properly.
"My brother's name was Ryan," I say. "Ten years older than me.
He used to joke and call me an oops baby.
My parents had tried for forever to have another child before giving up and then I came along.
He joined the Army the day he turned eighteen, which surprised exactly no one who knew him, because he'd wanted to be a soldier like our dad for as long as any of us could remember.
When he was a teenager, our dad brought home a flag from his own deployment and folded it into Ryan's hands like it was something sacred.
" I swallow. "It was. Ryan treated it that way his whole life. "
Dozer doesn't move and doesn't rush me. I notice he hasn’t given me one of those careful little nods people use when they're already planning what they're going to say next. He’s not listening to respond, he’s listening to hear the words I’m saying.
"He was Delta, worked with Hunter who became like a second big brother.
In 2011 he deployed to Afghanistan, again.
I was in college, thinking my biggest problem was where I would work after graduation and if I could get into the internship I wanted badly.
" I give a short, humorless laugh. "Funny how small your problems look in hindsight, when you didn't know yet what a real one felt like. "
"You don't have to do the jokes right now," Dozer says quietly. "Not with me."
I look at him and I’m amazed at how well he's already learned that about me, how I wear humor as armor, the jokes as the thing I reach for right before the truth gets too heavy.
"Okay." I let the joke go, and just say it plainly.
"He died on a mission that went wrong in ways nobody ever fully explained to my family.
Not really. Not beyond the careful language they use for families who ask too many questions.
Hunter was there. Hunter carried him the last quarter mile back to extraction because Ryan wasn't going to make it, and Hunter wasn't going to leave him lying somewhere he could be left behind.
Not even for a body that had already stopped being able to feel it. "
The words sit between us. My voice doesn't break, yet.
I'm almost proud of that, distantly, with the same forensic distance I give everything, cataloguing my own composure like a data point I can still trust. Telling him this story feels like an out of body experience.
I can recite the words and somehow distance myself from them, as if they happened to someone else. Trauma is funny like that, I suppose.
"Hunter came to see us after. He was the one who delivered the news, a promise he’d made Ryan and one Ryan had also made him.
If anything were to happen to them, they’d tell the family before the uniforms arrived.
He sat with my father for hours the week of the funeral and told him everything he was allowed to, and some things, I think, that he probably wasn't. He didn't have to do that. He is family, even if he doesn’t share our blood.
" I look down at my hands. "He's stayed family. Shows up on the anniversary of Ryan’s death. Checks in when he shouldn't have to. Treats me like I belong to him, like I’m his sister. I think sometimes it’s because he carried my brother out himself, and some part of him never fully set that weight back down. "
"You don't blame him," Dozer says. Not a question.
"Never did. Not for one second. Not even in the years right after, when I was angry at everything and everyone and looking for somewhere to put it.
I blamed the war. I blamed a system that sends men to die for decisions made by people who'll never carry a body a quarter mile through anything harder than a hallway.
" My throat tightens. "I never blamed the man who made sure my brother didn't die alone in the dirt. "
My voice cracks. Finally. Right there, the plain sentence underneath all the careful cataloguing breaking through despite every year of practice I've put into keeping it steady.
"I just miss him." It comes out smaller than everything before it.
Rawer. The thing I usually keep so far underneath the jokes and the competence that most people never get anywhere near it.
"Every single day. I catalog dead strangers for a living because somebody has to remember they mattered, and some part of that has always been about him.
About making sure nobody's brother gets treated like just a body on a table, because I know exactly what it costs a family when somebody does. He was my brother but after my dad’s last deployment and with our age differences, he was more like a sudo-father.
He took care of me and was the last person who ever truly did. "
Dozer doesn't say anything for a long moment. Then he gets up. He comes around the table and crouches in front of my chair so we're eye level. He doesn't touch me immediately. That matters more than he probably knows. He gives me the choice.
I close the distance by an inch. His hand comes up, settling lightly over mine. The same hand that's held a weapon, dragged me through crowds, put me behind cover, and stitched together everything that could have gone wrong this week. Now it just holds mine.
"He'd be proud of you," he says, quiet and certain, the way he says everything he actually believes. "Every stranger you've ever treated like they mattered. Every family you've made sure got the truth. That's not just your job. That's his memory, still doing good in the world through you."
I don't have a joke for that. I don't want one. The tears come before I can stop them, quiet at first, then harder, years of careful wall building and balancing giving way all at once. I hate crying. I hate the vulnerability of it, the loss of control, the complete lack of useful purpose.
But Dozer stays exactly where he is. He doesn't try to fix it. Doesn't tell me it'll be okay. Doesn't give me some hollow version of he's in a better place or everything happens for a reason, both of which should be punishable offenses when someone is grieving. He just stays.
His thumb moves once over the back of my hand, it’s a tiny motion. Almost nothing. It feels like everything.
"Thank you," I say once I can talk again, wiping my face with the back of my free hand. "For not trying to make it smaller than it is."
"It's not small," he says. "Nothing about it is small."
I look at him, this quiet, careful man crouched in front of my chair in a safe house that isn't fully safe, his hand still wrapped around mine like he's not in any hurry to let go.
Something settles into place. Something that's been circling for days, maybe weeks, maybe longer than that if I'm honest about how long I've been waiting for someone to just let me be exactly this messy and this real without flinching.
"I've never told anyone all of that," I say. "Not like that. Not the whole thing at once."
"I know."
"Why do you think I told you?"
He doesn't answer right away. He just looks at me, steady and unguarded, his thumb still resting against my knuckles. Then his gaze drops briefly to our hands before coming back to my face.
"Because you trust me."
The words are simple. No grand declaration. No promise he can't keep. Somehow, that makes them hit harder.
I inhale slowly. "Yeah," I whisper. "I do."
His fingers tighten around mine, just enough for me to feel it. "And because," he adds, voice rougher now, "you don't have to carry it alone anymore."
That does it. My eyes burn again, but this time I don't look away. Neither does he.
For once, I don't catalog the moment. I don't analyze it.
I don't search for the reason why his hand feels so good in mine or why the space between us suddenly seems much smaller than it was five minutes ago.
I just let myself feel it all. Him. And, the terrifying possibility that maybe letting someone in isn't the same thing as giving them the power to hurt you.
Maybe sometimes it's giving them the chance to heal you and make you whole again.