6. CHAPTER 6
Livia
I’m a morning person and never set my alarm but my sleep was patchy last night, and I found myself up much earlier than that. I never sleep well when I travel, and despite the team staying in a luxury hotel here in San Diego, I still felt out of place.
Maybe it’s the new job, maybe it’s the excitement of game day—my first as a member of the Wildfire staff—but here I am at five forty-five in the morning, accessing the hotel gym with my key card.
There’s a twofold reason for me snagging an early-morning workout. The first is that I’ve always done my best thinking while in motion. I find the physical work quiets the part of my brain that won’t stop cataloguing and analyzing long enough for the actual useful thoughts to surface.
The second reason—and maybe the most important—I’m hoping to “run into” Locke. Van let it drop that they were going to meet up for a workout, which they often do as they are the type who will hit the gym before six a.m.
The fitness center is decent by hotel standards. The free weight selection is solid and the equipment is well-maintained. I currently have the entire place to myself. I drop my bag on a bench near the free weight rack, pull out my earbuds, and open my music app.
That’s when I see the text from Grant. It came in at two seventeen in the morning. Did you get my card? I just want to know you read it. That’s all I’m asking.
I stare at it for a moment.
That’s all I’m asking.
He’s been saying some version of that sentence for the last two months. Just one conversation. Just a chance to explain. Each ask framed as small and reasonable, each one underneath it the same thing—just give me a point of entry, just let me back in, just tell me the door isn’t permanently closed.
I step out into the hallway and call him, not giving a shit if I wake him up.
It rings four times and I almost hang up. “Livia?” His voice is groggy, heavy with sleep.
“I got the card,” I say, keeping my tone even. I’ve learned that any elevation or drop in tone—warmer, icier, fatigued, angry—gives him ammunition against me, but even ground is harder to negotiate against. “I’m not going to respond to it and I will not respond to texts. I’ve told you this.”
“I just needed to know you read it,” he whines, and I wrinkle my nose in disgust. “Did you? Actually read it?”
Ugh… I hate that I did read it because I can’t lie to him, and I hate that admitting I did will give him hope. I sigh in frustration. “Grant.”
“I’m not trying to start anything. I just… I put a lot of thought and meaning into what I wrote, and I want to make sure it didn’t go straight in the trash.”
I refuse to admit to reading it. “What you put into it doesn’t change my position. We are over. We were over the minute you cheated, and if there was a snowball’s chance in hell I’d ever reconsider, the fact you touched me in anger sealed the deal.”
Another pause, and his tone shifts slightly—not quite angry, but something underneath it tightens. “You moved a thousand miles away, Livia. I think that’s a little extreme, don’t you? Like, at some point, don’t we deserve a conversation about what happened between us?”
“We had that conversation. Once is enough.”
“You talked and I listened. That’s not the same thing.”
I close my eyes briefly. This is the thing about Grant that I spent almost two years not seeing clearly enough—the way he twists everything between us to portray himself as the reasonable one and me as the unfair half.
I caught him cheating, ended the relationship, and somehow the narrative became about how I hadn’t given him enough space to explain himself.
I think back to that one and only conversation. He grabbed me hard enough to leave bruises and somehow that became about how I’d pushed him to that place. Every version of that altercation has him at the center of a different reality wherein he was justified.
“I’m not doing this,” I say. “Don’t text me again.”
I hang up before he can answer, but he immediately calls me back. I let the voicemail pick up and fortunately, he doesn’t call again after that.
I stand in the hallway, knowing in my gut the conversation accomplished nothing and I shouldn’t have called, but that’s what happens when anger gets the best of me.
It’s been two months since we broke up and he won’t let it go.
I’m grateful that I have those miles between us now so he can’t just show up on my doorstep the way he did back in LA.
I can’t recall how many times he’d knock on my door, and I’d pretend not to be there to avoid the confrontation.
Shaking off the gross feelings he produces, I go back into the gym, put my earbuds in, find my playlist, and pick up my weights.
I’m twenty minutes into my workout and doing a set of dumbbell flies on the incline bench when the door opens behind me.
I see him in the mirror before he sees me.
Locke Donovan, dark blond hair under a baseball cap with the ends sticking out, in a gray T-shirt and black training shorts. He’s a big guy, muscular across his chest and arms with powerful legs. You can tell with one glance he spends a lot of time in the gym, but he’s definitely no meathead.
Locke scans the equipment as he walks in, and for the first ten steps he hasn’t looked far enough left to find me.
I keep lifting and watch him in the mirror, and then it happens… his head turns and his eyes lock with mine in the reflection.
The wariness that moves through him is obvious and definitely not a surprise. I can see the calculation in his eyes, the wheels spinning on how to handle this dilemma. He looks at the door behind him, back to me, and to the door again.
He is absolutely considering leaving. He’s weighing how much he wants to work out versus the possibility of having to talk to me.
I set my weights down and sit up straight on the bench. “You leave and I’ll tell Van you’re afraid of a one-hundred-and-thirty-five-pound woman.”
A combination of irritation and a hint of amusement move across his face, immediately wiped away by indignation. “That’s—”
“Blackmail,” I agree pleasantly. “Effective though.” I pick my weights back up. “I’ll make you a deal. You stay, do your workout, and I won’t say a single word about sessions or mandates or performance optimization for the entire time. Scout’s honor.”
He looks at me with those pale eyes, and I can see the distrust. It’s a complete lack of faith in anyone representing this organization and I intend to find out why.
But not today.
Locke huffs out a breath of resignation and moves to the weight rack. I refuse the smile that wants to come and return to my last set of flies.
He sets up at the bench press on the rack, his movements efficient and automatic.
I stay on my side, keeping my word by maintaining my silence.
We’re just two people working in parallel, the clink of weights and the controlled exhale of effort.
It’s almost companionable and I wouldn’t have predicted that.
Van has yet to make an appearance and I wonder if he canceled or decided not to show.
I had mentioned I’d probably see him, so maybe he purposely stayed away to give me some alone time with Locke.
Seven minutes pass before I finally make my move. Locke is in between sets so I seize the moment. I move to the dumbbells and choose a twenty-pounder to do biceps curls.
“Eisenhower in War and Peace,” I say out of the blue and his head jerks up, eyes landing on me with a frown. “You had it on the plane yesterday. Hard to miss the cover.” I settle onto my bench across from him, resting the weight temporarily on my thigh. “Any good?”
His expression shifts, almost like confusion as he tries to figure out what to do with me. “You were watching me?” he asks, trying to sound offended.
I lift a shoulder. “I observe people. Occupational hazard. What drew you to it? Military history specifically?”
His frown deepens, and he shakes his head a tiny bit as if he can’t believe I’d ask such a thing.
“Strategy,” he says finally. “Decision-making under impossible conditions.”
“The same fundamental problems that keep coming up across a few thousand years of human conflict,” I muse.
Locke blinks in surprise, and instantly, I see him relax a fraction. “When you take into account terrain changes and weapons evolving, but the core problems still exist.” He positions himself on the bench under the barbell. “It’s definitely worth understanding.”
I peel off a set of curls while he does his chest presses and the minute he racks, I say, “So… is the book any good?”
Locke pushes up into a sitting position and grabs his water bottle to take a swig. “Are you a history buff?”
Hmm… he asked me a question, and that shows interest. I run with it. “Somewhat, but I really enjoy learning about ancient times. The further back you go, the more clearly you can see the patterns.”
“The Romans,” he says, like that’s a complete sentence. Which for him, I’m learning, it basically is.
“The Romans,” I agree. “Though I’d argue their greatest skill wasn’t warfare. It was infrastructure—roads, aqueducts, administrative systems. The army was just how they protected their investment.”
His face softens fractionally, not quite a smile but the possibility of one, though it never quite breaks through. “The army was how they built the investment. You don’t lay roads through territory you don’t control.”
“Fair point,” I concede. “Conquest first, civilization second.”
“Conquest first, civilization as the justification.” He reaches for his barbell. “They were very good at making expansion look like a favor to the people they invaded.”
“Every empire tells itself that story,” I say. “That’s not unique to Rome. That’s just what power does with its own narrative.”
He looks at me directly then, the way he looked at me once in my office before he stood up and walked out—like he’s recalibrating. “You sound like someone who’s read more than just somewhat.”
“Well, let’s just say I watch a lot of documentaries and I know a little bit about a lot of stuff.”
Locke stares at me briefly before settling back down onto the bench to do another set of presses. It feels as if the conversation is over, but I’m not ready to let it go. I’m actually setting a foundational block and it’s far too flimsy to abandon just yet.
“Do you think Eisenhower would have understood the Romans?”
“What do you mean?” he asks as he pumps iron, a slight grunt to his words.
“Well, he had the same problem… holding a territory taken by force without becoming the thing you fought against?”
“Most commanders don’t think past the victory,” Locke says. “That’s the failure point. You plan for the battle and not for the morning after.”
He racks the bar and sits up. We look at each other and I sense no professional friction between us.
I pull the thread very carefully, understanding how fragile it is. “Do you think Eisenhower ever made peace with it? The gap between knowing what was right and living with what that rightness cost him? When the cost turns out to be—”
Locke stands up so abruptly, the words freeze in my mouth. His expression has gone blank, walled off into nothingness.
“Good conversation,” he says flatly, but his manner indicates he found nothing good about it.
In fact, I think what I said there at the end might have been distasteful to him.
Locke reaches into his pocket and pulls out earbuds. He puts them in and moves to a different section of the gym, closing off the conversation as final as a dead bolt sliding home.
I sit on my bench and look at the space where he’d been standing.
He was right there.
For ten minutes he was engaged with me as we talked about history. He was unguarded until he was triggered and the shutters came down.
The frustrating part isn’t that he disengaged but rather trying to figure out what caused the change. My mind rewinds the conversation, and it seems the change came when I asked him about the cost of being right.
It’s a clue, for sure, but without context, I have no idea how it matters to him. I reach for my water and take a sip.
Whether the rightness of a thing is ever enough when the cost turns out to be something—what?
That question was going somewhere Locke didn’t like and that’s why he stood up.
I pick up my weight and finish my biceps curls and think about the man who walked away from a question like it had knives that would cut him open.