Chapter 14 Jane
JANE
Jane sat across from Gabe, watching him gather himself to speak. She could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his jaw clenched and released as he prepared to share something he had clearly kept locked away for a long time.
She understood that feeling. The weight of carrying a story that hurt too much to tell. The fear was that once you spoke it out loud, once you shared that pain with another person, it would become real in a way it had not been before.
But she had just done exactly that. She had just laid bare the worst moment of her life, the accident that had taken everything from her. And Gabe had listened without judgment, without trying to fix it or minimize it. He had just been there, steady and present and understanding.
Now it was her turn to do the same for him.
Jane wiped the remaining tears from her eyes and tried to compose herself.
She felt raw and exposed, like a wound that had been reopened.
But there was also relief. She had told the full story.
Not the sanitized version she gave to acquaintances or the carefully edited highlights she shared with people who asked casual questions.
The real story, with all its pain, horror, and devastating detail.
And Gabe had not flinched. Had not looked at her with pity or discomfort. He had just held her hand and listened, and that simple act had meant more than he probably realized.
“Take your time,” Jane said softly, echoing the patience he had shown her.
Gabe nodded, his eyes fixed on the painted shells spread across the table. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet but steady.
“Her name was Abigail,” Gabe began. “Abi. We met fourteen years ago, fresh out of SEAL training and thinking I was invincible. She was working as a field medic, attached to our unit for a deployment in Afghanistan.”
Jane listened, watching Gabe’s face as he spoke. She could see the love there, even after six years. The kind of love that did not fade just because the person was gone.
“She was beautiful,” Gabe continued, a small smile crossing his face.
“But it was not her looks that got me. It was her laugh. This big, uninhibited laugh seemed impossible coming from someone so small. And she was fearless. Completely, utterly fearless. She would run into situations that made grown men hesitate to help someone who was hurt.”
Gabe picked up his coffee cup, wrapping his hands around it the same way Jane had earlier, drawing comfort from the warmth.
“We fell in love fast,” he said. “The kind of intense, all-consuming love that happens when you are in a combat zone and every day might be your last. We got married six months after we met. My mother tried to talk us into waiting. She said we were too young and should take our time. But we didn’t want to wait.
We wanted every moment we could get together. ”
Jane felt her chest tighten, already dreading where this story was going.
“For four years, we deployed together whenever possible,” Gabe said.
“It was not always easy. The military doesn’t love having married couples in the same unit.
But we made it work. And when we weren’t deployed, we were planning our future.
Abi wanted kids. A house near the beach.
She talked about going back to school, becoming a nurse practitioner, working in a civilian hospital where the worst trauma was a car accident instead of an IED. ”
Gabe’s smile faded, his expression growing darker.
“Six years ago, Abi and I were both called out at the same time,” Gabe began, his voice steady but his hands betraying his tension as they gripped his coffee cup.
“At first, we thought it was to different locations. Different missions entirely. But when I got to the staging area, I found out we were both being sent to the same forward operating base in Syria.”
A small, sad smile crossed Gabe’s face at the memory.
“We were surprised,” he continued. “Happy surprised. Abi was being sent to provide medical support. Some hostages had already been recovered in an earlier operation, and they needed immediate medical attention. I was leading my SEAL team on follow-up reconnaissance. Intelligence suggested there might be more hostages in the region, and we were there to assess and potentially extract if we found them.”
Jane watched Gabe’s face, seeing the way his expression shifted between the happiness of that memory and the pain of what came after.
“The second day we were there,” Gabe said, his voice growing rougher, “we got intel that the last of the hostages had been spotted. A village about a day’s ride from the base.
The original plan was to send a fresh SEAL team.
My guys had just come off a seventy-two-hour op and needed rest. But the area had been quiet.
No hostile activity for weeks. And we were already geared up and ready to go. ”
Gabe’s hands tightened around the coffee cup until his knuckles went white.
“So I made the call,” he said. “Left a few men behind at the base for security and took the rest of my team. When we left, Abi was near the entrance to the medical tent. She waved goodbye, and my team was ragging on me about being married to the prettiest medic in the Corps.” His voice cracked slightly.
“That was the last time I saw her alive.”
Jane reached across the table and took his hand, the same way he had held hers earlier. Gabe gripped back hard, as if she were the only thing anchoring him to the present.
“The mission went wrong from the start,” Gabe continued, his voice flat now, emotionless in the way people got when recounting trauma.
“The intelligence was bad. There were no hostages in that village. Nothing but empty buildings and a few scared locals who scattered at the sight of us. We searched everywhere. Every structure, every hiding place. Nothing.”
He paused, drawing a shaky breath.
“I radioed it back to base,” Gabe said. “Reported that the intel was bogus, that we were coming back. But the person I’d been coordinating with, the intelligence officer who’d sent us out there, she was gone.
The person who answered said she’d disappeared more than a day ago.
That they’d been looking for her. That her credentials were fake and that she’d fed us false information. ”
Jane felt her breath catch, already understanding where this was going.
“And then he told me,” Gabe said, his voice breaking now, “that I needed to get back to base immediately. That the base was under attack. Had been under attack for the past three hours. That it was a coordinated assault. With mortars, small arms fire, and explosives. We’d been lured away deliberately so the base would have minimal defense. ”
Tears were forming in Gabe’s eyes, streaming down his face.
“We moved as fast as we could,” Gabe said. “Pushed our vehicles to their limits, drove through the night. But it takes time to cover that kind of distance, and we’d been sent a full day’s ride away. By the time we got back...”
He stopped, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
“By the time we got back, the rescue and cleanup crews were already there,” Gabe continued. “The attack was over. The hostiles had hit hard and fast and then disappeared. And the casualties...” His voice broke completely. “There were so many casualties.”
Jane squeezed his hand tighter, her own tears flowing freely now.
“I jumped out of the vehicle before it even stopped,” Gabe said.
“I started running toward the medical tent because I knew that’s where Abi would have been.
Where she would have stayed, treating the wounded, refusing to take cover while there were people who needed her help.
That’s who she was. That’s what she did. ”
Gabe’s shoulders shook with silent sobs.
“But they wouldn’t let me near her,” he said.
“My commanding officer physically held me back. He told me she was gone. That a mortar round had come through the roof of the medical tent. That she’d been trying to save wounded soldiers when it hit.
She’d taken shrapnel, massive trauma, but she’d kept working for almost an hour even while bleeding out. ”
“Oh, Gabe,” Jane whispered, her voice breaking.
“Three men,” Gabe said, the words coming out choked.
“They told me she saved three men before she finally collapsed. She’d refused treatment herself, kept saying others needed it more.
By the time they got her to the operating table, there was too much damage.
Too much blood loss. She died during surgery. ”
Gabe pulled his hand from Jane’s and covered his face, his entire body shaking with grief that was six years old but felt as fresh as if it had happened yesterday.
Jane stood up, ignoring the protest from her back, and moved around the table.
She wrapped her arms around Gabe and held him while he cried, the way someone should have held him six years ago, but probably hadn’t, because he was a SEAL and SEALs were supposed to be strong, supposed to be able to handle anything.
“I wasn’t there,” Gabe said, his voice muffled against her shoulder.
“I wasn’t there when she needed me most. I was chasing false intelligence, following orders based on lies, while Abi was dying.
And if I hadn’t taken that mission, if I had questioned the intel more carefully, if I had sent another team like I was supposed to—”
“It was not your fault,” Jane said fiercely, holding him tighter. “Gabe, listen to me. It was not your fault.”
“A kid came to me afterward,” Gabe continued, as if he had not heard her.
“A fourteen-year-old boy. He’d been one of the hostages we’d recovered earlier, the ones Abi was treating.
He had two little sisters with him. And he told me that when the attack started, Abi had protected them.
She had thrown herself over his sisters when the mortar hit.
She’d taken shrapnel that would have killed them. ”
Fresh tears streamed down Gabe’s face.
“He said she fought for them,” Gabe whispered. “Even while she was dying, she was still trying to protect them. Still trying to save everyone. That’s so like her. That’s exactly who Abi was.”
Jane held him while he cried, her own tears mixing with his.
She understood now. Understood the crushing weight of survivor’s guilt.
Understood why he had spent six years throwing himself into danger, trying to balance the scales, trying to make Abi’s death mean something by saving as many people as he could.
“My head knows it was not my fault,” Gabe said finally, his voice raw.
“Knows that I was following orders, that the intelligence officer was likely a plant, that the whole thing was designed to draw defenders away from the base. But my heart keeps saying I should have known better. I should have questioned it more. I should have been there to protect her.”
“Or maybe you would have died too,” Jane said gently, echoing what she’d said earlier.
“Maybe you both would have been lost instead of just her. Maybe those three men she saved would have died. Maybe that boy’s little sisters would have been killed.
You cannot know, Gabe. You cannot torture yourself with what-ifs. ”
Gabe pulled back slightly and looked up at her with red-rimmed eyes.
“For six years, I’ve been trying to convince myself of that,” he said.
“For six years, I’ve been taking every dangerous mission, volunteering for every deployment, throwing myself into situations that should have killed me.
Because part of me thought if I kept saving people, if I kept being the hero, maybe it would balance out.
Maybe it would make up for not being there when Abi needed me. ”
Jane understood that impulse completely. The desperate need to do something, anything, to make sense of senseless loss.
“But it doesn’t work that way,” Gabe said, his voice breaking. “I have saved dozens of people over the past six years. Hundreds, maybe. And it hasn’t brought Abi back. It hasn’t eased the guilt or filled the hole she left.”
“No,” Jane agreed softly. “It wouldn’t. Because grief doesn’t work that way. Loss doesn’t work that way.”
They stood there together, Jane holding Gabe while he cried for the wife he had lost and the years he had spent running from his pain. She understood that running. She had done it herself for three years, hiding at the inn and going through the motions of living without really being alive.
Finally, Gabe’s tears slowed. He pulled back and wiped his face with his hands, giving Jane a watery smile.
“Now I am a wreck too,” he said, echoing her words from earlier.
Jane smiled through her own tears. “We make quite a pair.”
“We do,” Gabe agreed.
They stood there for a moment longer, and then Jane helped Gabe back into his chair. She moved around the table to her own seat, her back protesting slightly from the awkward position, but she ignored it. Some pain was worth it.
“Thank you,” Gabe said quietly. “For listening. For not trying to tell me it gets easier or that time heals all wounds or any of the other useless platitudes people say when they do not know what else to offer.”
“Because it doesn’t get easier,” Jane said. “It just gets different. The pain becomes part of you instead of consuming all of you. You learn to carry it instead of being crushed by it.”
“Exactly,” Gabe said, relief evident in his voice that she understood.
They sat in silence for a while, both processing everything they had shared. The rain had lightened outside, no longer the steady downpour but a gentle mist. Through the windows, Jane could see the clouds beginning to break apart, hints of blue sky peeking through.
“Do you think,” Gabe said finally, “that we’re supposed to feel guilty for moving on? For finding happiness again after losing the people we loved?”
Jane considered the question carefully. It was something she had wrestled with herself over the past few days as her feelings for Gabe had grown stronger.
“I think,” she said slowly, “that the people we loved would want us to be happy. Darren loved me. I know that absolutely. And I think if he were here, he would tell me to stop punishing myself. To stop just existing and start living again.”
“Abi would say the same,” Gabe said. “She would probably smack me upside the head and tell me to stop being an idiot. That she didn’t die, so I could spend the rest of my life feeling guilty.”
Jane smiled at that image. “She sounds like she was amazing.”
“She was,” Gabe said. “And so was Darren, from everything you’ve told me about him.”
“He was,” Jane agreed.
They looked at each other across the table, and something passed between them. An understanding. An acknowledgment of what they were both feeling, what was growing between them despite their grief and pain.