Chapter 6
Elias
I've faced down worse things than asking a woman out. Technically.
An IED. A CO who hated my guts for two full deployments. A physical therapist named Priya who apparently believes squats are a form of personal punishment I somehow deserve.
None of it prepared me for standing outside Saoirse's front door with a six-pack of decent beer and absolutely no plan for what I was going to say.
I'd spent the whole drive over rehearsing. Three different versions, all of them terrible in their own specific way.
The first version was too formal — something about gratitude and professional respect that sounded like I was drafting an after-action report instead of telling a woman I wanted her in my life.
The second version was too casual, all jokes and deflection, the kind of thing I'd have said six months ago to avoid actually saying anything real.
The third version I couldn't even finish rehearsing, because somewhere around the second sentence I'd had to pull over and just breathe for a minute, hands on the wheel, heart going harder than it had any business going for something that wasn't combat.
Knox had offered to come with me. I'd turned him down, obviously, but the offer had stuck with me the whole drive — my president, willing to sit in my truck outside a woman's house for moral support, because that's the kind of club I'd come home to, the kind that shows up even for the parts you have to do alone.
"You've been standing out there for four minutes," she said, opening the door before I'd even knocked. "I could see you through the window. You looked like you were rehearsing something."
"I was rehearsing something."
"How'd it go?"
"Badly. I forgot most of it the second you opened the door."
She smiled, stepping back to let me in, and something about the easy warmth of it settled the nerves in my chest just enough to let me breathe.
Her place was smaller than mine, cozier, plants on every surface that had a flat spot to hold one. A cactus sat on the windowsill, defiantly alive.
"That's not the one you killed," I said, nodding at it.
"No. That's the redemption cactus. I've kept it alive four months. I consider it a major life achievement."
"Grandma would've had opinions about a four-month benchmark being the bar."
"Your grandma sounds terrifying."
"She was. In the best way." I set the beer on her counter, hands finding something to do so they wouldn't just hang there uselessly. "I didn't come here to talk about cacti."
"I figured." She leaned against the counter, arms crossed loosely, giving me room instead of pressing. "Take your time."
I didn't take much of it. Waiting had never been my strong suit, and eight months of learning how short life actually is had cured me of whatever patience I used to have for putting off things that mattered.
"I've been thinking about how to say this since you told me about the transfer," I said. "Every version sounded too small or too much. So I'm just going to say the true thing and let it be whatever size it turns out to be."
"Okay."
"You made a room where I was allowed to not be okay," I said.
"And somewhere in that room, I started wanting to be okay again.
First for you. Then because of you. Then, somewhere along the way, just — again.
On my own. Except it never really felt like on my own, because you were always there, making it possible. "
She didn't say anything. Just watched me, steady, the same way she'd watched me across a hundred garden beds.
"I don't know if a man who's still putting himself back together has any business asking a woman like you for anything," I said.
"But I've learned the hard way that life doesn't wait for you to feel ready.
I'd rather ask and be wrong than carry one more thing I never said out loud.
So. Saoirse. I want this. Whatever this turns out to be. I want it with you."
The kitchen went quiet. Somewhere outside, a dog barked twice and stopped.
"That was a good speech," she said finally, voice a little rough. "For someone who forgot his rehearsed version."
"I peaked under pressure. It's a medic thing."
She laughed, short and surprised, and crossed the space between us before I'd even finished processing that she'd moved.
"I want it too," she said. "I have since the garden. Since the tomatoes, if I'm being fully honest, which feels like a strange thing to fall for someone over, but here we are."
"Grandma would be thrilled. Tomatoes bringing people together. She'd never let me hear the end of it."
"I'd like to hear more about her sometime. Properly. Not just the garden version."
"You will." I reached for her hand, testing the ground the way I'd tested everything since coming home — carefully, deliberately, making sure it would hold before I put my full weight on it.
It held. "There's more to tell. There's more to me than the last eight months, remember?
You said that to me once. I want you to actually meet the rest of it. "
"I'd like that." She squeezed my hand, something settling in her face that looked a lot like relief. "Can I tell you something too? Something I haven't told many people?"
"Always."
"What does this look like?" I asked, before she could start. "Practically, I mean. You're still work friends with half the clinic staff. I'm still figuring out what my life looks like outside a uniform. Neither of us has done this in a while, probably."
"Define 'a while.'"
"Long enough that I forgot the correct order of operations. Do I take you to dinner first, or did we skip that step somewhere around the garden bed?"
"I think we skipped several steps," she said, laughing. "We went straight from patient and therapist to two people who've cried in front of each other about dead brothers and dead soldiers. Dinner might actually be a nice change of pace."
"Dinner, then. Marian's, maybe. Or the diner, if you want something less fancy."
"The diner. Always the diner. I have strong opinions about their pie."
"Everyone in this town has strong opinions about that pie. I think it's a prerequisite for citizenship."
"You'd know. You're the one with the road name and the club patch."
"Prospect status came with a pie quiz. I'm not even joking. Boone made me rate all six flavors before he'd sponsor me." I shook my head at the memory, an easier one than most from that stretch of my life, back before deployment, before any of this. "Feels like a hundred years ago."
"Tell me about it. The prospect years. I want the whole story, not the highlight reel."
She led me to her small kitchen table, and we sat, and she told me — really told me, not the careful, professional version she'd given me in the garden, but the whole shape of it, unpolished and raw.
"Rory was three years older than me," she said.
"Steadier, growing up. The one everyone assumed would be fine, because he always seemed fine, right up until he wasn't. He came home from his deployment quieter than he left, but nobody thought much of it.
Homecoming's supposed to be an adjustment. We all told ourselves that."
I stayed quiet, giving her the same room she'd always given me.
"What was he like?" I asked, after a while. "Before. Not the ending. I want to know the beginning of him too."
She smiled, small and sad and grateful all at once, like nobody had thought to ask her that in a long time.
"He was funny," she said. "Funnier than me, honestly, which I've never told anyone because it feels like a betrayal of my own personality.
He did this thing where he'd narrate our dog's inner thoughts in this ridiculous voice at family dinners.
Our mother would tell him to stop and he never did, not once, and eventually she'd be laughing too hard to keep asking. "
"Sounds like he'd have gotten along with half my club."
"He'd have loved Boone. Instantly. They'd have been a menace together."
"A dangerous combination. The world's lucky they never met."
"The world's loss, honestly." Her smile faded slowly, grief and fondness tangled together the way I recognized from my own memories of Doc, of Petrov, of Rodriguez.
"He started pulling back from things, slowly, after he came home.
Skipped a few family dinners. Said he was tired a lot.
Classic signs, in hindsight, all the signs I now teach other families to watch for, except back then I didn't know to watch for them.
I was in grad school. Busy. I told myself he sounded fine on the phone. "
"You couldn't have known everything," I said, quiet.
"I know that, logically. I've said it to a hundred grieving families.
It's a lot harder to actually believe it about yourself.
" She looked down at our joined hands. "He died on a Tuesday.
Ordinary Tuesday. I was in the middle of a study group when my mother called, and I almost didn't pick up because I thought it could wait. "
"Saoirse."
"I built this whole career out of that phone call," she said.
"Every patient I've ever treated, every room I've ever tried to make safe enough for someone to be honest in — it's all, somewhere underneath, an attempt to go back and answer that call sooner.
I know that's not really possible. I do it anyway. "
"What did the funeral look like?" I asked, because I wanted the whole shape of it, not just the wound at the center. "Was it big? Small? Did people say the right things, or the useless things people always say?"
"Both. Mostly useless things. 'He's in a better place.
' 'At least he's not suffering anymore.' Nobody knows what to say to a family after a suicide, so they say things that would work fine for cancer and just hope it translates.
" She laughed, short and humorless. "One of his old unit buddies came, though.
Flew in from three states over, didn't say much of anything useful either, honestly, but he stood next to me the whole service like a wall.
Didn't need words. Just needed to not let me stand there alone. "