Chapter 8 #2
We sat together a long while after that — the four of us, then more of the club as word spread and brothers started arriving quietly, one and two at a time, until my dark living room was full of people who loved me, lamps finally switched back on, the suffocating silence replaced by low voices and the specific, steady comfort of not being alone in a room where alone had nearly won.
I called the peer-support number the next morning.
Saoirse sat beside me the whole time, her hand steady on my knee, and I talked to a man named Ray, a combat vet with a voice roughened by exactly the kind of history that made him understand every single thing I said without needing it explained twice.
"You did the hardest thing there is," Ray told me, near the end of that first call. "You reached out before it was too late. That's not weakness, son. That's the whole ballgame, right there."
I started seeing a counselor the following week — someone who specialized in combat trauma and survivor's guilt, someone whose office didn't feel like one more room to perform gratitude in, but one more room, like Saoirse's garden, where I was finally allowed to just be exactly as broken and as healing as I actually was.
Her name was Dr. Alvarez. Older, steady, a photograph on her desk of her own son in uniform that told me, without either of us saying it directly, that she understood this particular grief from more than just textbooks.
"Tell me about Sanchez," she said, that first session, and I did — the whole shape of him, not just the ending, the same way Saoirse had taught me to talk about Doc and Rodriguez and Petrov, ordinary details instead of just wounds.
"He used to hum while he cleaned his rifle," I told her. "Same three notes, over and over. Drove half the unit crazy. I used to tease him about it."
"What do you feel when you remember that?"
"Grief. But also — something almost like fondness, underneath it. Like the grief's got room for both things now, instead of just swallowing everything whole."
"That's progress," she said. "Real progress. Not the absence of grief. Just grief that's learned how to share space with everything else that's still alive in you."
I kept going back, every week, sometimes twice a week in the harder stretches. Ray from the peer-support network called me every few days too, checking in, no pressure, just steady, reliable contact from a man who understood exactly what silence could cost if nobody interrupted it in time.
"You don't have to talk every time I call," Ray told me once. "Sometimes I just want you to pick up. That's the whole ask. Just pick up."
I picked up every time.
It wasn't instant. I want to be honest about that, the same honesty Saoirse taught me to bring to everything.
The grief for Sanchez didn't resolve itself in a week, or a month.
Some days were still hard, weeks later, harder than I wanted to admit even to myself — a song on the radio, a smell that reminded me of the field hospital, a Tuesday that felt too much like every other terrible Tuesday I'd survived.
But I wasn't carrying it alone anymore. That was the whole difference. That was everything.
Knox checked in daily for the first two weeks, no exceptions, sometimes just a single text — you good?
— that required nothing more than a thumbs-up in response, but the asking mattered more than either of us ever said out loud.
Gemma restocked my fridge twice as often as usual, still complaining about my grocery choices, still showing up anyway.
The whole club rotated through, quiet and constant, a wall of people making sure I never had another night alone with the dark the way I'd almost had that first terrible Tuesday.
Saoirse came every evening she could, and on the evenings she couldn't, she called, and on the nights the calls weren't enough, she simply showed up anyway, key in hand, the way she had that first terrible night, refusing every time to let the distance between us become anything close to what it had almost become.
"You don't have to check on me every single night," I told her, one evening about two weeks out, half joke, half genuine concern that I was asking too much of her.
"I'm not checking on you out of obligation," she said. "I'm here because I want to be here. There's a difference, Elias, and I need you to actually believe it instead of just accepting it as a kindness you owe me gratitude for."
"I'm working on believing it."
"That's all I'm asking. Just keep working on it."
Three weeks after that night, Saoirse showed up at my door again — different circumstances this time, dawn just starting to break gold over the mountains, both of us having spent the night wrapped around each other after a long, hard conversation about Sanchez, about Rory, about every empty chair either of us had ever had to sit beside.
"You're up early," I said, finding her already awake beside me, watching the light change through the window.
"Couldn't sleep. Good thoughts, not bad ones, for once.
" She turned to look at me, something fierce and certain in her expression that hadn't been there the night of the crisis, something that had grown instead out of surviving it together.
"I keep thinking about what you said. About being one more empty chair.
I don't want you thinking about survival in terms of chairs and absence anymore, Elias.
I want you thinking about it in terms of this. Right here. Right now. Alive."
"Show me," I said, and meant it as more than a simple request.
She pulled me down to her with a hunger that had nothing careful left in it, her mouth crashing against mine, teeth catching my lower lip in a way that had me groaning into her mouth.
I met her with everything I had, hands sliding beneath her shirt, dragging it up and off in one motion, her own hands already working the buttons of mine open, impatient, urgent, both of us shedding the last of the night's fear along with our clothes.