29. Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Twenty-Nine
CALEB
Light is flooding through the curtains.
That’s the first thing I notice. Not the gray, flat nothing of the Airstream ceiling.
Not the pine branches shifting above the clearing.
Light, warm, and golden, filtered through cotton curtains that have small flowers printed on them.
Flowers. On the curtains. In a room that smells like vanilla and laundry detergent and her.
My brain is quiet.
There were no nightmares last night. No three a.m. bolt upright with sweat on my neck and my hands grabbing for something that isn’t there. No calculations running in the background, sorting threats, mapping exits, counting the seconds since the last time I felt safe.
Regan’s asleep on her side, facing me, one hand on my chest like she put it there in her sleep because her body needed to confirm I was still here. Her hair is loose on the pillow. Her mouth is slightly open and I swear to God she’s the most beautiful girl in the whole fucking world.
I lie still, not wanting to wake her, and watch her breathe. The sheet is pulled to her waist, and I can see all of her, skin above the sheet, an outline below it.
Lying in the strange bed with a woman who is technically a stranger, even though I’ve known her half my life, I feel peace I thought I’d never find again.
It ends the way it always ends, the way good things always end for me.
My brain boots up. The gears start turning.
The machinery of ten years’ worth of certainty clicks online, and the quiet fills with noise.
You’re in love with her.
The thought arrives without warning. I’m in love with her.
I’ve been in love with her since I was sixteen and she laughed at my joke about the chemistry homework, and I thought, oh, I’m done.
I was in love with her when I enlisted. In love with her in Kandahar.
In love with her every night in the Airstream when I looked at the photo and told myself the anger was stronger than the rest of it.
It was never stronger. It was just louder.
And now I’m lying in her bed with her hand on my chest, and the anger is quiet. Love is the loudest thing in the room, and the problem with that is simple.
The woman I love is the woman who betrayed me.
Except Regan doesn’t behave like a woman who betrayed anyone. Regan sat on my workshop floor during a PTSD episode and didn’t flinch. Didn’t panic. Didn’t ask questions I couldn’t answer. Just sat there, three feet away, and waited.
Regan treated my jumpy dog and never once lost patience with him or with me. She adjusted dosages and wrote up treatment plans, and sat up with me all night when Bear wouldn’t eat.
Regan has been confused, hurt, and honest at every turn.
When I pulled away after the workshop, she didn’t chase.
When I showed up at her truck with food from the Briar Rose, she let me in.
When she cried over a dead horse, she let me see it.
She has never, not once, behaved like a person who has something to hide.
So what does that mean?
I turn my head and stare at the ceiling. Her apartment ceiling is white, clean, no water stains. A small crack runs along the edge near the window. The fairy lights are strung along the headboard in a loose loop.
What does it mean if the woman in the photo and the woman in this bed are the same person and none of it makes sense?
The photo is real. Drew took it. I saw it on his phone screen in a high school hall at seventeen, and the girl in the photo was Regan, and she had another guy’s arms around her.
That photo was enough to make me walk into that recruiting office the next morning and sign away four years of my life and never look back.
The photo is real. I’m not questioning that. I’m questioning what it means.
And the questioning is worse than the certainty ever was, because the certainty had a purpose.
The certainty was a wall. It kept me upright.
It gave me a reason for Kandahar and the Airstream and the mat on the floor and the decade of silence.
The certainty said you left because she broke the deal, and leaving was the right call.
If the certainty is wrong, then the wall comes down. And behind the wall is a version of the story where a seventeen-year-old girl went to a party, and a photo got taken, and a boy who loved her saw it and assumed the worst and destroyed both their lives over a misunderstanding.
If I’m wrong, then everything I’ve done, the enlisting, the silence, the ten years of carrying a photo like a weapon, was for nothing.
I’d be the villain of this story. Not the betrayed. The betrayer. The boy who ran instead of asking one question. The man who never came back to hear the answer. That possibility sits in my chest like a stone.
Regan shifts in her sleep. Makes a small sound.
Her fingers curl against my chest, and I look down at her hand and think about the way she touches Bear.
Gentle. Patient. Never fast. She lets the animal come to her.
She lets the animal decide. She never forces contact, never grabs, never pulls.
She waits. Just like she’s been waiting for me.
The thought is unbearable, so I do what I’ve always done. I bury it.
The photo is real. Drew saw what he saw. She was with someone else. The rest is noise.
I close my eyes. Count backward from ten. A grounding exercise the VA therapist taught me that I use for panic attacks and apparently also for the realization that I might have ruined my life.
Ten. Nine. Eight.
Regan’s breathing.
Seven. Six.
The creek outside her window.
Five. Four.
Bear shifting on the rug.
Three. Two. One.
The panic doesn’t go away. It just goes quieter. Manageable. Small enough to put in a box and close the lid and not open until I’m alone in the clearing with the fire and the dark.
I get up. Lift her hand off my chest and set it on the warm patch of sheet where I was lying. She makes another sound, low, not awake but close to it. I pull the sheet up to her shoulder.
Bear lifts his head and watches me.
“Stay,” I whisper.
He puts his head back down.
The bathroom is small and covered in blue tiles.
There’s a plant on the windowsill that’s actually alive, which is more than I can say for anything in the Airstream.
I wash my face, then look at myself in the mirror.
The man looking back is twenty-eight years old and tired. He’s also in love and terrified.
Get dressed. Go home. Figure this out.
I go back to the bedroom. Regan hasn’t moved.
The light through the curtains is brighter now, catching the gold in her hair, and I stand in the doorway and watch her sleep.
The view from this doorway is the best thing I’ve ever seen and the worst, because it’s showing me what I could have and what I might have thrown away.
I pull on my jeans and shirt. I sit on the edge of the bed to lace my boots.
Her hand touches my back. Her fingers light against my spine through the cotton.
“You’re leaving,” she says. Not a question.
“I need to feed the horses.”
“Okay.”
She doesn’t ask me to stay again. She asked once, last night. She won’t ask twice. That’s Regan. She’ll tell you what she wants, clear and clean, and then she’ll let you decide.
I turn. She’s looking at me, sleepy, hair across her face, the sheet pulled up to her chin. She looks like every version of herself I’ve ever loved, layered on top of each other.
“Last night,” I say.
“I know,” she says.
“It mattered.”
“I know that too.”
I lean down and kiss her forehead. My mouth rests on her skin. It’s a kiss that means something I can’t say out loud yet.
“I’ll call you,” I say.
“Okay.”
Bear follows me down the metal staircase and into the truck. The parking lot is empty. The morning is sharp and bright and the air tastes like October creeping in at the edges of September.
I sit in the truck but don’t start the engine. The keys are in my hand. The glovebox is three inches from my knee, and inside it, folded in with the parking citations and the AAA card, is Drew’s note.
Stay sharp.
The note used to mean something. This morning it sits wrong, like a shirt that shrank in the wash. I start the engine, pull out of the lot, and head for the clearing.
The doubt is in the truck with me, small and quiet. Taking up the passenger seat like a hitchhiker I didn’t invite and can’t make leave.