Chapter 13 #3
“I’d gone back to the Hummer to radio our position and let command know we were gonna be a bit late, when the first shot rang out.
My guys were over the side, all roped in.
Fucking sitting ducks for the sniper hidden across the gorge.
All three of them were dead in seconds, and I barely made it out.
You wanna talk about guilt? About failure?
I’m the one that made the call. I’m the one that put them on that mountainside.
I’m the one who went to each of their families to tell them how I didn’t smell an ambush. ”
More than anything else, those visits had nearly killed him.
So he understood exactly why Ty’s trip to see Bethany Reeves had sent him off the rails.
If not for others doing for him exactly what he was doing now, he might’ve come to a different end.
“I wish I could say it gets easier. It doesn’t.
It’s a pain you have to learn to live with. ”
“How?”
Harrison thought of what he’d been doing.
Of how he kept writing different versions of what happened, trying to exorcise it, trying to make everything come out different.
It hadn’t helped. Not really. Because what had happened was irrevocably a part of him.
So much so that a woman who’d been a total stranger had seen it, in his eyes, in the lines of his face, down to the marks on his soul.
She’d looked at him and seen hero material.
He didn’t feel like a hero, but Ivy made him want to try.
There was no going back to that mountain road and changing what happened.
He’d been telling his stories through his books, but he’d been telling them for himself.
He thought of the emails and wondered if that was the answer.
Instead of story as therapy for him, story as service for them.
He found himself wanting to do more. Wanting to tell stories for guys like Ty.
Those guys coming home, who needed to see the same shit happening to someone else, somebody they could relate to.
Somebody who could hear, “It wasn’t your fault.
There was nothing you could have done,” and then realize that was true.
He needed to show them his truth. Which meant he had to accept it himself.
“You have to accept the fact that awful shit happens with no rhyme or reason, and you weren’t to blame for those who died when you lived.”
“I don’t have the first clue how to do that.”
“Neither did I. It’s not an easy thing to let go of.
But on the bad days, the days it feels like that can’t be true, I remember what the wife of one of my men told me when I went to see her.
She said if we hadn’t stopped to try to help, if we hadn’t immediately tried to save the child we thought was in danger, then her husband wouldn’t have been the man she fell love with.
We had no way of knowing it was a set up, so we did the right thing based on the information we had. Period.”
“That helps?”
“Sometimes. In the end, you have to find a new mission.”
This was his.
Even as Harrison thought it, ideas bombarded his brain.
Maybe there were guys out there who needed to see Coop do more than just keep going.
Just like Harrison, he’d been surviving, not living.
If Harrison had taken nothing else away from his time with Ivy, it was that.
So maybe his readers needed to see Coop walk away, to choose life instead of death, instead of duty, to give themselves permission to do the same.
But what would that look like? How did people live far from the front, where death was less of a certainty?
People whose every day wasn’t shaped by the movements of troops or the acquisition of critical intelligence?
They’d lead far simpler lives, where their biggest concerns were having basic needs met.
And maybe, without the bitter mistress of duty, there’d be time for a woman.
What would it take to turn Coop’s head? What sort of woman could make him see that there was more to life in the Quadrant than war and encourage him to embrace it? A sharp-eyed, whip-smart beauty with silky brown hair and eyes like winter forests, perhaps.
Of course it came back to Ivy. It seemed almost all his thoughts lately came back to her.
She’d have a field day profiling Coop. The idea of it made him smile.
Maybe he’d ask her when she was done with her own book and had a chance to actually maybe read his stuff.
That was a terrifying thought. She was good.
Terrifyingly so. He was…well, far better than adequate, but he’d have been lying if it didn’t admit he was a little professionally intimidated by her.
Or maybe it was less fear of how she’d like his writing and more about what reading it would reveal about him.
Maybe they could discuss the whole thing over dinner. After he explained his disappearing act.
“What kind of mission?” Ty’s words interrupted his train of thought. “I’ve been in the Army since I was eighteen. I don’t know anything else.”
Harrison dragged his focus back to the conversation. He wouldn’t be able to shake loose to drive back to Eden’s Ridge for a while yet, but as soon as he got a minute, he’d try to get a message to her. “Why’d you go into the military in the first place?”
“I was a skinny ass kid. Bullied growing up. I wanted to become somebody who was in a position to protect others.”
In Harrison’s head, Coop traded in his proton rifle for a futuristic six-shooter and a badge.
“Have you ever considered a career in law enforcement?”