Chapter 27
TWENTY-SEVEN
Chloe
I stumble down the stairs, tears burning my eyes. I know Jack said to fight for Miles, to make him talk to me and tell me what he’s battling against, but I won’t force him to let me in. He has to want it. Want us.
It takes all of two minutes to drive the four blocks home, and when I get there, I almost wish that Jake were here instead of with my parents. With the house empty, my heart bruised and battered, I feel more exposed inside than I do blanketed by the warm night air.
I pad through the kitchen and push out the back door, Bronson trailing after me. The soft glow of little landscape lights acts as a beacon, drawing me to the garden. I settle on the bench that a husband made by hand for his wife. The one that Miles took my child to get for me for Mother’s Day.
Bronson checks the yard and then comes back and curls up at my feet, and my toes automatically rub against his belly. As soothing as it is for him, it’s just as much of a balm to me.
We’ll be okay.
As the wind picks up, promising a coming storm, I allow myself to cry, cycling through the stages of grief. I don’t really even know if those apply to this mess. I’m sure, if I felt like digging in and doing the work that my therapist encouraged years ago as I processed the loss of Dallas, I’d find that they do, that I can make my feelings fit into a box and file them away. But I don’t want to.
Instead, I let the tears flow, unchecked, down my face.
And tomorrow, I’ll figure out if I want to wallow in this messy place or pick myself up and get shit done.
Bronson lifts his head, staring into the silence. He doesn’t growl, just focuses squarely on the side of the house, where the gate is.
Miles emerges from the darkness and soundlessly makes his way across the yard. Hands shoved deep in the pockets of his shorts, his head hanging, chin practically resting on his chest.
He clears his throat and blows out a deep breath. I can almost hear him counting the hold before he inhales slowly.
“My daughter was barely a month old when my wife killed her.”
Air rushes from my lungs in a searing whoosh.
“I found them. Walked in the door and found Aly clutching a knife by the blade, blood running down her hand and dripping from the bottom of the bassinet. She’d be two now. Walking, talking, all of that, but she’s gone, never got the chance.”
He shifts his weight and continues, “Aly didn’t do well with the pregnancy. She, uh… she suffered with depression. A lot. But the doctors were there. They were on top of things, checking in, monitoring her. No one saw her break coming. They had no idea that she was hiding not just postpartum depression, but also a full PPD psychosis.”
My hands fly to my cheeks, finally pushing away the tears I shed for my broken heart, only to make room for fresh ones for Miles’s loss.
“My team was gearing up, doing mission prep, and I… I was gone a lot. Working long hours, focused on the upcoming mission.” His shrug is a barely there movement, more of a shift than an actual lift of his shoulder. “I got scrubbed from the mission and placed on watch. Buried my daughter. Saw a therapist and tried to figure out how to live. It was a lot—honestly too much. I fought myself with feelings of failure. In my job, as a father, a husband. I was a mess for a while.
“I finally figured out that I had to do something, so I took as much leave as I could and decided to separate from the navy. Thank God, Calvin—the guy who started Fire Born Security—hired me. I don’t know if it was pity or what, but as much as I’d like to think I was getting my shit together at that point…” The grimace that twists his face finishes the thought better than words.
Miles sucks in a lungful of air and then blows it out his nose, preparing for whatever he has to say next. “I’m not proud of it because I knew she was sick, but the first thing I did was divorce my wife. The DA took that, ran with it at trial, and pushed for the harshest penalty for Aly. There was a lot of guilt with that.” He shifts his weight, maybe swaying a little, his head hanging low. Shame and guilt draped over him.
“Miles, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say. Is… is that why you went to California? Not for work, but to see…” I don’t know how to address her. Aly? His wife? The woman who took what he’d obviously held very dear?
He lifts his head and briefly meets my eyes before tilting it up to the sky, a quick flash of lightning illuminating his strong profile. “Yeah. While the DA was pushing for a sentence of life in prison, I worked closely with her doctors, family, her legal team to have her placed in a long-term facility. What she’d done was awful, beyond my worst nightmare, but she was sick. Prison wouldn’t give her the kind of mental health care she needed, so I did everything in my power to help her get just that.”
Thunder rumbles in the distance.
“Did it not… Your message when you were leaving Cali sounded like whatever you were there for was a success. Did I read that wrong? I mean, obviously, I thought it was work stuff, but I thought?—”
“No,” he says, gently cutting me off. “You’re right. It was all good. When I left California, she was being transported to her new facility, but by the time I landed here, she’d taken her own life.”
I can’t help the gasp that shoots from my lungs, the sound of it loud in the still night.
“Yeah, I know. I did everything I could to make things right. To make sure that another life wasn’t lost to Aly’s illness. It baffled the prosecutors on her case. I lobbied for her, not against. Begged for her to get help, not just be locked away. And I failed. Again.”
“Miles, you didn’t fail?—”
He hums in disagreement maybe. “But I did. I feel like I did, even more so now that she’s gone. You know, I worked through all the stages of grief. I took a lot of my initial anger out on Maggie and?—”
“Your truck?”
He laughs, quick and with more resignation than humor. “Yep. I poured myself into restoring her, finding and fixing every little thing, stripping her down and building her up. And at the same time, I put myself back together. I know it sounds stupid, but working on that truck saved me. And when she was done and Calvin saw me struggling again, he suggested taking a position here, starting over fresh.” He gives me a tight smile.
We both came here to start over. To move on from losses so big, so life changing. Two tattered hearts seeking salvation.
“And I did. I found happiness I hadn’t thought I’d find again. A job that’s, God, the next best thing to what I was doing as a SEAL. Still fulfilling but without the deployments, without the part that I blamed for missing Aly’s spiral. And when things felt good, really good, you fell into my arms. You and Jake”—he glances around my little yard—“all of this, gave me the pieces I had been missing. A family. It was all perfect, almost too good to be true. So, when Ryan—Aly’s lawyer—called to tell me she was gone, that she’d taken her life…”
Warm drops of rain fall, landing on the top of my head like tender kisses. Wet dots bloom on the bench, raindrops getting fatter and falling harder as each second ticks by.
“Come inside,” I say, rising to my feet. I grasp Miles’s hand, guiding him toward the house.
“I should go.” He tugs on his hand, but there’s no way I’m going to let him go. Not now, not after all that he told me.
I lead him into the kitchen, and as if it were waiting for us, the sky opens up as the door shuts behind us. In the bright glow of the overhead light, Miles looks even worse than he did at his apartment. Eyes bloodshot, hair and beard wild. His clothes rumpled, splotches of rain darkening his t-shirt.
“Go sit down,” I tell him, waving a hand to quiet him when he starts to protest.
I grab a glass of water and ease down on the couch, Miles parked in the center, elbows resting on his strong thighs.
“Drink this and then finish what you were going to say. The lawyer called you,” I prompt, handing him the glass.
Miles quickly drains it, setting it on the table when he’s done. “Yeah, all the ways I failed Aly and the baby hit me like a punch to the gut. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. It was like a warning to let you and Jake go before I failed you more than I already had.” Exhaustion dragging him down, Miles slumps back into the downy cushions.
“How do you think you failed us, Miles?”
He tenses briefly. “The bench, the robbery. I put Jake in danger, and you could have lost him. It would’ve been my fault; I’d have taken him from you. I know what that feels like, Chloe. I’d rather bear the pain of losing you both, knowing you were safe without me, than to have you suffer that loss. But turns out”—he turns his head, so his hazy brown gaze is directed right at me—“I don’t think I can live without you guys. I love you so goddamn much, it hurts. I’m tired of pain. So fucking tired of it.”
I reach out, placing my palm on his cheek, my thumb stroking his whiskers away from his lips.
“I love you,” Miles repeats, his lips moving against my thumb. “I don’t want to lose you.”
I press my lips to his temple and pull his body toward me, settling his torso between my thighs and his head against my stomach. Almost immediately, Miles’s breathing evens out, his face going slack with sleep. I trace his dark, heavy brows before trailing my fingers across his cheekbones and down his nose.
Did his daughter look like him? Did her mouth purse in sleep with the perfect cupid-bow lips, like his? Or did he see his wife—ex-wife—every time he looked at her? How did he get up each morning and get through his day, not showing any of that pain to the world?
The press of his weight, his warmth, the soft and even puff of breath at each exhale act together, relaxing me. The drumming beat of the rain pelting against the window finally pulls me under, exhaustion consuming me.