Chapter 8 #2
I sit with it a second. Then, because she’s opened a door and I’ve always been curious…
“Can I ask you something? Your dad. He was Special Forces, about as close to a SEAL as you can get without the trident, right?”
“Close enough that he’d argue the differences for two hours straight. What is it with soldiers and sailors? Always with their pissing contest.”
“Not a contest. Sailors are superior. But anyway, after your mom died…I remember you told me he sort of let that part of his life go. But you didn’t tell me why. Why didn’t he remarry? Why not try again? Wasn’t he lonely?”
Eden drops her head, and for a second I’m sure I’ve overstepped and gone somewhere I had no right to go.
“Sorry,” I say quickly. “I know it’s hard, thinking about your dad—”
“Callen.” She looks up, and she’s not sad.
She’s smiling at a small private thing she chooses not to share.
“I was lost in a happy memory just now. Not a sad one.” She lets that settle.
“That’s how grief works, when you let yourself go all the way through it instead of around.
I remember the good parts. I’m sad we won’t make more of them.
But I get to keep the ones we made, and that’s…
everything. That’s how you survive the hurt. Small, happy moments.”
I don’t say anything. I can’t. She’s just described, in about four sentences, the thing I’ve been failing to do with five dead men for ten years.
“But the real answer to your question,” she goes on, “is that my dad didn’t remarry because he had me.
Whatever hole my mom left, I guess I was enough to fill it.
He decided that, and he never regretted it.
He was the most devoted father you can imagine.
” She says it proudly, and I know it isn’t just praise, it’s the entire structure of who she grew up to be.
I swallow down the emotion, because a daughter praising her dead dad with that look of admiration on her face grabs a hold of my lungs and squeezes tight. When I can finally talk again, I say, “So, you’re recommending I have a kid.”
Eden laughs, the tension breaking clean. “Maybe start smaller. A cat, perhaps.”
“A cat.”
“Baby steps, Callen.”
“I actually did meet someone. Recently.” There was no conscious point in this conversation where I decided to say it. It just comes out, like my heart had been begging for an opportunity to confess.
“How recently?” Eden sucks in her lips and flutters her eyelashes—trying her damndest to remain cool.
“Very recently.” I take a sip of my piping-hot coffee, still scorching even with the cold Baileys cream.
“What’s she like?” Eden asks calmly, although she looks like she’s about to burst.
“Not a cat. But the claws are comparable.” I almost smile. “She’s too young for me, though.”
That’s when Cricket walks past my open door and stops. Backpedals. She’s suddenly in the doorway with a mug cradled in both hands and an expression I’ve learned to fear, because it means she heard exactly enough.
Her blonde hair’s stick-straight today, spilling over the shoulders of a black leather dress, knee-high boots to match.
Next to Eden’s yellow florals she looks like a shadow to a sunbeam—night and day, and yet these two have somehow grown closer than sisters.
God knows how. God knows why they got along so quickly.
But they did, and now they hunt as a set, and I am currently the prey.
Uninvited, Cricket drops into the second chair next to Eden, teasing smile already fully deployed.
“Who is too young for you?” Cricket asks in her way-too-obvious Irish accent that she denies is there.
“Christ.” I exhale at the ceiling. “How long have you been listening outside the door?”
“Don’t worry about it. Tea time.” Cricket sips from her mug, delighted. “Spill. Who are you dating?”
“I’m not dating her. She’s a little young. And not to mention, way too intense for me—”
“How young are we talking, perv?” Cricket narrows her eyes over the rim of the mug. “Give me a number before I decide how to feel about you.”
“Twenty-six.”
“Oh, psshh.” She waves a hand, instantly bored of her own suspicion.
“That’s fair game. I thought you meant fresh out of pigtails.
Twenty-six is a fully developed frontal lobe.
She can rent a car at a reasonable rate.
” She swivels toward her friend for approval, because Eden’s read on reality is the only one anybody actually trusts.
Eden nods, judicious. “Definitely fair game.”
“See?” Cricket says. “Vetted.”
“And,” Eden adds, turning back to me with a slow smile, “you must like her a lot, if you’re inventing all these little reasons not to.”
“I like her,” I admit. “But this…” I gesture around at the concrete walls of my office as if it sums up my entire life. “PALADIN takes up everything. I don’t think she’d fit in.”
Although maybe I’m wrong. Outside of Eden, I suspect Sylvie is just as unhinged as the rest of my comrades.
“What’s her name?” Eden asks.
“No.” I point a finger at each of them in turn. “Absolutely not. Too early for names. I know exactly how you two operate and I’m not letting anyone get attached to a woman I’ve known for five minutes.”