Chapter Forty Eight
Hunter
The Fourth of July came in full force.
Cami planned a small cookout at her mom’s.
Hot dogs, sparklers in the driveway, nothing wild.
The night before, she texted to ask what kind of pie I liked, her messages scattered with emojis and that easy warmth she carried into every corner of her life.
She sent a picture of Zeke, tiny flag in hand, grinning as if he’d already claimed the whole day for himself.
I wanted to say yes. Hell, I wanted to be there more than anything.
But when the day came, I couldn’t do it.
I told her I wasn’t feeling well, blamed it on a rough night, and said I’d try to catch up on sleep.
The lie slipped out too easily, and that stung more than I wanted to admit.
Her reply came after a pause I could almost feel, a gentle hesitation that pressed through the screen. “It’s okay, maybe next time.”
She didn’t push, and that somehow cut deeper.
By dusk, the air outside had that heavy July heat that sticks to your skin.
I sat on my couch with the TV on low, trying to pretend the silence didn’t bother me.
I thought about calling her, just to hear her laugh or the kids running in the background, but the guilt hit before I could reach for the phone.
Then a single firework went off outside.
Pop.
Too sharp. Too close.
And just like that, my chest tightened, breath caught halfway.
A high-pitched ringing started in my ears, drowning out the world around me, growing louder with each heartbeat.
My vision narrowed, colors blurring as if I was looking through a warped lens.
My body moved before my brain caught up.
I dropped low, shoulder against the wall, muscles locked and ready for impact.
The sound cracked through me like a live wire.
Another pop. Then another.
The air thickened. The flash through the blinds hit the room in bursts of red and white, and suddenly, I wasn’t in my apartment anymore. The floor wasn’t carpet, it was dirt. The smell wasn’t barbecue, it was smoke, fuel, sweat.
My hand twitched toward a weapon that wasn’t there.
The old training kicked in fast—scan, cover, assess—but there was no threat, no orders, no team at my back. Just me. Alone. In a living room that didn’t feel safe anymore.
I tried to breathe through it.
Four in. Six out.
But the noise outside wouldn’t stop. Each one felt like it dug deeper, pulling pieces of the past I’d buried under miles of silence.
The convoy ambush.
The flash before the dust.
The sound of someone yelling for a medic, only to not hear an answer.
My throat burned. I could almost taste the metallic tang of the blood and the way your mouth goes dry when the adrenaline finally runs out.
People think PTSD is just fear. It’s not.
It’s memory. It’s your body remembering faster than your mind can forget, like a smoke alarm that blares for burnt toast as if the house were on fire.
Just a hint of smoke triggers the siren, regardless of how real the threat is, and your body is trapped in that same loop, responding to echoes of danger long after the fire is out.
Another explosion—louder this time. My hands shook. My heartbeat felt like gunfire under my skin.
I hated that I couldn’t control it. Hated that some cheap fireworks could pull me apart.
Then my phone buzzed.
A picture from Cami.
Zeke was holding a sparkler, grinning ear to ear. The twins were beside him, sticky with Popsicle stains, and she was smiling— she was smiling, that tired, beautiful smile that always made me feel like maybe I could stop running.
Camille: Wish you were here.
And it wrecked me.
Because I did wish I was there. I wanted to be in that driveway, laughing with them, holding her hand, not sitting in a dark apartment fighting ghosts that never learned to stay dead.
The fireworks didn’t stop.
Pop!
Every echo rolled through me like aftershocks, too sharp, too close. The walls of my apartment felt smaller by the minute. Outside, I could hear a neighbor’s carefree laughter, a reminder of celebrations that only deepened my sense of isolation. I needed noise, something I could control.
I grabbed my phone and opened the first playlist that came up. The speakers kicked in, bass rumbling through the floor, so loud it almost drowned out the sounds in my head. Almost.
It was country at first, something easy, but it wasn’t cutting it.
Too close to home. Too full of words that felt like things I’d lost. I switched it to rock, volume up until it rattled the windows.
The guitar hit like a wall of sound, drowning out the phantom explosions outside, replacing one kind of chaos with another.
For a minute, it worked.
The vibration under my feet, heavy drums, voices rough and wordless, all of it kept me anchored in the present. Loud meant safe. Loud meant now.
I stripped my shirt off and walked straight to the shower, not caring that the lights were still off. The water came on hard and cold at first, then scalding, filling the room with steam that burned the air from my lungs. I braced both hands against the tile, head bowed under the spray.
It was the only thing that helped drown out the weight of it. The sound. The simplicity.
No sand. No smoke. No ghosts. Just the steady rhythm of water against skin, trying to wash away everything the night had brought back.
I stayed there until my fingers wrinkled and my head felt hollow, until the heat had faded to lukewarm and I couldn’t tell if I was shaking from the cold or from everything else.
When I finally turned the water off, the thoughts quickly returned.
The music was still blaring from the other room, but it sounded far away, muffled by the steam and the fog in my head. I dried off, walked barefoot across the floor, and grabbed my phone to shut it off.
That’s when I saw her text.
Camille: Hope you’re feeling better. The kids
and I missed you tonight.
My throat tightened.
Even in a few words, she managed to bring a warmth to my world. Like light after dark.
I stared at the message for a long time, thumb hovering over the keyboard. The words lined up in my head, the truth right there: I wanted to be there. I’m sorry I lied. I’m trying.
But I couldn’t type any of it. Not tonight.
Instead, I set the phone face down and sat on the edge of the bed, the music still humming low in the background.
My chest was heavy, my muscles buzzing with leftover adrenaline that had nowhere to go. The apartment felt too still again, too neat. Everything in its place except me.
I leaned forward, elbows on my knees, and just stared at the floor. The carpet blurred. The sound dulled. My head finally started to empty.
And that’s when the switch flipped.
It’s not something you notice happening.
One moment you’re wound tight, ready to jump at every sound, and the next…
nothing. There’s a quiet so deep it hums. Your body shuts down before your brain can argue, limbs weighted with wet sand, too heavy to lift, as if anchored to the earth.
The shift is sudden and complete, leaving nothing but a hollow echo where tension used to reside.
So I let it.
I lay back on the bed, still half-damp, still in the same clothes I’d pulled on after the shower. The pillow was cold as I pressed it to my head, attempting to drown out the distant noise outside.
My heartbeat raced until even that faded into background noise.
The world didn’t stop. It just dimmed, edges softening until everything felt far away.
And somewhere between the echo of fireworks and the hum of silence, I fell asleep.
When I woke, morning light cut across the floor in sharp stripes. My mouth was dry, head was pounding. The music must have stopped hours ago, since my phone now lay dead beside me.
But the weight hadn’t gone anywhere. It sat low in me, dull and familiar, the kind of ache you don’t walk off. Guilt. Shame. Both heavy as armor, I couldn’t take off.
I’d lied to her. Lied about being fine. Lied about needing rest when the truth was worse. I couldn’t even show up for fireworks and sparklers in a driveway. Couldn’t stand the noise long enough to see the way her kids’ faces lit up.
And that thought, that I’d failed her before it even mattered, cut deeper than I wanted to admit. If I couldn’t handle that, how was I supposed to show up when things actually got hard? When they needed me?
I plugged my phone in and watched the screen flicker back to life. A missed FaceTime call from Camille and one text waited.
Camille: Zeke saved you a sparkler.
Something so small, so kind, and I didn’t deserve any of it. She had no idea what last night had been for me. The panic. The noise. The part of me I’d thought I’d buried years ago was clawing its way back up.
She still saw me as the steady one. The safe one.
And maybe that’s what hurt most, because I wanted to be. For her. For them.
But I wasn’t there yet. Not even close.
Wanting to be enough didn’t mean I was. And until I figured out how to quiet the war still living under my skin, distance felt like the only way to keep her safe—from me, from this, from everything I still hadn’t learned how to fight.