Chapter 17 #2
The silence. That’s what lives in me. Not the image of his body in the rubble. Not the blood, the dust, or the screaming that came after. The silence. The absence of his voice where it should have been.
“That’s what I hear when I stop moving.” The confession pulls itself from somewhere deep. “The silence on that radio. Jake not answering. Every time I’m still, every time I let the quiet in, that’s what fills it.”
She hasn’t moved her hand from my arm.
“The keys,” she says. Not a question.
“Yeah.” I almost laugh. Almost. “The keys are noise. As long as they’re spinning, as long as something is moving, I’m not in that silence. I’m not hearing him not answer.”
“And the flying. The death wish.”
“It’s not a death wish.” The words come out sharper than I intended. I soften them. “It’s not that I want to die. It’s that I don’t care if the next run kills me. Because maybe …” I trail off.
“Maybe that’s what you deserve for being ninety seconds too slow.” She says it without judgment. Without pity. Just truth, reflected back.
“Yeah.”
The highway stretches. The sun beats down. My eyes sting, and it’s not from the glare.
“I’ve never told anyone that.” My voice sounds strange in my own ears. “Not Ghost. Not the team. Not the shrinks the Army made me talk to. No one.”
“Why me?”
The question is simple. The answer isn’t.
“Because you broke for me.” I glance at her finally, just for a second. Her eyes are wet. “You trusted me with the worst of yourself. The least I can do is trust you with the worst of me.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. The desert rolls past. A hawk circles overhead, riding thermals bone-deep.
Then she speaks.
“You flew fifteen minutes in eleven.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not failure. That’s superhuman.”
“It wasn’t enough.”
“No.” Her voice is steady. Sure. “It wasn’t.
But the ninety seconds—that wasn’t yours to control.
The Taliban chose when to spring the trap.
Jake’s position when the structure collapsed.
The way the comms cut in and out. A thousand variables you couldn’t influence, and you still cut four minutes off an impossible flight. ”
“It doesn’t matter how fast I flew if he still died.”
“Doesn’t it?” She shifts, turning toward me more fully.
“You’ve been trying to outrun a moment that already happened.
Flying faster and faster, you can somehow go back and close that gap.
But you can’t. No one can. You could be the fastest pilot who ever lived, and you still couldn’t fly backward in time. ”
The words land like stones in still water. Ripples spreading.
“Then what do I do?” The question comes out raw. Broken. “How do I live with ninety seconds that I can never get back?”
She doesn’t answer right away. The road hums beneath us. The sun pours down.
Then her hand slides down my arm, finds my hand on the gear shift, and holds on.
“You stop running.” Her voice is quiet but certain. “You let yourself be still. And you let someone else be there in the silence with you.”
I stare at the road. The horizon. The endless stretch of desert that doesn’t care about our pain.
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“Neither do I.” Her fingers tighten around mine. “But maybe we can figure it out together.”
We drive.
Her hand stays in mine. I don’t let go.
The desert changes as the miles pass. Flat scrubland giving way to rocky outcroppings, distant mountains growing closer. The sun tracks across the sky, afternoon light turning gold.
The silence between us isn’t empty anymore.
It’s strange. I’ve spent seven years filling every quiet moment with noise—keys spinning, engines roaring, jokes deflecting. Anything to avoid the space where Jake’s voice should be and isn’t.
But right now, with her hand warm in mine and the road unwinding before us, the silence is just—silence. Full of her breathing. The engine’s hum. The whisper of wind through cracked windows.
Not a grave. Just a room. One she’s sitting in with me.
“For what it’s worth,” she says eventually, “he sounded like a good man.”
“He was.” The words come easier now. “He was the best of us.”
“And he would have wanted you to stop punishing yourself.”
“Probably.” A ghost of a smile. “He’d probably tell me to get my head out of my ass and fly the damn helicopter.”
“Sounds like solid advice.”
“Jake was full of solid advice. And terrible jokes. And an inexplicable love for country music that I never understood.”
“Country music?”
“The worst. Twangy, tragic, someone’s-dog-died-and-their-truck-broke-down-and-their-wife-left-them country music. He’d play it on every extraction flight. Said it helped him focus.”
She laughs. Actually laughs. The sound is startling, bright, and real.
“I’m sorry,” she says, still smiling. “I’m just picturing Delta Force operators inserting into hostile territory while listening to songs about dead dogs, pickup trucks, and ex-wives.”
“Welcome to my life.”
The smile stays on her face. Something eases in my chest at the sight of it.
“Thank you,” she says after a moment.
“For what?”
“For telling me. For trusting me with it.” She squeezes my hand. “I know that wasn’t easy.”
“No.” I glance at her. Back to the road. “But nothing worth doing ever is.”
The staging area comes into view around four o’clock.
Not the area itself—that’s still hidden somewhere in these hills, camouflaged and secured. But the landscape changes. Familiar rock formations that match the satellite images Halo showed us in Seattle. The turn-off leads to the secondary road, which in turn leads to the hidden approach.
We’re close.
“Almost there,” I say.
She nods. Her hand is still in mine. Neither of us has let go in hours.
The mission is waiting. The team. The canyon. The dam. Phoenix, downloading into Nevada servers, preparing to upload to the sky.
Seven-seven-three-alpha-delta-nine-nine-one-zero. Four-four-one-echo-bravo-seven-two-eight-five.
The codes that will burn it all down.
But for this moment, in this car, with her hand warm in mine and the worst of myself finally spoken aloud—
For this moment, I’m not running.
The silence isn’t the enemy anymore.
It’s just the space between heartbeats.
Hers.
Mine.
Ours.