by Reiss, CD
Caden with Greyson.
The complete puzzle came together, and clarity matched with reality.
Which is to say, I knew I was going to die sane.
Chapter Twenty-Three
CADEN
SAN DIEGO
OCTOBER, 2005
I hadn’t thought I’d ever get married. I didn’t love bachelorhood or despise the institution of marriage. It wasn’t a position I’d staked out and defended. It was simpler than that. I’d long ago accepted the fact that I was emotionally unqualified for the job of husband.
Then she’d come, and it didn’t matter.
Nothing else mattered. Not my rented tux or the wedding gown she’d plucked off the rack like a pair of jeans. Not Doug, the photographer who worked for the local paper. Not the brown sludge seeping into the hem of her dress or the grit between my toes.
What mattered was the sun setting behind her, the way her laughter rose above the bang and gurgle of the crashing waves, the wind pulling her veil behind her toward the infinite ocean.
She was connected to the sun, the sea, the wind, and the sand, and I was connected to her.
I’d never thought I’d get married, but how could I have known a woman like her existed?
“Stop kissing for one minute, guys!” the photographer cried. “I can’t see your faces.”
I opened my eyes. She had sand in her lashes.
“We should let the man do his job,” I said.
“If we wanted posed pictures, we would have hired that other lady.”
I turned to Doug and smiled, keeping her close. Behind him, her parents watched. Dad held Mom’s shoes. Jake and Colin were to the right, still arguing about politics as a cover for deep personality differences. Cousins, uncles, aunts, none mine before this day, played in the sand or wrinkled their noses at their sullied finery.
I heard the hiss of the foaming wave before I felt the cold rush on my feet, and as Greyson squealed, I sank an inch into wet sand and laughed. Doug click-clicked, and we ignored him.
“I just lost the deposit on this tux.”
She picked up the skirt of her dress. “It’s ruined,” she laughed. “I guess I can’t wear it again.”
I swept her in my arms and spun her. “I’ll shred it later just to make sure.”
“Oh no!” she cried when I put her down. “Look!”
Five feet away, a sand castle was getting waterlogged.
“Let’s move out,” Dad called. “The caterer’s going to start in half an hour.”
“We have thirty minutes to save it!” Veil dragging, she ran to the castle. “Mom!” She tossed her mother her shoes.
“Twenty minutes,” I said. “Ten minutes to drive back.”
She got on her knees and patted the base of the castle. “Help me!”
“You can’t be serious?”
Looking up at me with a streak of sand on her left cheek and the last bits of the sun catching the hairs flying out of her up-do, she caught me in the web of her higher expectations.
I got on my knees across from her, the castle between us.
“Just this one thing.” She pointed at a tower that had survived the wave. It had been made by a careful child, with evenly cut turrets and a window with sticks for bars.
“Hurry.” I got my hands under it, and she did the same.
A wave smashed and foamed, ripping toward us as we carefully lifted the tower without a second to spare.
“Slowly,” I said. “Careful.”
“Okay. We got it.”
Doug took his pictures. Jake and Colin stopped arguing. The kids watched with wide eyes. Everyone held their breath, rooting for us to move the tower to safety.
We stepped over the newly wet sand, balancing the piece of the castle. With every step, the tower cracked and split, and as we stepped out of the tidal zone, it collapsed in our hands.
A collective aww went up.
“We tried,” I said, slapping the sand off my hands.
She looped her arm through mine. “We did.”
When I kissed her, she tasted like sea foam, so I kissed her again and again on the way back to the house.
We tried.
We did.
Epilogue
caden
Death changes you even when you don’t die.
I’d recognized the Blackthorne building as soon as we got to the roof, and I saw the yellow-and-blue striped airbag below. I had a second to decide if the opportunity to have Greyson push me off a building would occur. I didn’t have time to ask if the bag was inflated or if it was safe. I didn’t have time to train in the proper way to fall.
If I’d had a second more to think about it, I wouldn’t have put her at risk.
Maybe I just did impulsive things when she was about to get on a helicopter with Ronin. Maybe I’d never know, and maybe it would never matter.
The bag had been inflated, and we fell side by side. Not quite safely, but not quite dead either.
“Baby!” I wrestled the inflated bag to turn to her.
“Caden!”
Anything could be wrong. I hadn’t seen the angle of her fall, and it took very little to paralyze a person from that height.
“Can you feel your hands and feet?”
“Yes.” The sound of her voice was a song, and her expression was sharp and aware. “Are you—?”
“I’m fine.”
I rolled on top of her, pushed by the movement of the air in the bag. Four hands clasped between our chests.
“We’re fine,” I said.
“We’re fine.”
I was promptly arrested.
* * *
Death changes you even when you don’t die.
I was court-martialed, demoted, and had my bonus taken. It wasn’t fun. I stated my case, expressed regret, took responsibility, but also made it clear that I would always do what I had to do to save my wife. Greyson was a character witness, as were her father and Jake, whose survival after capture was a miracle. Ronin testified with eyes averted from my wife’s face.
What kept me going through the shame of it all was Greyson. She was whole. We’d recreated her pivotal moment, and she’d taken control of it the way I’d taken control of my own.
That was the only cure so far.
By the time I was a free man, Blackthorne had quietly ended the BiCam study. They’d shuttered the medical study division, wiping it from their website as if it had never existed. Ronin went into the Saudi facility. I hoped they found a simpler cure, but knew they’d never tell me.
In the end, I was treated fairly. I negotiated staying in the army even after I could have been discharged. Greyson didn’t admit to wanting to keep her connection to the military, but I knew she did. Once she told me she was pregnant, I knew I had to stay.
* * *
Death changes you even when you don’t die.
I surfed. A few months to forty-two years old, army captain, New York City born and raised, I’d taken up surfing at five in the morning before I had to report at the Presidio.
Monterey was on the wrong side of dawn. The sky over the water didn’t change from dark to light as much as it went from navy to cadet, and when the ocean swelled, it looked like a black plastic bag being shaken out.
The surfer rides between the shore and a force that threatens to throw him against it. The push is stronger than any one man, and riding it means using it, respecting it, knowing it can pick you up and slam you against the earth if you’re not careful.
Which it did. A lot.
I spun in the brine, tucking my body into itself as I was rolled against the sand and spit up onto the beach with grit between the edges of my suit and my skin.
Shaking out my hair, I located my board and tucked it under my arm. My watch said I had time for another shot at it and—
“Caden!”
Sun rising behind her, Greyson was pulled forward by our son. He was named Hank, but we called him Yank because he pulled us in all directions as hard as his e
ighteen-month-old body could. I stuck the board in the sand and held my arms out for the baby. The fat, brown curls he got from my side of the family had been bleached blond by the sun, and the dark eyes he got from my wife were big with delight when I picked him up.
“You’re up,” I said facetiously.
Of course she was up. Hank didn’t actually sleep. It was unusual for her to drive to the beach before seven in the morning. I kissed her, but her lips were tight.
I turned to Hank. “What’s Mommy mad about?”
He reached over my shoulder to the bright-yellow board. I put him down.
“I’m not mad,” she said.
“Boo!” Hank peered around the board and popped back behind it.
Distracted, I chased him around the yellow barrier. “I’m going to get you!”
Crouching, chasing him in circles as he squealed, I was low enough to see what Greyson had in her hand. A white letter-sized envelope.
Snatching up Hank, I laid him over my shoulder and blew noisy air onto his belly, then I turned him upside down while he laughed and brushed the sand with his fingertips.
“What do you have there, baby?”
She held up the envelope. The front had the US Army seal. “Are you deploying?”
Since I was normal active duty, I would have known weeks ago if I was being sent overseas. Greyson knew that, but once burned, she assumed everything was fire.
Gently, I lowered Hank onto the beach. “No. It’s not that.”
“What is it then? Why didn’t you open it?”
“Because.” I snapped away the envelope. “I know what it is, so there’s no point.” I jammed my finger under the flap’s corner and yanked, making a mess of the tear. “And you’ve been with patients, or I’ve been on shift. We’re busy.” I blew into the split to open it. “I was waiting for the right time.”
Hank was pulling at my legs to get up.
I held the envelope out to him. “Pull that out.”
I had to get it removed halfway before he could get the paper loose. I handed it to Greyson still folded. She took it suspiciously, as if I’d lie about being deployed.
No. She trusted me. She still thought the army could lie, and I didn’t blame her.
“Open it,” I chided, picking up Hank again.
She swung her head to let the wind keep the hair out of her face and unfolded the page, glancing at me as if to ask if I had anything else to say before I was proven wrong.
“Mommy is a suspicious lady.”
Hank made a farting noise with his lips.
Greyson read the letter, every word of it, a satisfied smile growing across her face. “Major St. John. Congratulations.”
“I’m off square one.”
Her hands dropped, wrinkling the letter. “God, when can I stop worrying about this?”
I reached for her and pulled her close. Hank transferred his weight from me to her. “This is our life, baby. Is it that bad?”
“No. It’s perfect.”
I kissed Hank’s cheek, then her lips. They yielded this time, and I tasted her mouth until Hank jammed his fingers between us, laughing.
“Hanky,” I said, “are you ready for your little sister?”
“Yes!” He pointed at his mother’s belly, which was just starting to show.
“All right.” I gave him to Greyson and picked up my board. “So am I.”
“So am I,” Greyson said when I took her hand.
Hank wiggled to the ground and pulled us away from the ocean to the car, our home, our life together with its ups, its downs, its surprises and routines.
I helped Greyson onto the curb even though she didn’t need it and kissed her until our son pulled her away. I watched her stuttering walk to her car as she tried to keep up with a child who wanted to see everything every minute and wanted to take us along for the ride.
She glanced back at me, smiling, and waved me forward. “Keep up, Major!”
I hitched my board under my arm and chased my family home.
Was our life perfect?
Yes.
Yes, it was.
Epilogue
Greyson
How many possible futures did I have?
When we walked away from that air bag, I knew I was starting a possible future so unlikely that I needed to appreciate every minute of it.
When I found that envelope, I thought I was coming to another pivot point. A fork in the road where choices had to be made, because I’d promised myself that if he deployed to someplace safe, we were going with him. Hank would learn Japanese or German. A wife could chase a husband into death, but a mother did not follow where logic and common sense wouldn’t go.
“You really dodged a bullet there,” I said from the passenger seat. The front of the yellow surfboard stuck out from the roof like a giant duck’s bill in the windshield.
“How’s that?”
With the windows open, the cool morning air whipped his hair every which way. I’d married a man who was rigid and yoked by darkness, but my husband now had a burden-free spirit.
“I was going to take Hank wherever they sent you.” I didn’t mention that I’d drawn a line between our children and war. He knew.
He laughed and put his hand in my lap, twining it with mine. “Don’t ever change, Grey. Never.”
“Don’t ever leave me. Ever.”
Hank made little boy sounds in the back, holding a toy helicopter against the window so the sky would be a backdrop.
“I got an email from Ronin,” I said.
“Which Ronin?”
“That’s the news. There’s only one. They used the visualization procedure.”
“Yours?” He stopped at a light and turned toward me, brows raised. Big smile. God, the man was beautiful when he was happy. “The one you developed?”
“Yup.”
He slammed the car into park and put his arms around me. His kiss was insistent and jubilant, made through a smile. He pulled away. “I’m proud of you.”
“I’m pretty proud of myself.”
His eyes left mine for a second and he pushed the neckline of my shirt aside, exposing the mark he’d left on me the night before. It was sore to the touch. He was still good at hurting me just enough.
“You’d better have a doctor look at that,” he said.
“Good idea.”
“G’een, g’een!” Hank shouted, kicking my seat.
A horn honked behind us.
“Let’s go!” Caden said, looking at Hank in the rearview as he crossed the intersection.
“Let go!” his son repeated.
“Onward!” I joined in.
“O’wad!”
“Onward,” Caden said, taking my hand as he turned onto our block.
Forward we went.
Always forward, with nothing but the earth beneath us, the blue sky above us, and the horizon line before us.
THE END
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Acknowledgments
Thank you, thank you, thank you for joining me on this journey. This series was for you but also for my own soul. It’s not often that the id of a writer and the needs of readers are the same, so I cherish this series for that. My
goal was to deconstruct a marriage, piece by piece, examine it, and put it back together. It’s because of you, my faithful readers, that I was allowed this conceit.
Throughout the writing of this series, Sarah Ferguson and her husband answered stupid questions about the military in sixty seconds or less. Rebecca Yarros was great help for Cutting Edge as I set up life in Fallujah. I learned so much I can barely fit it all in my head. These women make their husbands’ sacrifices possible. They serve our country as bravely as the men they love, and they are not to be underestimated.
Sarah is also on my PR team, and it’s because of her and Jenn Watson that I was allowed time to write. Yes, this thing was a month late, but they held down the fort while I struggled to make this series what I needed it to be.
Fort-holding-down credit also goes to Jean, Serena, and Michelle for their help with my Facebook group. Cameron makes the gorgeous graphics on Instagram and profile pictures. Ashley makes my emails so effing pretty. Anthony keeps the money where it belongs and is amazingly good at being the soothing voice that cuts through the panic. Thank God for all of them.
Chanpreet Singh used her medical training to help figure out what happened in that closet in Fallujah. A lady from my fan group helped me find the right Kurdish phrase for “I’m pregnant.” I’ve searched my Facebook inbox and cannot find her name. If you’re there, wonderful lady, message me again so I can place your name here.
Cassie was a goddess and editor of grace, as always. Her staff, especially superbrain Devon B, proofed the series, and can I tell you something? Devon puts the CMoS numbers in the comments. Super sexy.
Lauren Blakely and Laurelin Paige mentor the hell out of me. I can’t even begin to list how many times and ways they extract my head from my ass.
I tried to calculate how long Caden’s parents were in the air as they fell. With the help of the internet, it should have been a snap. It wasn’t. I finally broke down and asked Penny Reid if she knew anyone who could help me calculate it, and she came back with a number in less time than it took to fall from the 101st floor of the World Trade Center circa 2001.