Back to You

by Jessica Scott

  “And you’re going to be on a plane in three hours. Pack your shit.” Marshall turned to stalk off, mumbling about pain in the ass captains and not having enough time for this shit.

  Iaconelli blew a smoke ring into the darkness. “God but he is such a charmer.”

  Trent sat there long after Story and Iaconelli went back into the ops tent.

  He wanted to go home. But now that it was happening, fear slithered down his spine.

  It had started slow. One day he’d wake up, dreaming about Laura. Other times, he’d be in the mess tent and he’d think he heard her laugh. He’d hear a kid giggling on the TV and he’d look up, expecting to see Ethan or Emma.

  Always, though, he was alone. He’d wanted it that way for so long. He’d wanted quiet when they’d been running around his feet, shrieking and bickering like kids did. He’d craved silence at the end of the day when someone would get out of bed for a glass of water.

  He’d certainly gotten the silence and the solitude.

  And the oppressive emptiness of it all ate away at him. He’d thrown himself into work here in the California desert. He’d pulled eighteen hour days gladly. The longer he spent away from the war, the less he felt its siren call, luring him back. And somehow, work wasn’t enough anymore. Nothing he did pushed away the aching need to get to the one place he simply didn’t belong: home.

  He was back in the States but he couldn’t go home. Not with an investigation hanging over his head and the potential for a very long jail sentence standing in front of him. And the worst part about the entire court-martial was that his brigade commander was changing command soon. If Colonel Richter left before the case was resolved, Trent would be at the mercy of the new commander—a new man with no loyalty to the soldiers he’d put in leadership positions.

  It was not a comfortable place to be. The power plays between the senior officers never ended well for junior officers, and Trent? Trent was caught right now. He had to trust that Colonel Richter would take care of this before he left.

  But a year after Trent had been sent home, Trent was running low on trust and patience.

  Patience had never been his strong suit. Every other time he’d been home, he’d been prepping to go back to war. This time, the year had stretched in front of him like an unending slog.

  It was the longest time he’d spent in the States since he’d gotten shot. It had taken him almost that long to realize just how badly he’d fucked up everything in his life that was supposed to be important.

  His marriage. His kids. His family.

  If there was a grade lower than an F at being a husband or a dad, he’d earned it. He’d come home from Iraq nearly a year ago—pending a court-martial and a divorce. And since then, nothing had happened. The case had been stuck in investigation mode forever. And the divorce? He just wasn’t able to sign the papers. His life had been frozen in carbonite on all counts.

  The investigation had moved slower than molasses in winter. And he was glad.

  Because standing out here in the California desert, he’d come to a conclusion. He wanted his family back. He wanted his wife back. When she’d slapped him with divorce papers last year, he’d refused to sign them, hoping that the investigation would go away and that he could fix things with her. But that hope had proved futile. The distance between them was too much. The warmth he remembered was gone, but still, he’d been unable to let her go. He couldn’t. Sure, they spoke on the phone or when he saw her at the office, but they were a few stolen minutes here, a quick chat about the kids. There was nothing there to give him hope that he could fix things with her.

  He’d volunteered to train soldiers anywhere he could so that he didn’t have to face the cold emptiness of the reality that he was no longer welcome in his own home. And if he volunteered, someone else wouldn’t have to.

  Now? Now he sat in the middle of the California desert and thought about the new dad who wouldn’t be there for the birth of his child. He looked down at his wedding ring and thought of all the time he’d willingly given up.

  He was a goddamned fool. He wanted her back. Damn it, he wanted his life back. The life with this woman who had once smiled and laughed with him and wrapped herself around him while she slept. Who was as beautiful changing Emma’s diaper as she was dressed up in an evening gown for the Cav ball. This woman who used to ask about his day when he called home at two in the morning, even after she’d been up half the night with one of the kids.

  He sobered, his hands trembling at the thought of his children and the tiny family that had grown while he’d been away. The tiny family that overwhelmed him and terrified him and dropped him to his knees with a need so strong, it crushed his lungs until he could not breathe. He didn’t know how to feel good, but he knew he’d never figure it out without them.

  He had no clue where to start. He had no idea how to be a father to his kids. Or a husband to a wife who could barely look at him.

  Trent hopped off the top of the truck. He had a phone call to make.

  Because it looked like he was getting exactly what he wanted.

  And it was time to figure out how to be the man his family needed him to be.

  * * *

  Fort Hood

  “Son of a bi-iscuit!”

  “Bad Mommy!”

  Laura Davila wrapped her scraped and bleeding knuckles in a paper towel and prayed to the patron saint of army wives for patience. Her six-year-old dishwasher was currently spread in carefully laid out pieces across the kitchen floor and counters. And now the cavernous white interior was splattered with her blood. Awesome.

  Her son Ethan looked up at her with disapproval in his dark brown eyes, and Laura flinched. “Sorry, honey. Mommy just hurt herself.”

  “You said a bad word.” This from her daughter, Emma. “Agent Chaos said you’re not allowed to say those words.”

  Laura glared at the fat brown hamster that was clutched in her daughter’s hands. Agent Chaos looked up at her with disapproving beady brown eyes. Sitting there, silently judging her.

  She had joked with Trent that he should buy the kids a hamster when he returned from his latest deployment. By the time he came back, things between them had already crumbled but he still remembered the damn hamster. He’d bought not one, but two of the stinking, smelly creatures. The hamster cuteness factor did not override the pain in the ass factor of having to clean their cages every other day to keep the smell from overpowering the entire house.

  Maybe if Trent had been around more over the last year, she wouldn’t have minded them so much. But instead of sitting at Fort Hood and working in an office like any other officer who was under investigation, he’d volunteered for several rotations at the National Training Center in Fort Irwin. He’d spent more time there than at Fort Hood over the last year. He might as well have just moved there.

  She took a deep breath and pressed on her throbbing knuckles, focusing on the pain so that she wouldn’t feel the tension that squeezed her heart every time she thought about her husband. She regretted sending him the divorce papers. She could admit that now, but she’d done the only thing she could at the time.

  She could still remember that stupid flare of hope when he’d stood in her office that day. Hope that maybe, finally, he had come home to her.

  But he hadn’t.

  And as time had ticked by and he’d refused to sign the papers and let her go, she’d moved beyond regret. Now, she wanted to move on with her life. Maybe someday she’d be able to think of Trent without the hurt and frustration that kept reminding her of everything she’d lost.

  “You have to pay us each a quarter,” Ethan said, stroking the fat orange hamster in his hands. Laura was seriously thinking about buying a cat—that would solve the hamster problem quickly enough. But it would be just one more thing to clean up after.

  And she wasn’t really up for the trauma of finding a dead hamster under the bed.

  She could only imagine the therapy bills.

  She pursed
her lips and counted to ten… thousand. “Okay guys, why don’t you go play in the garage or something? Mommy has too many parts in here, and I don’t want you to get hurt.”

  Or move anything. But she didn’t say that out loud, because that would only encourage them to run off with some vital component that would take her three days to identify and two more days to find online and order. A new dishwasher was not in the budget at the moment. Besides, she wanted to see if she could actually fix the thing herself.

  She shooed the kids and their accompanying hamsters out of the kitchen and made her way through the master bedroom to the cache of Band-Aids she hid in her bathroom. The kids were all too eager to use every bandage in the house if she let them, which always meant that she couldn’t find a Band-Aid when she really needed one. She’d resorted to hiding them like they were some kind of precious commodity. In her house, they were.

  Laura pulled down the shoebox that held the first aid kit. She held her breath as she cleaned the cuts on her knuckles with iodine, then wrapped gauze halfway down her fingers, covering the empty space where her wedding and engagement rings had once been.

  She paused, staring at her ring finger. Blood pooled on the pale band of skin there, as if her finger refused to forget the rings that had been there since forever.

  Her finger might not forget the rings but that didn’t mean it was a marriage worth waiting for. No amount of waiting or wishful thinking was going to change that. Trent had seen to that. And broken her heart all over again.

  She knew in her heart that they were finished. He had lied to her so many times about his deployments. That alone had destroyed her trust in him. And then there was the rest of it…

  She was ready for the pain to stop. Ready for her heart to stop waiting for the phone to ring. Waiting, so desperately for her heart to stop beating for a man who was never coming home.

  A spike of melancholy pressed on her lungs. Damn it, what was wrong with her today? She was past mourning the death of her marriage. At least she kept telling herself that. So when was it going to stop hurting?

  She briefly considered a shot of vodka to numb the pain, but that wasn’t really a good idea since she was alone with the kids. She barely ever had a drink these days. She sighed and glanced wistfully at the discreet box on the top shelf in the bathroom closet. Droughts were not limited to alcohol.

  She had gotten used to it, this new normal. While the kids were vibrant chaos, full of life and joy, the married part of her life was… well, it simply was. There was nothing there anymore. No joy. No hatred. Just silence and cold detachment overlying a dull aching sadness.

  She simply wanted it to be over. And damn Trent to hell for dragging it out when he wasn’t even willing to fight for them. And the silence between them? Between her and the man she’d thought she’d love for the rest of her life?

  She sat on the edge of their bed, one finger rubbing absently over the bruised knuckles and her empty ring finger. She could hear the kids shrieking in the garage. One of the hamsters had gotten away. She smiled. She really didn’t mind them, not when the kids loved the judgmental little beasts so much. It was a gesture of kindness from a man who couldn’t be a father. She knew that.

  It didn’t make it hurt any less. She’d married him knowing what she was getting into, thinking her love for him was strong enough to withstand whatever the army could throw at them. Knowing that the army was a demanding job, that he’d be gone a lot. But that first deployment had done something to him, something deeper than just the visible scars on his body.

  Once she never would have thought the silence would grow too loud or that his empty side of the bed would become too heavy to bear. Once she would have waited forever for him to come home to her.

  But forever was a long time.

  And her faith in their love had died long ago on some distant battlefield.

  Chapter Two

  Eight hours and a flight from hell later, Trent left his duffle bag in the operations office before walking down the halls of the Reaper Brigade headquarters. It was late summer in Fort Hood, Texas and it was mid to high nineties every day.

  It had been a hot summer and an even hotter fall. The heat, Trent could deal with. He’d been in Kuwait when the temperature had hit one hundred and thirty-two. Ninety was a cold front.

  But it was the cold from the office at the end of the hall he feared.

  He was glad he’d been called back to Fort Hood. He’d let his mind drift the entire flight home. What would happen if he walked into Laura’s office? He hadn’t gotten through to her before he’d gotten on the plane home. She didn’t know he was here.

  It gave him a little more time to figure out what to say. How to ask for a chance. Maybe not to be the father of the year but maybe for a chance just to be a dad. If he could figure that out.

  He rubbed his thumb over the smooth edge of his wedding band. Laura was an entirely different challenge.

  He’d hurt her. Badly. And he had no idea how to fix it.

  Maybe he could start with asking her if he could sleep on the couch. Because if he stayed at Fort Hood for more than a few weeks, he was going to have to find a more permanent place to stay than crashing at Shane and Jen’s. The thought of asking Laura if he could come home sent a cold sweat prickling over his skin.

  The likelihood of her allowing him through the front door for more than a short visit with the kids was snuggled up between slim and none. He had a better chance of hitting an IED and blowing the hell out of his truck in the middle of Highway 190 in Killeen than he had of getting her to agree to that.

  Not that he blamed her.

  At least she let him see the kids. And even that was a challenge. He didn’t know how to be a father to the two small kids who’d morphed from babies to mindless banshees with needs and wants and an uncanny ability to strike all the right nerves and detonate his patience.

  No matter how much he wished things were different, when it came to his family, he’d been a failure—and he was determined to fix things. No matter how much he wanted to be a bigger man and let his wife go, he simply could not bring himself to sign the papers that left him cold and empty. He’d tried. And each time, he’d put them away, choosing to wait just one more day.

  Hoping that someday, he’d find the right words to explain to Laura why he’d had to go. To put the ragged emptiness into some form she could understand. He’d never wanted her to see that part of him, the dead part that walked and talked but felt nothing. He was alive. He should have been grateful.

  Instead, the emptiness had swallowed everything, leaving him hollow. Until the only thing that felt right was the war.

  He didn’t want her to know that side of it. Never wanted her to see him for what he was—a burned-out warrior who was only good at one thing. God but he didn’t want her to see what he’d become.

  He glanced at his watch. Right on time for the brilliant end to his career. Shoving aside the worries from home, he walked through the headquarters that had been his sanctuary from the tribulations of real life.

  The headquarters was largely empty as most of the rear detachment staff had already left for the day. Apparently the staff were taking the new post commander’s directive about being out of the office by five p.m. seriously and since they were the “lucky” ones who’d escaped the National Training Center, they were apparently skipping out of real work, too. That wouldn’t last, though. About a week would go by before they all realized they couldn’t get anything done when everyone left that early. He turned into a conference room and rapped his knuckles on the doorframe.

  Major Patrick MacLean looked up from his laptop screen and nodded at the chair next to him at the conference room table, motioning for Trent to take a seat. Trent sat and waited silently for Patrick to finish writing an e-mail.

  Trent had known Patrick for years, since they’d both been lieutenants on another brigade staff a lifetime ago. His friend’s dark blue eyes were lined with stress and strain. Patrick often
said that being an army lawyer was slowly but surely sucking the life out of him. He only saw the bad parts of the army. He never got to see the Soldier of the Year, except when said Soldier of the Year was being charged with something terrible, like aggravated assault or misuse of his government travel card.

  Because there was nothing worse than misuse of the government travel card. He’d seen men killed, subordinates abused, but the fastest way to end a career was to get caught defrauding the government. He pushed his glasses up on the top of his head. He wasn’t sure what that said about the organization he’d sacrificed everything for, but it didn’t leave a good feeling in the pit of his guts.

  Trent wished he was being charged with simple misconduct—simple fraud where he could be sent on his way and avoid the lengthy investigation. Instead, the allegations against him seemed like a cruel twist on reality—and a complex, year-long investigation to boot.

  “How was your flight?” Patrick asked as he closed the lid of his laptop.

  “Terrible. We sat on the jetway for two hours before we took off.” Trent sucked in a hard breath through his nose, pushing down the riot of emotions churning inside him. “What’s so important that I had to be yanked off the training mission three days early?” Not that Trent was complaining. But it was fear that filled the emptiness inside him now.

  Fear that Laura had really gotten over him and let him go when he’d finally gotten his head out of his ass.

  Fear that he’d truly lost everything.

  Patrick rocked back in his chair. “First off, you should be at home, spending time with your family instead of volunteering for training mission after training mission, but we’ll get to that in a minute.”

  Trent sighed. “I know.”

  Patrick lifted a single brow and started to say something. Then he snapped his mouth closed, opened a file, and slid the contents toward Trent. “We’re getting ready to start the Article 32 hearing.”

  “That’s the one where they decide if there’s enough evidence to go to trial, right?”