Sea Glass Winter

by JoAnn Ross

  His father had wanted to accompany Mac to Colorado Springs, Kayla’s hometown, where she’d moved with their daughter, Emma, three months before.

  Not knowing what type of reception he’d receive, and needing to concentrate on repairing his wounded marriage, Mac insisted on going alone.

  From the stilted phone conversations they’d shared while he’d been at Travis, he wasn’t surprised when Kayla didn’t show up at the airport. After giving the address to the house he’d never seen to the cabdriver, he sat in the backseat, practicing what he was going to say to make things right again.

  The neighborhood was a typical American suburban, with neatly trimmed front lawns and tidy houses on each side of a street lined with trees ablaze in fall color. Even through his still blurred vision, the high blue Colorado sky and red, yellow, and bronze leaves on the trees seemed blindingly bright after Afghanistan’s unrelenting brown.

  Most of the houses on the street were flying the American flag, which was to be expected in a city that was home to the Air Force Academy. Mac couldn’t help noticing that the flag flying from the front porch of the white rambler the cabdriver had pulled up in front of was not the stars and stripes, but boasted three fallthemed pumpkins.

  He rang the bell and waited for what seemed an eternity.

  “Hi.” His wife’s tone, when she finally opened the door, wasn’t angry, as it had been the last time they’d spoken in person. Nor was it the least bit welcoming. What it was, he decided, was disinterested.

  “Hi,” he said back, standing there holding his duffel bag while she submitted him to a slow examination.

  “You look good,” she said. Since his mirror revealed that he was gaunt and gray, and had a bald spot where they’d shaved his head for surgery, he translated that to mean that he didn’t look nearly as bad as she’d expected.

  “So do you.”

  It was the truth. She looked much the same. But different. Her long, straight slide of chestnut hair had been cropped to a chin length blazing mahogany that echoed the leaves on the tree in the small front yard, and the snug purple sweater and skinny jeans revealed that although she’d always claimed to hate exercise, she’d been working out. A lot.

  Silence settled over them as they stood there, she inside the ranch-style house, he on the narrow front porch. The only sound came from the blower the elderly man across the street was using to attack a mountain of leaves.

  He glanced past her. “Where’s Emma?”

  “At a neighbor’s.” The unfamiliar, glossy bright hair swung as she tilted her head toward the house next door. “It’s obvious we need to talk without a child present.”

  Mac’s internal siren, which had failed to ring when the suicide bomber had driven his jingle truck into the marketplace, had begun to sound. But feeling the leaf guy’s eyes on them, he wasn’t going to stand out here in public and point out that the child Kayla was referring to was his child, too. Ever since waking up to find himself in the Bagram ER, he’d gotten through the pain, stress, and guilt by staying focused on getting back home and holding his daughter in his arms.

  Although patience had admittedly never been his strong suit, Mac held his tongue and refrained from starting yet another argument as he walked into the small foyer.

  Where the two flowered suitcases sitting by the front door suggested that whatever conversation he and his wife were about to have was probably not going to go his way.

  Click here for more books by JoAnn Ross

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