by Marie Force
A petite blonde walked to the front of the room, her cheeks flushed with what might’ve been nerves. Gavin noticed she still wore her engagement and wedding rings on her left hand, and the sight of those rings made him unreasonably sad for someone he’d never met.
“Thank you so much, Amelia, Bob and Hannah for this lovely gathering tonight as well as the warm welcome I’ve received this week. It’s been such a treat to get away from it all, to spend some time in this beautiful corner of the country and to be with you all.” Her gesture encompassed the other guests. “I feel like I’ve made lifetime friends here, and I’ll always be grateful for the respite.” She took a deep breath before she continued. “Like many of you, my life has been split in half—before and after. On a regular Tuesday morning, I was getting my kids ready for the day when my doorbell rang. I expected my neighbor who came two mornings a week to take my daughter to preschool. Because my son was an infant, she saved me the trouble of packing up both kids to deliver Brianna to her. I had my son on my hip when I swung open the door to men in uniform. I don’t remember much of that day. Apparently, I passed out at the sight of those men, but my maternal instincts were still intact because I somehow managed to shield my baby with my own body so he wasn’t injured. I can’t even think about what my poor daughter had to endure with her mom out cold on the floor, her brother screaming and men she didn’t recognize at the door. She was four then. I hope she won’t remember it, but she also won’t remember much about her father, and that breaks my heart.”
Listening to Cindy’s story, Gavin broke out in a cold sweat as the memories from his own darkest day came back to him like a horror movie he could never escape.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen to us,” Cindy continued. “Lance’s unit was one of the last to deploy to Iraq before the final troops left. They were on a humanitarian mission, bringing badly needed aid to the Iraqi people, who’d endured a decade of war. He was hit and killed by a stray bullet fired in one of the villages where they were working. The bullet had nothing to do with the war, apparently. Sometimes, when I allow myself to think about that—how his death had nothing at all to do with the war . . . Well, it’s better if I don’t think about that.”
Gavin couldn’t do this. He couldn’t stay in this hot, suffocating room and listen to Cindy’s tragedy unfold before him. Releasing Ella’s hand, he slipped out of the room, hoping no one would notice him leaving. He didn’t want to be rude, but he also didn’t want to pass out from overheating either.
He cut through the kitchen and went out into the backyard, where he could finally breathe again in the cold November air. Bending at the waist, he propped his hands on his knees and focused on drawing deep breaths of cold air into his lungs.
Not surprisingly, Ella came out right behind him. “Gav? Are you okay?”
“Yeah, sorry. It was so hot in there I felt like I was going to pass out.”
She laid her hand flat against his back. “Is that all it was?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Gavin.”
Here was the one person he couldn’t bullshit with his assurances that he was fine when he wasn’t. She saw right through him. The mirror he couldn’t escape.
“Rabbit hole alert.”
“Ah, I see. Come here.”
Resigned to accepting her comfort, he stood to his full height and turned to her.
She put her arms around him and held on tight, letting him know with one simple gesture that he wasn’t alone.
“Sorry.”
“Please don’t apologize.”
“My parents and Hannah have probably heard a lot of those stories since the inn opened, but I haven’t. Brought it all back. That day . . .”
Ella ran her hand over his back in small, soothing circles. “Do you want to tell me about it?”
He never wanted to think about it again, let alone say the words out loud.
“Maybe if you tell me, then I’ll know and you won’t be alone with it anymore. It’ll be our burden to share, and I can help you avoid the triggers.”
“I don’t want you to share my burden, Ella. That’s not what we’re doing here.”
“It’s not? So you’re only signing on for the good stuff? No hard stuff, no bad stuff, no ugly?”
“I don’t want you mired in my ugly.”
“Even if I want to be?”
He looked down at her beautiful face. Even in the dark he could see her affection for him shining through. “You’re crazy, you know that?”
“Crazy about you, Gavin Guthrie.”
“The feeling is entirely mutual.” He kissed her softly. “I’ll tell you about it, but not here. Let’s go home.”
“Whatever you want to do.”
They went back inside, where the party was carrying on with happy voices and conversation. He hoped his parents hadn’t noticed him backing out of the room while Cindy was talking.
“Oh, there you two are,” Bob said when they entered the kitchen.
“We were just getting some air,” Ella said, “but we’re going to head out now. We’ve both got early days tomorrow.”
“We’re glad you could come,” Bob said. He hugged Ella and shook hands with Gavin, his shrewd gaze giving him a close once-over. Despite Ella’s efforts to cover for him, he knew his dad was clued in to his distress. “We’ll talk tomorrow, yes?”
Though asked as a question, Gavin knew it wasn’t a request. “Yeah.”
They said their good-byes to the others and were on the way to his place a few minutes later. Around the fringes of his mind, the darkness hovered, threatening to swoop in and drag him down. It had happened too many times before for Gavin not to recognize the signs of impending trouble.
He was thankful for Ella’s presence and regretful, too. He’d meant it when he said he didn’t want her to see his darkness, but the thought of sharing the burden, of not having to go it alone any longer . . . Her offer was too tantalizing to resist, and that made him feel like a world-class bastard.
Ella had felt it happen. Standing beside Gavin while Cindy shared her heartbreaking memories, Ella had been immediately aware of the tension that invaded him, the stiffness to his body, the change in his breathing. She’d been about to get him out of there when he released her hand and made the move on his own.
She wasn’t entirely sure she was doing the right thing by encouraging him to talk about the event that had triggered his reaction tonight. Too bad she couldn’t consult with Hannah, but her sister was still at the party and Gavin . . . He was pouring himself a fortifying drink of amber-colored liquor.
Raising the bottle in her direction, he silently asked if she wanted a drink.
Ella nodded. She needed the fortification as much as he did.
Bringing two glasses, Gavin joined her on the sofa. He’d stoked up the fire in his woodstove, and the room was warm and cozy.
“We don’t have to do this, you know,” Ella said.
Swirling the liquid around in his glass, he watched it closely. “I’ve never talked about it with anyone.”
His confession took her breath away. “Ever?”
He shook his head. “Of course my parents and Hannah and I have talked about funny memories and we’ve paid tribute on anniversaries, the annual road race and now the inn. But I’ve never talked to anyone about what losing him did to me.” He finally looked at her. “Except for you. That day at Homer’s funeral, when we were on the porch swing . . . That was a first for me. I thought you should know that.”
Ella couldn’t have spoken if she had to. She reached for his free hand and cradled it between her hands.
“I suppose it’s obvious to everyone that it wrecked me because of the way I’ve acted at times. I’m not proud of that, but I’ve learned there’s no rhyme or reason when something like this happens. Grief affects everyone differently.” After a long pause, Gavin said, “I’ve been thinking over the last few days that if we’re going to do this, really do it the right way, you should know what you
’re getting. And what happened tonight . . . I guess that just proved that I’m not as far along in this process as I ought to be by now.”
“I want to know, Gavin. If we share the load it won’t be so heavy for you to carry alone. And there’s no timetable. No one is holding up a stopwatch and timing how long it takes you to get over your brother’s death. I’m certainly not doing that. I fully expect that you’ll never completely get over it.”
“You’re so sweet.” He put down his glass and ran his thumb over her jaw. “So strong and capable. I’m afraid of using your strength as a crutch.”
“It’s not a crutch if it’s freely given.”
After a long pause, he sighed deeply and began to speak. “I didn’t want him to go into the army. I had a bad feeling about it from the beginning. Hannah did, too. She and I talked about it a lot the year they were seniors and I was a junior at UVM. He had this great opportunity to play professional hockey, and he was going to turn that down to go into the army? Neither of us got how it was even a decision. I’ve since come to know that the desire to serve at that level is either in you like it was in him or it isn’t. It’s not in me. It never was, even after being brought up by a career army officer. I’ve felt guilty about that for a long time—that he gave so much and I had no desire at all to give anything to the military.”
Ella had to resist the urge to speak, to offer comfort. That he was talking about these things to her was a huge gift that she didn’t receive lightly. It might be the most important conversation they’d ever have. She was already surprised to hear that Gavin hadn’t wanted Caleb to go into the army.
“The last time he was home, before that final deployment, we went camping for a few days, just the two of us and Homer, of course. We never went anywhere without good old Homie. It was the first time we’d been able to get away by ourselves in a couple of years, and we had a lot of laughs as always. But the whole time we were gone and in the days before he left, I had this low buzz of foreboding. I didn’t recognize it then for what it was, but I had a knot in my stomach the size of a fist that would not go away. I thought maybe I was getting sick from Caleb’s camp cooking or something. I didn’t know then that it was fear. Raw, gritty fear. I never told anyone that when I said good-bye to him on the day he left for Iraq, I had the worst feeling I’d never see him again.”
“Gavin . . .” Ella brushed the tears off her cheeks, wishing she could be stronger for him, but her heart was breaking.
“At the time, I chalked it up to my overactive imagination. He was going to a part of Iraq where the fighting was mostly over. They were there to help train the Iraqi army and to provide aid. It wasn’t about active combat. Not this time. Even knowing that, I couldn’t shake the aching, gnawing fear. I’d wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, thinking the worst. I was a fucking mess for weeks.”
“And you didn’t tell anyone?”
“Who could I tell? My parents? Hannah? They didn’t need to hear that, not when they were contending with their own worries.” He shook his head. “At times, I seriously wondered if I was going insane. My brother was a grown man, the toughest dude I’d ever known. He was a highly trained army officer who could kick the shit out of anyone who dared to cross him. And here I was, a quivering, fearful wreck of a man in comparison. I hated myself for feeling the way I did.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Gavin. You can’t help the way you feel. None of us can.” It killed her to hear that he had suffered so profoundly in utter silence.
“I know, but still . . . It felt ridiculous to be so worried about a man who was more than capable of taking care of himself, especially when he’d been in far more dangerous situations than the one he was in then.” His shoulders hunched, he looked down at the floor, desolation coming off him in waves. “I was working outside of town, clearing land for a new development when my dad called. He asked if I could come to the house right away. I asked him why, and he just said . . . ‘Please come, Gav.’ I knew. I just knew. I didn’t want to go there. I actually thought about getting in my truck and driving north to Canada. I almost did it, too. Even all these years later, I’m still ashamed to admit how close I came to just driving away.”
“No one would’ve blamed you.”
“Wouldn’t have changed anything,” he said with a shrug. “And besides, I’d like to think I’m a better son than that. My parents needed me, so I went. I’ll never forget the sight of that blue four-door sedan with U.S. government plates sitting outside the house when I arrived. If I’d been looking for confirmation, there it was. I found out later that they’d already been to Hannah’s house.”
Ella couldn’t bear to remain separate from him any longer. She crawled into his lap and put her arms around him.
He was slow to respond, as if he didn’t think he deserved the comfort. But then his arms came around her, and he buried his face in her hair.
She was relieved that he was allowing her to comfort him. He’d been in bad need of some comfort for far too long.
“I finally went in there, and my parents . . . They were just wrecked. My mom was out of her mind. My dad had gone silent. He was blaming himself, I’m sure. He’d been so proud when Caleb went into the army. The chaplain told me what’d happened, and I remember thinking it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. He’d been blown up while playing a game of soccer? For real? It made absolutely no sense to me, and it still doesn’t. It never will.”
Ella drew in a shaky deep breath and ran her fingers through his hair, wishing there was something she could do or say that would help him. But all she could do was listen and offer what comfort she could.
“I don’t remember much about the rest of that day or the weeks that followed. It’s all a bit of a blur to me. The one thing I do remember, painfully and sickeningly, was that I never told Caleb how afraid I was for him. It was on my mind constantly, that maybe if I’d told him he would’ve been more careful.”
“Oh God, Gavin,” she whispered. “You haven’t been carrying that around with you all this time, have you?”
“I don’t think about it every day anymore, but I’ll always wish I’d told him.”
“He would’ve laughed it off. He would’ve said you were being ridiculous, that he was fine. You know how he was.”
“Yeah, I do, and I also never wanted to put something in his head that didn’t need to be there. Not when he had so many other things to think about.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference. You know that, don’t you?”
He shrugged, not entirely convinced.
Ella took him by the face and forced him to look at her. “It was his time to go. Nothing you or any of the rest of us who loved him could’ve done or said would’ve changed that irrefutable fact. This was how his life was meant to play out, even if we don’t like it.”
“I don’t like it. I hate it.”
“I hate it, too. I hate it for you and your parents and Hannah and all his friends and extended family. I hate it for all of us. But you know what I’m certain of?”
He shook his head.
“Caleb would hate, absolutely hate, that you feel any guilt whatsoever about what happened to him. He made his choices, and he owned them, Gavin. Nothing you could’ve said or done would’ve changed the outcome for him, as much as you’d like to think otherwise.”
“I don’t really believe I could’ve changed the outcome. I just like to think I could have,” he added with a ghost of a smile.
“He knew you loved him. He died with no doubt whatsoever that he was well and truly loved by so many people. I have to believe he was at peace with himself and his life in that last moment.”
“I hope so. I like to think he never knew what hit him.”
“He didn’t.”
They sat quietly, wrapped up in each other’s arms, and after a while, Ella felt him begin to relax ever so slightly. She wanted to know what he was thinking, if it had helped to talk about it, whether he was tired or sad. B
ut she didn’t ask. She remained stoically silent, hoping he was getting whatever he needed from her.
After a long period of silence, she ventured a glance at him and saw that he was gazing into the fire, lost in thought. She reached up to caress his face, running her thumb over the stubble on his jaw.
He looked down at her. “Thanks.”
“Any time.” She swallowed the hot ball of fear that wanted to lodge in her throat. Had they done more harm than good by talking about this stuff that caused him so much pain? “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I think I am.” He took a deep breath. “What happened tonight . . . Cindy’s story . . . I wasn’t expecting that. Things like that . . . some people can just hear them and commiserate and go on. For me, it tends to tear the scab off the wound, which starts the spinning. I might’ve gone off and done something stupid, but I didn’t do that this time. Because of you. Because you were here when I needed you.”
“I always want to be here when you need me.”
“Will you let me do the same for you?” he asked. “Will you lean on me the way you’ve allowed me to lean on you?”
“There’s no one I’d rather lean on than you.”
His smile lit up his face, and the eyes that had been so desolate a short time ago came alive again.
“I love that smile of yours,” she said, tracing it with her finger.
“I love having a reason to smile again. Thanks for that, too.”
“My pleasure.”
“Speaking of your pleasure, it’s been hours and hours since I kissed you.”
“I was wondering when you were going to notice that.”
Still smiling, he brought his lips down on hers for a kiss that went from soft and sweet to hot and sultry in about ten seconds.
Ella held him close to her, loving the feel of his lips on hers, the roughness of his whiskers, the passionate thrust of his tongue. She loved everything about kissing him and being with him this way, whether they were talking about the worst day of his life or kissing passionately, she loved it all. When he tightened his hold on her and stood to carry her into the bedroom, she squeaked in surprise that quickly turned to desire. Sleeping next to him every night had quickly become her favorite thing in the world, and she couldn’t wait to snuggle into his warm embrace once again.