by LJ Evans
“Tell me something good. Something about your childhood.”
His face turned dark. “Nothing. I don’t have good memories, Dani. Not a single one that isn’t tainted in some way.” Then, he dragged himself away and went inside.
My heart pounded harder, tears burning at my eyes, even though I wouldn’t let them fall. He’d lied to me. There were good memories. I saw them in the way he talked with Maribelle. I saw them in the way he talked about the flower fields. They were there. Goodness and light. But he’d surrounded them in a box of unhappiness. It was achingly hard to watch.
When I opened the door and went in, it was to find Maribelle sitting at the small kitchen table with a cup of something hot. Coffee, by the smell in the room. There was no Nash.
“Good morning,” I said, my voice shaky with emotions.
“Good morning. You were both up early,” Maribelle said, that playful tone in her voice once more, and I wanted to dissuade her of any ideas she had of Nash and me.
I filled my water bottle before crossing to her at the table, taking her in with her white hair glowing in the halo of sun filling the room and making her pale skin almost translucent.
“It’s not that way with Nash and me.”
She nodded. “So, you’ve said.” Her smile slowly disappeared. “I worry about him.”
“Me too,” I said before I could keep it back. Did I? Worry about Nash? I guess I did—even more than just whatever had happened this morning. I worried about him losing the people he loved most and still trying to function as if nothing was different. I worried about his career and what he’d do without it. I worried about him not telling a soul he actually had a family.
“He was full of piss and vinegar this morning. He didn’t pick a fight, did he?” she asked.
“I…” I shook my head. “I don’t understand him sometimes.”
“Only sometimes?” she laughed. “That boy could baffle the toughest of minds.”
“I… He…” Then, I stopped. Nash wouldn’t want me to talk to her about it. I wouldn’t want him to talk about what happened to me in the elevator. “Never mind.”
She watched me. “Where did you all go?”
A hand referred to my sweaty apparel.
“I jogged down to the plant and came back before he joined me at the pond.”
Her body froze. “The pond? Nash was at the pond?”
“Well, I was there, cooling off under the willow trees, and he… he stopped,” I said, trying to deflect, brushing the memory of his pounding heart from me.
“He went all the way to the trees?” Her voice was squeaky and unsure, and now all of my signals were going off. I’d seen too many people in Washington try to hide things to not see this for what it was. A secret. A dark secret. One that had her stuttering and repeating herself, and one that had had Nash freaking out as if he’d never gone through SEAL training.
I nodded and reached my hand across the table to squeeze her hand. “Is everything okay?”
She brought herself back, much as Nash had, from a memory that neither of them could bear. She removed her hand from mine before patting it. “Yes. Of course, it’s all fine.”
But I knew for a fact it wasn’t.
Nash
SECOND CHANCES
“I won't break you,
I will not let you down.
Open up again, I believe in second chances.”
Performed by Imagine Dragons
Written by Mckee / Reynolds / Platzman / Sermon
I was shaking. Shaking through every limb in my body as I climbed the stairs. I felt like my skin was being pulled from me inch by inch. Torture worse than anything we’d experienced at Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training. When I got to my room, I shed my clothes, entered the shower, and stood under the steady stream of water, trying to wash away the fear and pain I felt in every part of my body.
My vision filled with Dani. Finding her in almost the same exact spot at the side of the pond was like a dam breaking inside me. Heartache and loss filled my soul. I slammed my hand against the tile, the pain there doing nothing to dull the pain raging inside me.
Dark hair and grass in the moonlight instead of the sunshine.
Dark hair and limbs in the dirt on the side of a road.
Dark blood. Darkness.
Fucking darkness.
I got out of the shower and dressed in my jeans and a T-shirt.
Darren. Dani. My past. They were all rolling together, forcing me to feel things I’d locked away. Before I thought it all the way through, I hit dial on my phone.
“Hello.” Tristan’s voice, sweet and light, tore at me. Family. She felt more like family to me than Carson or Maribelle had in a long time. That family had died on a moonlit night by the pond.
When I didn’t respond, Tristan sighed, full of tiredness. She said my name with a small question at the end. “Nash?”
“I just needed to hear your voice,” I said, trying to pull myself together so I didn’t make things worse for her. “How’s Hannah?”
She paused a beat before saying, “My grandma is spoiling her. She’s never going to eat a vegetable again.”
Since she’d kicked me out, we’d only had a couple of conversations. The first stilted, the next easing us back to safe ground: Hannah and the dog.
“And Molly?” I asked.
“Molly loves everyone better than me, so Grandma has become her new favorite. I think she might love her more than she loves you.”
“Impossible,” I said.
“Grams gives her gobs of extra treats.”
A small smile crept onto my lips.
“When are you coming back?” I asked.
She hesitated. “Honestly…I don’t know.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means life here is agreeing with me.”
I couldn’t keep it from stabbing at me that a town was agreeing with her more than I had. I grumbled, “Because I’m not there?”
A frustrated sigh echoed over the phone. “Believe it or not, Nash, not everything centers around you. This. Being here. Working with my grandma at her store…I feel useful. I feel like I have another reason besides Hannah to get up every day. Isn’t that what you said I needed?”
The taunt hurt.
When I didn’t respond, she continued, softer, “I like visiting with Gram’s friends, and how they ask about her. I like that Hannah is getting a chance to know her. It feels like something that is just mine and not his.”
God that hurt.
The space between us was making me realize how little I’d done for her. Sure, I’d been there to help with the physical things. The baby. The dog. But I hadn’t really been able to help her. Not when I’d been grieving so much myself.
I hadn’t been able to pull her from the edge.
I’d just continually reminded her of where it was at.
“I’m glad,” I said, voice rough. My eyes burned, and my fingers were clenched, biting into the palm of my hand, but it was the truth.
“Are you?” she asked, trying to interpret my tone.
“Yes. It’s all I want. For you to be happy again.”
She sniffled, and I wanted to punch something because I’d made her cry again when she’d just been telling me she was doing better.
“You know that’s what he’d want for you, too, right?” she asked quietly.
I did. He’d had the best fucking soul of anyone I’d ever met. He’d give the shirt off his back to anyone. He had literally given the shirt off his back on one of our missions in Afghanistan when we’d stumbled on a group of kids shivering in the snow. He’d handed over his jacket, and we’d all followed suit and ended up just shy of hypothermia by the time we’d reached our extraction point.
“Why does it feel like betraying him?” I asked her, pissed that my voice cracked again.
“Because you blame yourself,” she said. I heard Hanna
h, her blathering in the background, and Tristan said something I couldn’t hear to someone else in the room, and then it was quiet as if she’d walked away from the baby.
“If I’d just been―”
“Stop! You can’t do that, Nash. You can’t. I can’t either.”
She was quiet for a long time, and then she said, “Darren couldn’t tell me much about the missions. I didn’t really want to know because I was scared shitless every time you guys were out in the field. Having him gone for months at a time was hard, but knowing you were actually out... I could barely breathe. But one time, about six months before…” Her voice broke, and she paused again before forcing herself on. “I don’t know what happened…all he told me was, ‘If Nash hadn’t been there, we’d all be dead.’”
I was shaking my head, even though I knew the exact mission she was talking about. We were somewhere we were definitely not supposed to be. Somewhere that would have started World War III if it ever came out. We’d been moving in to blow the place to kingdom come when I’d seen the flicker of a laser—a silent alarm we were about to trigger. I’d halted us all with one word into our headsets. Quiet, barely loud enough to be heard.
We’d stopped to assess the situation, knowing if we went any farther, we’d be sitting ducks with guns blazing down on us from above us in the entryway. The enemy would have had the higher ground. The fucking high ground was always the better ground.
What I’d done hadn’t been any big deal. I hadn’t pulled him from a fire or stopped the bleeding on an arterial wound. I’d just seen a flicker that wasn’t supposed to be there. A light my sniper senses had latched onto in a nanosecond.
“It went both ways,” I said finally.
“I know,” she responded. “But what I’m trying to say is you did save him. He saved you. And now we both have to save ourselves.”
“I want to be there for you,” I told her the honest, raw truth.
“I’m not saying you can’t be part of my life, Nash. God, I don’t even want that. I want Hannah to know you. I want you to be able to tell her stories…” Her voice completely broke apart, quiet sobs that made mine hit my eyes. “I want you to tell her stories about her father so she knows the kind of man he was.”
I ran a hand along my scar, the pain making it hard to speak, the silence allowing us both to gather ourselves back together. She was the brave one; she spoke first.
“You are absolutely one of the best people in my life,” she said. “I’m not letting you go. I’ve already lost too much. I love you. Maybe not as much as the dog…”
“The dog?” I choked on a laugh that she returned.
The sound released a feeling in my chest of a weight slowly rising from where it had been holding me down.
After a moment, she asked, “How’s Dani?”
“I completely freaked out on her.”
“You? No way.” It was half-serious, half-tease, because freaking out wasn’t my norm, but she was trying to keep the moment light and away from the dark place we’d gone.
I stared out the window at the myrtle trees, knowing the pond was beyond it. A nemesis I hadn’t overcome yet in my life.
“Can I give you a piece of advice?” she asked.
“You will whether I want it or not.”
“Because that’s what family does. We keep each other from making humongous mistakes.”
My heart tugged because her words matched my thoughts. We were a family. We would always be that way, even without Darren tying us together.
“Go ahead, Doctor Phil,” I said, and she chuckled.
“Just tell her the truth.”
“About?”
“Everything. Anything. All of it.”
“I don’t know if I can,” I told her.
“Then you’ll never have what Darren and I had,” she replied.
“I hate that I told you that,” I said with a wry smile, remembering my drunken self after finishing sniper training, coming back to our apartment to find her and Darren tearing each other’s clothes off. I’d taken a walk and come back while Darren was in the shower. I’d told Tristan that, someday, I hoped to have what they had. The love that allowed you to finish each other’s sentences and could speak volumes with a look. I’d wanted it, and yet, I hadn’t because I’d seen what a love like that could do to a person when one of them didn’t come home. I’d been a mixed-up piece of shit.
I still was.
“I gotta go. It sounds like Hannah is pulling Molly’s tail again,” she said.
I smiled.
“We’ll talk again soon, okay?” she said.
“Take care of yourself.”
“You too.”
Then, she was gone.
I stared at the phone, emotions still raging through me as thoughts of family chugged through my burnt heart.
I picked up my keys and wallet and left the house by the back stairs. I got into the rental car and drove a route that took me closer to town. I pulled into the cemetery, got out, and walked toward our family’s mausoleum. The one holding my ancestors. The place that held the ashes of my mother and my father. The tomb I hadn’t visited since I was thirteen and had buried my second parent.
When I first walked in, the air was stale but cooler than outside. I found my way to the marble bench in the middle, and I sat on it, staring at the words in front of me: Suzannah Wellsley. Beloved wife, mother, and sister. The bronze plaque was screwed to the marble just above the one that read: Lance Gordon Harrison. Beloved husband, father, and son. My parents had been married, but they’d each kept their last names, giving me two instead: Nash Harrison Wellsley.
I wondered what my parents would think of my life. Would they be upset that I wasn’t participating in the family business that they’d both loved? Would Mom be upset at Carson for turning me out of my home and sending me to boarding school mere weeks after she’d died? I hadn’t had a chance to grieve for her. I’d been lost and rootless, and Carson had flung me away so I could become a man.
It had taken me many years to see the time Carson spent with me for what it was. It wasn’t because he loved me. It wasn’t because he enjoyed our times together. It was because he was molding me into the person he wanted me to be. For the business. And my parents had let him because, after all, Carson knew best was the tagline of our household. Even though the business was left equally to both my mom and Carson, it had always been Carson who’d been in charge. It hadn’t seemed to bother my father. In truth, the drudgery of running a farm and a corporation on a daily basis would have dragged both my parents down.
My father had rarely been home. Looking back, it was easy to say that I’d hardly known him. I’d seen him for short stints in between each of his great adventures. His happy place had been on the hunt for new plant and flower specimens to add to the estate’s unique collection. Many times, my mom would go with him, and I’d be alone on the estate for months with just Maribelle and Carson.
Mom had always tried to make up for it with an outpouring of love and attention when she came home. Dad had simply gone from traveling to the experimenting, spending all his time in greenhouses and labs with whatever flora they’d brought back.
The one incontrovertible fact of my time with them was that they loved each other as much as they loved traveling the globe. And when Mom lost him, she’d been adrift.
When Tristan lost Darren, it was like seeing that all over again. A repeat appearance that had haunted my life. With some space, I could see I’d let my past fears overtake me in my present. Not for me, but for her. For Tristan.
I hadn’t wanted the same ending to her story.
I sat on the bench until I was brought back by the wind shuffling leaves onto the mausoleum floor. I wasn’t even sure why I’d come. Maybe I needed a goodbye I’d never gotten to give either of my parents, like the one I’d received in pounding my Trident into the wood of my lost brothers’ coffins. The SEAL tradition was both symbolic and healing
.
A sudden memory filled me: my mom kissing her fingers and then placing them on my father’s lips as he said goodbye at the door. “I love you. Keep this with you until you can give it back to me.”
The memory hit me with a sudden desire to have that for my own. Someone to love me enough to hold on to a kiss for me. Someone who saw me, with all my damn flaws and scars and hang-ups, and could still love me. A reason for me to come back from the mission rather than a reason for me to go on the mission. Fucking Dr. Inez was right. The sudden craving felt like a gift being handed to me as I sat there. And maybe it was. Maybe my mom had reached down and offered it to me.
Regardless, it filled me with a new purpose. A new reason to move forward past the spot I’d retreated. I stood, put my fingers to my lips, and then placed them on my mom’s niche. “Keep it with you, Mom.”
My words whispered around me in the silence.
Then, I got in the car and drove back the way I came, knowing I still had a lot of shit to figure out. A lot of wounds to heal and a lot of answers to find before the mess that was my life could be straightened out.
But first, I had someone else to talk to. I’d told her I’d tell her about my parents, and after this morning’s debacle, it was time. I didn’t relish it, but Tristan was right; she deserved the truth from me, and so I’d start by giving it to her and seeing where the cards fell from there.
Dani
DAYLIGHT
“Maybe you ran with the wolves and refused to settle down,
Maybe I've stormed out of every single room in this town.
Threw out our cloaks and our daggers because it's morning now,
It's brighter now, now.”
Performed by Taylor Swift
Written by Taylor Swift
After showering and devouring a biscuit from the basket Maribelle had left out with a note for me to help myself, I brought my laptop into the library and worked at the huge desk there. I spent hours on the phone, emailing, and writing posts to deflect the whispers about Brady being in rehab, spinning it with hints of family and needing to be elsewhere.