by Hill, Teresa
Now Mace, who was nearly a stranger to her, had brought all these people together so they could share their memories of Aaron with her.
What kind of man does that? He reeked of kindness?
She was still suspicious, of course, but it had been getting harder every day to feel that way.
The gathering started to wind down. People came to say goodbye. They hugged her and whispered that they’d always miss Aaron, that they were sorry her time with him had been so short. Some of them thanked her for making him so happy before he died. Half a dozen of them slipped her pieces of paper containing their names and phone numbers. If she ever needed anything, even just to talk, she should call.
The last few people helped Mace clean up after the cookout. She tried to do that, too, but he wouldn’t let her, so she drifted over to the edge of the deck and then down onto the beach. It was late, but enough light came from the buildings to see where she was walking and watch the white caps created by the waves breaking on the shore.
The beach was nearly deserted, breezy but not cold, beautiful and wild. She especially loved the way the wind and waves created a comforting blur of background noise around her. It pushed aside the silence in which she often found herself when her memories were overwhelming and too painful.
She felt drained by all the things she’d heard, but also oddly peaceful, like the evening had drained a nasty wound on her soul.
Someone dropped down to sit on the sand beside her, startling her until she saw that it was Mace.
“Can I sit with you? Or do you want to be alone?”
“You can sit,” she said. “Is everybody else gone?”
He nodded.
“Why did you do this?”
“Because they miss him, too. They wanted to meet you, to talk to you, to talk about Aaron, and I thought it might help you to be here, to hear what they had to say.”
“So, you just go around doing good?”
“It’s a military thing. We take care of our own, and you’re one of us. You always will be. You’ve been all alone in this until now. That pisses me off.”
“Mace, you and Aaron were practically strangers. Just because you were there that day … ”
“I should have come and found you sooner. There’s no excuse. I’m sorry.”
She wondered what it would have been like if he had been there a few days or a few weeks after Aaron died. Would she have fallen into such a deep hole? Would she have lost her teaching job and ended up working in a bar and living with a creepy guy? Would she have been so angry, so bitter, so lost?
“All those people here tonight – you didn’t tell them about Aaron making me think he married me? The things they said about him and me – did you ask them to tell me what you thought I needed to hear?”
“No, Dani. I wouldn’t ask anybody to lie to you. I just went to talk to them, listened to what they said about Aaron and thought you should hear it, too.”
“The person they described is the person I thought he was, but it doesn’t change the fact that the marriage was a lie.”
“We have two different views of the same person that don’t make sense. We have the man you and all these people believed Aaron to be and the one who made you think he’d married you, when he hadn’t. We need to figure out how those two things could both be true.”
“I don’t know if I can. I’ve tried this whole time to make sense of it, and there’s no sense to make.”
“You don’t have to do a thing. I’ll do it.”
She watched something flicker across his handsome face in the near darkness, something she didn’t fully understand. Pain? Regrets? Guilt? Dani still hadn’t asked him about the day Aaron died. She wasn’t ready to hear it, but she understood guilt as a motive much more easily than kindness.
“You feel guilty that he died?”
“Of course, I do. Everyone in his unit feels guilty that they weren’t there that day, when he needed them, even if he didn’t die in combat or anywhere near a war zone. It’s part of the code. We take care of each other. We rely on each other. His unit wasn’t there, but I was. Another American, trained to fight, to defend. He should have been able to rely on me.”
She worked up her nerve to ask, “Could you have saved him?”
“Maybe.” He stared off across the water, a world of pain in his voice. “I’ll never know for sure.”
Part of her wanted to scream, what do you mean, you could have saved him? He could still be here? I could ask him what the hell he meant, that day he supposedly married me? I could ask him if anything between us was real?
The other part of her had gone over it a million times, all the things she could have done differently that might have kept Aaron off that train. It was a terrible mind game people played when they lost someone.
“I could have refused to meet him in Greece,” she said. “I mean, who does that? Goes off to a foreign country to meet a man she’s only talked to on the phone or seen through a computer screen? That’s crazy.”
“People do it,” Mace said.
“But a lot of people wouldn’t. I thought it was crazy, even as I was doing it, but Aaron had a way of making me want to do anything he asked. The worst If Only for me is that I could have refused to marry him. Only nineteen days together in person, and he claimed he wanted to marry me. I could have just said I loved him, and I wanted to marry him someday, but not that day. I could have told him to ask me in six months or a year — any reasonable amount of time — but I didn’t. I said yes. If I hadn’t, we would have left a day earlier, as we’d planned. He would have been on a different train.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. He could have missed his earlier flight. It could have been cancelled. You never know with things like that.”
“Just like you’ll never know if you could have saved him.”
Mace nodded, but it didn’t look like he’d stopped feeling partly responsible for Aaron dying. Dani hadn’t either.
One train, the next. One plane or the next. Could someone’s whole life really depend on such minor details? It made life seem impossibly fragile, like every moment of every day, we keep rolling the dice. Live or die, hundreds, thousands of times.
Life couldn’t work like that, could it? She hated imagining that she made a hundred, a thousand tiny decisions a day that could change her entire life. Did she get in her car now or two minutes from now? Go through the intersection when everything was fine or two minutes later when someone ran a light, and of all the cars going through that intersection that day, hit hers?
That was crazy.
“I know it doesn’t look like it, but I promised myself I’d put all of this behind me eventually. I’d get to the point where I’m not existing in a total fog. I made a deal with myself. One year to wallow and be pissed off and hurt and just coast along any way I can. But then I’d be better. I’d have a life that wasn’t pathetic. And it’s almost been a year.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“Mace, I don’t know if I can go back to thinking maybe Aaron was the man I thought he was. If I start to hope that, and you’re wrong, if losing him hits me again as hard as it did the first time … I don’t know if I can go through that again.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t want to make this harder for you. I know it seems impossible, but I really think Aaron had a reason for what he did that last day with you. Let me find the reason.”
She shook her head. “Could I stop you, even if I wanted to?”
He flashed her a quick smile. It was gone in seconds, but … God, that man smiling was dangerous.
She shook off the completely unwelcome hit of heat. She was done with men who seemed too good to be true. Mace was the embodiment of that kind of charm. She suspected he didn’t even know how to turn it off, it was so much a part of who he was.
But he had done something really special for her today, her and all of Aaron’s friends. It had given her a lot to think about, a lot she didn’t want to think about but likely wouldn’t be ab
le to avoid.
“It’s been a long day, and I’m tired. Hearing all those stories about Aaron — ”
“I know it wasn’t easy.” Mace got to his feet, stuck out his hand and hauled her to her feet, too. “Come on. I’ll walk you to your car.”
“You think I can’t make it to my car by myself?”
“Can’t help it. My mother would be ashamed of me if I didn’t walk a lady to her car.”
“If she’d met me under the same circumstances you did, she’d know I was no lady.”
“Hey, I don’t judge anybody for what grief does to them. You do whatever you have to, just to get through the day.”
“I don’t do … what it looked like in the parking lot … I don’t … I haven’t been with anyone since Aaron.”
“None of my business,” he said.
“No. I want you to know. I really loved him. I loved him with everything I had, like I’d never let myself love anyone before.”
“I understand.”
“So, if you go off and find out Aaron was a jerk and a liar … I don’t know. Don’t tell me? Just don’t come back?”
“I can’t do that. I have to be able to help you in some way.”
“No, Mace. You really don’t.”
“I do. For me. For the promise I made that day on the train. I hate that this happened to you. I hate that Aaron died. I hate thinking about whether I could have stopped it, and I hate how you’re living now. That guy, Randy, I hate him most of all, and I hate him being in that house with you.”
“Wow.” Dani laughed, more in astonishment than amusement. “Tell me how you really feel about my life.”
“I want you out of that apartment.”
Like he had anything to do with where she lived. “What are you, my dad now?” Not that she’d ever had much of a dad, but it sounded like something she’d heard a dad would say.
“This building has some empty places,” he said.
“I can’t afford to live in this building.”
“I have friends here. Friends who are gone a lot on deployments. Places sit empty. Not a good idea. Anything could happen when a condo is empty for months.”
“You want me here, so no one will break into one of these places? Your reasoning needs work.”
“Busted water pipes. Somebody turns on the water in their bathtub and forgets about it until it starts sending water through the ceiling of the apartment below it. It could happen.”
“You don’t have to fix everything for me.”
“I want to fix this,” he said stubbornly.
“Right. Anything else, while you’re at it?”
He shrugged and tried to look reasonable, but failed. “I wish you weren’t working at that bar.”
“Good God, Mace. Are you for real?”
“You wanted to be a teacher. You should be a teacher.”
“I screwed that up royally. It takes everything you have, every day, to hold the attention of a class full of seven-year-olds, and I could barely get out of bed in the morning. I couldn’t get through a day without crying. The kids were great. They were so sweet and worried about me that they kept asking their parents and other people at school what was wrong with me. They wanted to bring me flowers and give me little glittery stickers. One of them gave me his favorite miniature car — a red convertible like his dad drove. He said maybe if his dad took me for a ride in his real convertible, I’d feel better. That’s when I knew I had to get out of there. I was worrying little kids and making them nervous that something bad was going to happen that I knew about, but no one would tell them, because they were kids. Kids were scared, because of me.”
Mace stopped twice before he got some words out. “The school should have been more supportive to you.”
“They were nice, but I was failing in every way to do my job.”
“They should have given you a leave of absence, let you come back and start over after you’d had some time.”
“I should have been up front with them from the start, told them I’d just lost … See? Even now, I don’t know what to say. I hadn’t lost my husband. He’d asked me to marry him, but I didn’t know if that part was real, either. I doubted it, so I didn’t feel right calling myself his fiancée. I lost the man I loved, but even that made me feel stupid. Everything about me and Aaron made me feel stupid and angry, so I didn’t say anything. I just crept along until it got so bad, I couldn’t anymore, and then I quit.”
“Okay, but you’re not in that place anymore.”
“And I’m a brand new teacher who was a disaster on her first job. Why would anyone ever hire me?”
“Say your fiancée was a hero, a Navy Lieutenant who helped save dozens of people during a mass shooting. People remember that. It matters, what he did.”
“So, I should play the sympathy card?”
“You deserve sympathy and understanding.”
He sounded so sincere, but needing sympathy and understanding sounded like an excuse to her, and she’d been raised not to make them. You worked hard. You took care of yourself. You didn’t depend on other people.
They got to her car. “I’ll think about it,” she said.
She needed to get away from him. It was too tempting to cry on those big, strong shoulders of his. He was a grown-man version of Aaron, sure he could solve any problem and wanting her to believe he could do the same for her.
It was ridiculously appealing. Or it would be to a woman who hadn’t gone through what Dani had.
“What if I could help you get back into teaching?” he asked.
“You can do that, too? You think you can do anything, don’t you?”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
She nodded. “You happen to have a job for me, a place for me to live, and you’re going to prove to me that my … fiancée wasn’t a jerk and a liar. Can you make me three inches taller and ten pounds lighter while you’re at it? Oh, and get rid of my freckles. They make me look like I’m twelve.”
“They don’t make you look like you’re twelve.”
He made it sound like … like he approved of her freckles.
Ridiculous man.
“That’s what you picked out from the list of things you want to do for me? Cosmetic work?”
He shrugged, and his cocky grin was back.
She didn’t like that. She stood in the parking garage, way too close to him, too tempted, shouting at herself in her own head to get out of there. The moment seemed to drag out toward eternity. His smile was so tempting. She suspected he’d used it to charm women his whole life, and that few had been able to resist him.
Dani didn’t know what she would have done if she’d been left alone with him there much longer, but a couple walking toward them distracted her.
Mace smiled at the couple as they came closer. The guy had that tight, powerful, special-ops look that Mace had, although he was older, maybe early forties.
The three of them said hello to each other, and Mace kissed the young, beautiful blonde on the cheek, which gave Dani an unwelcome twinge. Envy? Jealousy? Of course not.
“Dani, this is my friend Will and his fiancée, Amanda. Guys, this is Dani Reed.”
They exchanged knowing looks. What had Mace said about her? So many bad possibilities came to mind.
Then his friend’s mouth twitched. “Pepper-spray girl?”
“Will! Don’t!” his girlfriend said, although she was grinning, too.
Mace glared.
“All the guys love that somebody got the drop on him,” Will said. “If he can’t hold his own against a girl, he deserves to get hassled about it.”
Dani was mortified. Did they know about the threesome bit, too?
“We’re not laughing at you,” Will added. “We’re laughing at him.”
Dani was desperate to change the subject. “You two work together?”
“Yes,” Mace said. “And Amanda’s a teacher.” He turned to the pretty blonde. “So is Dani.”
“I
was a teacher,” Amanda said.
“Me, too.” Dani had a feeling there was a story there.
“Dani wants to get back into teaching,” Mace said.
“Me, too,” Amanda said.
“I think you might be able to help each other,” Mace added.
Dani growled. “He’s determined to fix my entire life,” she told his friends.
“He’s good at that,” Amanda said.
“Did he try to fix yours?”
“He helped fix it.” The look Amanda gave Mace wasn’t teasing in any way.
The energy in the space between them all shifted completely, turning serious and a little bit sad. Mace looked embarrassed, and Will pulled Amanda in close to his side and kissed her forehead in a move so sweet and tender, Dani had to look away.
“Where are you guys headed?” Mace asked, breaking the mood.
“Late dinner. Want to join us?” his friend asked.
“We ate earlier.”
“Oh, that thing was tonight?” Will asked.
Mace nodded.
They knew, Dani realized. More than about the pepper-spray incident. They knew about her and Aaron.
Will took Dani’s hand and squeezed it. “I’m so sorry about your hus—”
“Fiancée,” Mace said.
“Your fiancée. I almost went on the climbing trip with Mace. Wish I’d been there to help them both when the shooting started.”
Dani couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be in the middle of something like that, but Will seemed sincere. Amanda leaned into his side more heavily and turned her face into his shoulder for a moment. The idea that he might been there, too, was enough to terrify his fiancée.
“Thought we were going to lose this guy, too, for a while after it happened.” Will looked at Mace. “It was so hard to get information out of the German hospital after the shooting that our whole team was ready to invade the country and take over the hospital to find out how he was, and apologize for the whole thing later.”
“Wait. Hospital? You were hurt, too?” Mace’s face gave nothing away. “He didn’t tell me that.”
“He wouldn’t,” Will said.
Amanda put her hand on Mace’s arm. “You really scared us.” She looked at Dani. “He was in the hospital for weeks, in Germany and back here.”
