by Hill, Teresa
Oh, God.
She hadn’t thought about him being hurt. Never. But particularly in the SEAL teams, everything they did was probably dangerous.
Aaron had claimed he mostly sat behind a desk or walked around a warehouse full of airplane parts. It just so happened that sometimes he did it in a war zone, but still, inside a big base, inside a wall with guards at the gate. It sounded so much safer than what she imagined Mace did.
She could never let herself care for a man who worked in such a dangerous profession, who, as Aaron had done, would put himself between innocent civilians and a gunman on a train.
She felt a little sick inside just thinking about it.
“Stop it,” Mace told his friends. “You’re scaring her.”
“You should have told me,” Dani said.
“It’s over. I’m fine.” He turned back to his friends. “You guys must be hungry, right?”
“Yeah,” Will said. “We’ll take off. Dani, it was nice to meet you.”
“Yes. We should get together and talk, former teacher to former teacher,” Amanda said.
“Okay,” Dani agreed.
Right now, she wanted them gone. She wanted to know exactly what Mace had done on that train and how badly he’d been hurt. She wanted to not care nearly as much as she already did. She wanted to never again lose anyone she cared about to violence or war. She wanted to tell Mace to stop, to never go on another mission for the Navy. But he and Aaron had only boarded a passenger train in Germany, and now Aaron was gone.
Nowhere was safe.
How could she have forgotten that?
When Mace’s friends disappeared around a corner in the garage, she didn’t know what to say to him. She had questions. She wanted answers. But a part of her wanted to get away from him, get him out of her life.
It shouldn’t feel this bad to know that he almost died on that train, too. She barely knew him. She’d promised herself she’d never be vulnerable again, especially not to a man with a dangerous life.
It had sounded so simple when she first made those promises. Then Mace had come along.
He watched her cautiously, like he wasn’t quite sure what to say or do.
She tried to calm down, tried to be rational. It was impossible.
“You almost died?” she finally asked shakily.
He shrugged off the question. “I’ve come closer than that before.”
Oh, my God. She shot him a horrified look.
“No, what I meant was, I’ve had times when I felt like I had less control over a situation and was in more danger than I was on that train.”
“You felt like you were in control on that train with a guy who opened fire?”
“More than I’ve had on some missions. Helicopters are hard to keep in the air, particularly in places with a lot of sand. And there was a training mission once where a detonator malfunctioned on some explosives.”
“Oh.” She bit down hard on her bottom lip to keep from making another sound, most likely a pitiful whimper.
Helicopter crashes.
Explosives.
No big deal to him, it seemed.
“I have to go.” She reached for her car door.
“Dani, wait.” He surprised her by getting between her and the car, then pulling her into his arms and holding her tight. “I’m sorry I never said anything about it. You didn’t want to hear what happened on the train. It wasn’t something you needed to hear about. Is it really that big a deal?”
“People almost dying? Yes, that’s a big deal!” she insisted, while trying not to sink too deeply into the amazing feeling of being held against him, soaking up the warmth and solidness of him and forgetting the idea that he’d come close to dying not quite a year ago.
“You didn’t even know me then.”
“But I know you now. I know what you do, and I’ve lost enough people. I don’t even want to think about losing anyone else.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again, finally letting her go.
“Me, too.”
* * *
Chapter Twelve
Dani
She shook the whole time she drove home. When she got there, she found Randy and Karen making out on the couch. Her roommate said hello and behind Karen’s back, Randy smiled, stared at Dani and licked his lips slowly.
Dani shot him a disgusted look, and he laughed.
“What is it?” Karen turned around too late to see or understand what Randy was doing.
“Nothing, baby.” Randy squeezed her tight and went back to kissing her.
Mace was right to hate that she lived here. Dani did, too, but the place didn’t seem nearly as dangerous as being friends with Mace, Mr. I’ve-come-closer-to-dying before.
Dani went to her room and closed the door, still shaking. She wanted to know what had happened to him on the train, but she couldn’t find out without also reading about Aaron dying.
She’d never let herself delve too deeply into the media attention the attack had received. She’d click on a story about it, see a photo of Aaron, then click away quickly. Video news reports were even harder. Someone had taken photos inside the train car. Dani had clicked on one of those once. She saw the blood on the floor, blood-stained gauze or paper — whatever was left behind after the emergency medical people worked on the survivors and hauled them away. She’d run to the bathroom to throw up.
It wouldn’t be easy to read about what had happened without seeing images, but it was Mace. She wanted to know what he went through.
She pulled out her ancient laptop, which was barely limping along these days, and stared at the background image on her screen. It was a photo of Dani with the kids from the class where she had done her student teaching. She’d loved those kids.
For months previously, it had been a photo Aaron had sent her from Virginia Beach, before he deployed. It was a great shot of him standing in front of a fighter plane, the kind his unit helped maintain. Someone must have been kneeling or sitting on the ground, looking up at Aaron, who seemed impossibly tall and fit.
He’d looked so happy, so proud. She’d teased him about using that photo and his job to pick up girls. She could imagine him saying casually, “I help keep fighter planes in the air,” or maybe claiming to be a pilot. He’d feigned insult and told her he didn’t pick up girls anymore, because he had her.
After he died, she hadn’t been able to look at her computer until weeks later, when she’d asked a friend to change the background image.
She’d hated to leave her first kids, but she’d been so excited about the blissful life opening up in front of her, with a group of second graders all her own and Aaron to come home to every night.
Angry and impatient with herself for getting caught up in those memories, she called up a search engine. Just type it in, she told herself. Get it over with. Mace Daughtry, Germany, train shooting.
She couldn’t do it.
Instead, she typed American citizens, marrying in Greece, license requirements.
She’d never done that before. Betsy, her college roommate, had looked for Dani and started reading off the required paperwork, but Dani had quickly made her stop.
But that search sounded much easier now than stories about the train shooting.
She clicked on the American Embassy in Greece’s site. They suggested obtaining a license in the U.S., before going to Greece, and even then, there were special requirements — a stamp of some sort from U.S. officials and having the license translated into Greek.
She and Aaron hadn’t done any of that.
Next, she tried Americans getting a license while already in Greece …
The list of requirements was huge. Valid passports. They’d had those. Official copies of birth certificates. No. Did anyone travel with one of those?
Official translation of birth certificate into Greek, obtained at a Greek office in Athens, and it might take weeks to get it. No, they hadn’t had that.
Affidavit of Marriage, signed by an offic
ial at the American Embassy in Greece, available on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings in Athens, in English and Greek, of course. Copy of official notice of wedding published in Greek newspaper or, on small islands that had no newspaper, posted outside the mayor’s office.
No one could get married at the last minute in Greece. Aaron had to have found out right away, when he went to get the license.
Why hadn’t he just told her it was impossible?
She would have been disappointed — momentarily — but fine with waiting. She’d thought it was crazy to get married on the spur of the moment, anyway. She’d been excited, along with Aaron, but surprised and a little uneasy, too. It was like something out of a fairy tale, but Dani was a realist.
Had her own intuition tried to save her from herself and the gut-wrenching lie of that fake wedding? Of Aaron himself, who really was too good to be true?
And now here was Mace, barging into her life, determined to help her. Who did that? Mace seemed too good to be true, too.
Mace, who’d nearly died on the train and tormented himself by thinking that maybe — somehow — he could have saved Aaron.
Keep going, she told herself. She was through hiding from information that scared her or made her sad.
She went back to her favorite search engine and typed in Mace Daughtry, US Navy SEAL, Germany, train shooting.
She got photos of him, battered and bruised, unnaturally pale and stern, with a medal pinned to his uniform jacket over his hospital gown. The German Chancellor and the US Ambassador to Germany stood to either side of him.
In another photo, he looked a little better, in a uniform with rows of medals, shaking hands with the President of the United States.
He was a hero, the accompanying stories said. So was Aaron, whose mother accepted his medal from the President.
Dani vaguely remembered people telling her that Aaron was being called a hero, but she had been so out of it those first few weeks, crazy with grief and disbelief and anger.
Hero? No, he was dead. That overrode any other description.
She read a few of the stories on her computer, skipping around any mention of Aaron, to find out about Mace’s injuries. Shot twice, in his arm and his shoulder. Collapsed lung, broken collarbone, stabbed in the abdomen. Surgery, days in critical condition, more surgery in the US.
She cried as she read the list of his injuries. Despite all that, he’d stabbed the gunman, shot him twice, and finally brought him down. How had Mace done anything when he’d been hurt so badly? How had he survived?
Couldn’t Aaron have been the one to survive?
Aaron who’d lied to her, who maybe hadn’t loved her at all? Instead of Mace, who felt guilty for surviving and seemed so determined to help her pull her life back together?
She couldn’t wish that for Mace.
She pressed her fingertips hard into her forehead, wishing she could push the things she’d just read out of her head. She didn’t want those thoughts or images. She wanted to go back to the days before Mace barged into her life with all his questions about her and Aaron, without that painful bit of hope that maybe Mace was right.
But what if Aaron hadn’t lied to her, not exactly? What if he really had wanted to marry her in Greece, just couldn’t?
No, no, no, her sense of self-preservation screamed at her.
If she let herself hope for that, and Mace was wrong, she’d lose Aaron all over again. She couldn’t. Who was Mace to think he had a right to make her hope again?
* * *
Chapter Thirteen
Dani
She went back to ignoring him, although it was really hard, especially when she thought of that hug he’d given her. Either she’d imagined it felt so much better than it did, or it was the best hug she’d ever gotten in her life. For a moment, she’d felt so safe.
He was right back at the bar, nursing his two beers and eating his dinner.
Ever since the get-together with Aaron’s old unit and finding out how badly Mace had been hurt, she was having awful nightmares again.
Aaron bleeding on the floor of the train car. Aaron in pain. Aaron wanting her, needing her, and she wasn’t there.
She knew more now of what it had looked like in the train car. Adding to the images that already haunted her, now she could picture Aaron lying amid blood and the discarded bandages and tubing she’d seen in the photos.
Sometimes, Aaron stood in front of her, calling her name, but she could never reach him. Sometimes he told her he was sorry. Sometimes she screamed awful things at him about being a liar and never loving her, never marrying her. He always looked heartbroken when she did.
And she had another new series of images. Mace on the train. Mace bleeding. Mace in pain. Mace telling Dani how sorry he was as she held his hand and sat by his hospital bed, Dani feeling guilty because a part of her kept thinking, why couldn’t Aaron have been the one to survive?
If she could choose — Aaron or Mace — which one would it be?
Sometimes, she dreamed that she was on the train, too. The killer was there, with his huge, menacing gun, Aaron and Mace standing in front of him, telling Dani to choose or he’d shoot them both.
Every time she dreamed that dream, he shot them both before she could decide.
So she was impossibly tired and stressed and guilty, and she missed Mace, even though he was right across the room at the bar, wanting to make sure she was safe, when she wouldn’t even talk to him.
Jill did. She ambushed him at closing time one night and demanded to know what he’d done to mess Dani up so badly.
Dani didn’t hear what he said. His voice was a lot quieter than Jill’s.
“Look at her!” Jill yelled at him after he was the only customer left in the bar. “She can’t sleep. She looks like a zombie again, the way she did when she first started working here. What did you do?”
“Jill, stop!” Dani moved between the two of them.
“It’s okay,” Mace said.
“No, it’s not,” Jill said.
Dani whispered to Jill, “This isn’t helping.”
“Neither is him being here, right?”
“I don’t know. Just … I’ll talk to him.”
“You don’t have to,” Jill insisted.
“Yes, I do. Just … Thank you. It means a lot that you’d stand up for me this way, but this is between me and him.”
Jill shot him one more menacing look, then left the two of them alone.
Mace looked tired, too, cautious for once instead of plowing forward with what he wanted. She had to try hard not to see him bleeding and broken.
“Can’t sleep?” he asked finally.
“Better off when I don’t.” She wasn’t going to elaborate.
“Nightmares?”
She didn’t want to ask, but she did. “You, too?”
“Sometimes. Everybody has them sometimes, right?”
“I guess so.” She also believed some people had a lot more of them than others. “What are yours about? The train?”
“Sometimes.” He shot her a puzzled look. “Is this really what you want to talk about, Dani?”
“I don’t want to talk about anything. Do we really have to talk?”
“No. I just … I’m going out of town for a little while.”
“Why?”
“Work. I was hoping you would do me a favor. I’m getting some work done on my condo. Some stuff will be delivered, some workers who may need to get in and out while I’m gone. I hoped you could house-sit for me.”
“House-sit?”
“Condo-sit. Whatever you want to call it.”
“So now you’re making things up to get me out of my apartment and away from Randy?”
“I’m not making anything up. Would it really be a hardship for you to be away from that asshole Randy for a few days?”
“No. I just … ”
“Don’t trust me?”
“Not when you’re in Superman mode.”
“I don’t even know what that means.”
“When you’re trying to save the world. Or just me. I’m not your responsibility — ”
“Never said you were.”
“Yeah, you did. Kind of.”
“Believe me, I know I can’t save the world,” Mace said. “I found that out long before you or Aaron came along. But would it kill you to just trust me a little bit? To let someone help you once in a while?”
“I trusted Aaron. You know how that turned out.”
“Well, I’m not Aaron! I would be, if I could. I’d be dead instead, for you. But I can’t.”
“No. Don’t say that. I … Dammit, I thought it myself for about three seconds, and I hate myself for it. Don’t you say it.”
He sighed heavily. “Don’t hate yourself for it. Don’t hate yourself for anything. I don’t want that.”
“I read about how badly you were hurt. You didn’t tell me any of that!”
“Why would I?”
“Because you almost died trying to save those people. Because you’re a hero — ”
“I’m not a hero. I did my job, what I was trained to do — ”
“Which happened to save a ton of people’s lives — ”
“We don’t know that. We don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t been there. Maybe more people would have survived if I’d done something different that day. We don’t know that, either.”
“You can’t seriously think you didn’t do enough that day — ”
His hard look seemed to beg her to stop talking, to let this go.
“Mace, it was just a horrible thing that happened, and we’ll never make sense of it. All the what-ifs in the world won’t change it. You told me that, and you were right. You can’t tell me to stop doing the what-if thing if you’re still doing it yourself.”
He said nothing.
“If you’re volunteering for some kind of mission so your apartment will be empty, so you can get me to stay there and be away from Randy, and you end up getting hurt, I will never forgive you!”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
