Rain pounded the windows, thunder rolling almost continuously now. The storm outside matched the one she was finally letting happen inside.
I held her through it all. Through the crying that turned to hiccups. Through the shaking that gradually slowed. Through the exhausted silence that followed. My shirt was soaked with her tears, her body heavy against mine as the emotional exhaustion took hold.
Finally, she quieted. Her breathing evened out, and I thought she might have fallen asleep. The rain had settled into a steady rhythm, no longer violent but consistent. Cleansing.
“I don’t know how you do this.” Her voice was hoarse, barely above a whisper. “How you don’t crack under the pressure.”
“Military trained me for it. Compartmentalizing, staying focused on the mission even when everything’s going to hell.” I shifted slightly, looking down at her. “But this is different. In combat, I knew who the enemy was. Had my unit watching my six. Here, having you in danger, watching you go through this—it’s harder than any deployment I’ve been on.”
She shifted against me, and the dress Oliver had forced her to wear rode up above her knees. I froze as I saw her bare legs clearly for the first time. Scars ran up both calves and higher where I couldn’t see, some thin and white, others thicker and still pink.
She saw me looking and tugged at the dress, trying to cover them.
“Don’t.” I caught her hand gently. “You don’t have to hide them.”
“They’re ugly.”
“They’re proof you survived something.” I traced one of the scars lightly with my finger, feeling her tense then slowly relax. “Your car accident?”
She nodded, not meeting my eyes.
“Will you tell me about it? If you don’t mind?”
For a long moment, I didn’t think she would answer. Then she took a shaky breath.
“Four months after you left. January. Everything was covered in ice.” Her voice was distant, like she was watching it happen to someone else. “I was driving home from working late at a client’s office downtown. The road looked fine, but black ice is invisible until you’re sliding.”
My chest tightened. Four months after I’d left her. While I’d been drinking myself into oblivion, trying to forget everything that had happened overseas, she’d been?—
“The car went off the embankment. Rolled several times before it stopped.” She was still looking at the scars, not at me. “The frame crushed in. The roof pressing down on my skull, the dashboard cutting into my legs. I could hear my bones breaking but couldn’t feel them yet. Adrenaline, I guess.”
Jesus Christ. I forced myself to stay still, to let her tell it at her own pace.
“Four hours.” Her voice broke slightly. “Four hours trapped in that tin can while it compressed around me. I could hear the rescue crews. Could hear them saying they had to be careful or the whole thing would collapse completely. Every time they cut into the metal, the car would shift, get smaller. I kept thinking I was going to die in there, crushed like a bug.”
“Mia—”
“The claustrophobia started after that. I couldn’t get in an elevator. Couldn’t even close the bathroom door all the way. Took months of therapy just to be able to sleep with a blanket over me.” She finally looked up at me, her eyes still red from crying. “It changed who I was. Made me this broken, fearful thing. A shell of the woman you knew.”
“No.” The word came out harder than I intended. “It didn’t make you a shell of anything. It made you stronger.”
She started to protest, but I continued.
“You survived something that would have killed most people. You didn’t let it stop you. You found ways to adapt, to keep living. You became a successful photographer, found work that gave you what you needed. And when you got grabbed by militia assholes and shoved into your worst nightmare, you didn’t just survive—you helped with the mission. You’ve been courageous as hell.”
“I screamed myself raw in that closet. You saw me. That’s not courage.”
“That’s human. Courage isn’t about not being afraid. It’s about functioning despite the fear. And that’s exactly what you’ve done for three days straight.” I cupped her face, thumb brushing away a tear. “I just wish I’d been there. After the accident. To help you through it.”
“I wish you’d been there too.”
The guilt hit like a physical blow. I’d been so focused on protecting her from my darkness that I’d left her to face her own alone.
“But I understand better now,” she continued softly. “You were fighting your own demons. That last mission—your friends dying, one of them killing himself afterward. You were drowning and didn’t want me to know it.”
I was humbled by her understanding, by her ability to see past her own pain to recognize mine. “I still wish I’d been there. If I had known, Kitten,”—the old pet name fell out of my mouth unbidden—“I would’ve been there.”
“I know that. I believe you.”
