“My team was gearing up, doing mission prep, and I… I was gone a lot. Working long hours, focused on the upcoming mission.” His shrug is a barely there movement, more of a shift than an actual lift of his shoulder. “I got scrubbed from the mission and placed on watch. Buried my daughter. Saw a therapist and tried to figure out how to live. It was a lot—honestly too much. I fought myself with feelings of failure. In my job, as a father, a husband. I was a mess for a while.
“I finally figured out that I had to do something, so I took as much leave as I could and decided to separate from the navy. Thank God, Calvin—the guy who started Fire Born Security—hired me. I don’t know if it was pity or what, but as much as I’d like to think I was getting my shit together at that point…” The grimace that twists his face finishes the thought better than words.
Miles sucks in a lungful of air and then blows it out his nose, preparing for whatever he has to say next. “I’m not proud of it because I knew she was sick, but the first thing I did was divorce my wife. The DA took that, ran with it at trial, and pushed for the harshest penalty for Aly. There was a lot of guilt with that.” He shifts his weight, maybe swaying a little, his head hanging low. Shame and guilt draped over him.
“Miles, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say. Is… is that why you went to California? Not for work, but to see…” I don’t know how to address her. Aly? His wife? The woman who took what he’d obviously held very dear?
He lifts his head and briefly meets my eyes before tilting it up to the sky, a quick flash of lightning illuminating his strong profile. “Yeah. While the DA was pushing for a sentence of life in prison, I worked closely with her doctors, family, her legalteam to have her placed in a long-term facility. What she’d done was awful, beyond my worst nightmare, but she was sick. Prison wouldn’t give her the kind of mental health care she needed, so I did everything in my power to help her get just that.”
Thunder rumbles in the distance.
“Did it not… Your message when you were leaving Cali sounded like whatever you were there for was a success. Did I read that wrong? I mean, obviously, I thought it was work stuff, but I thought?—”
“No,” he says, gently cutting me off. “You’re right. It was all good. When I left California, she was being transported to her new facility, but by the time I landed here, she’d taken her own life.”
I can’t help the gasp that shoots from my lungs, the sound of it loud in the still night.
“Yeah, I know. I did everything I could to make things right. To make sure that another life wasn’t lost to Aly’s illness. It baffled the prosecutors on her case. I lobbiedforher, not against. Begged for her to get help, not just be locked away. And I failed. Again.”
“Miles, you didn’t fail?—”
He hums in disagreement maybe. “But I did. Ifeellike I did, even more so now that she’s gone. You know, I worked through all the stages of grief. I took a lot of my initial anger out on Maggie and?—”
“Your truck?”
He laughs, quick and with more resignation than humor. “Yep. I poured myself into restoring her, finding and fixing every little thing, stripping her down and building her up. And at the same time, I put myself back together. I know it sounds stupid, but working on that truck saved me. And when she was done and Calvin saw me struggling again, he suggested taking a position here, starting over fresh.” He gives me a tight smile.
We both came here to start over. To move on from losses so big, so life changing. Two tattered hearts seeking salvation.
“And I did. I found happiness I hadn’t thought I’d find again. A job that’s, God, the next best thing to what I was doing as a SEAL. Still fulfilling but without the deployments, without the part that I blamed for missing Aly’s spiral. And when things felt good, really good, you fell into my arms. You and Jake”—he glances around my little yard—“all of this, gave me the pieces I had been missing. A family. It was all perfect, almost too good to be true. So, when Ryan—Aly’s lawyer—called to tell me she was gone, that she’d taken her life…”
Warm drops of rain fall, landing on the top of my head like tender kisses. Wet dots bloom on the bench, raindrops getting fatter and falling harder as each second ticks by.
“Come inside,” I say, rising to my feet. I grasp Miles’s hand, guiding him toward the house.
“I should go.” He tugs on his hand, but there’s no way I’m going to let him go. Not now, not after all that he told me.
I lead him into the kitchen, and as if it were waiting for us, the sky opens up as the door shuts behind us. In the bright glow of the overhead light, Miles looks even worse than he did at his apartment. Eyes bloodshot, hair and beard wild. His clothes rumpled, splotches of rain darkening his t-shirt.
“Go sit down,” I tell him, waving a hand to quiet him when he starts to protest.
I grab a glass of water and ease down on the couch, Miles parked in the center, elbows resting on his strong thighs.
“Drink this and then finish what you were going to say. The lawyer called you,” I prompt, handing him the glass.
Miles quickly drains it, setting it on the table when he’s done. “Yeah, all the ways I failed Aly and the baby hit me like a punch to the gut. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t think. It was like a warning to let you and Jake go before I failed you more thanI already had.” Exhaustion dragging him down, Miles slumps back into the downy cushions.
“How do you think you failed us, Miles?”
He tenses briefly. “The bench, the robbery. I put Jake in danger, and you could have lost him. It would’ve been my fault; I’d have taken him from you. I know what that feels like, Chloe. I’d rather bear the pain of losing you both, knowing you were safe without me, than to have you suffer that loss. But turns out”—he turns his head, so his hazy brown gaze is directed right at me—“I don’t think I can live without you guys. I love you so goddamn much, it hurts. I’m tired of pain. So fucking tired of it.”
I reach out, placing my palm on his cheek, my thumb stroking his whiskers away from his lips.
“I love you,” Miles repeats, his lips moving against my thumb. “I don’t want to lose you.”
I press my lips to his temple and pull his body toward me, settling his torso between my thighs and his head against my stomach. Almost immediately, Miles’s breathing evens out, his face going slack with sleep. I trace his dark, heavy brows before trailing my fingers across his cheekbones and down his nose.
Did his daughter look like him? Did her mouth purse in sleep with the perfect cupid-bow lips, like his? Or did he see his wife—ex-wife—every time he looked at her? How did he get up each morning and get through his day, not showing any of that pain to the world?
