“Take your time,” Jane said softly, echoing the patience he had shown her.
Gabe nodded, his eyes fixed on the painted shells spread across the table. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet but steady.
“Her name was Abigail,” Gabe began. “Abi. We met fourteen years ago, fresh out of SEAL training and thinking I was invincible. She was working as a field medic, attached to our unit for a deployment in Afghanistan.”
Jane listened, watching Gabe’s face as he spoke. She could see the love there, even after six years. The kind of love that did not fade just because the person was gone.
“She was beautiful,” Gabe continued, a small smile crossing his face. “But it was not her looks that got me. It was her laugh. This big, uninhibited laugh seemed impossible coming from someone so small. And she was fearless. Completely, utterly fearless. She would run into situations that made grown men hesitate to help someone who was hurt.”
Gabe picked up his coffee cup, wrapping his hands around it the same way Jane had earlier, drawing comfort from the warmth.
“We fell in love fast,” he said. “The kind of intense, all-consuming love that happens when you are in a combat zone and every day might be your last. We got married six months after we met. My mother tried to talk us into waiting. She said we were too young and should take our time. But we didn’t want to wait. We wanted every moment we could get together.”
Jane felt her chest tighten, already dreading where this story was going.
“For four years, we deployed together whenever possible,” Gabe said. “It was not always easy. The military doesn’t love having married couples in the same unit. But we made it work. And when we weren’t deployed, we were planning our future. Abi wanted kids. A house near the beach. She talked about going back to school, becoming a nurse practitioner, working in a civilian hospital where the worst trauma was a car accident instead of an IED.”
Gabe’s smile faded, his expression growing darker.
“Six years ago, Abi and I were both called out at the same time,” Gabe began, his voice steady but his hands betraying his tension as they gripped his coffee cup. “At first, we thought it was to different locations. Different missions entirely. But when I got to the staging area, I found out we were both being sent to the same forward operating base in Syria.”
A small, sad smile crossed Gabe’s face at the memory.
“We were surprised,” he continued. “Happy surprised. Abi was being sent to provide medical support. Some hostages had already been recovered in an earlier operation, and they needed immediate medical attention. I was leading my SEAL team on follow-up reconnaissance. Intelligence suggested there might be more hostages in the region, and we were there to assess and potentially extract if we found them.”
Jane watched Gabe’s face, seeing the way his expression shifted between the happiness of that memory and the pain of what came after.
“The second day we were there,” Gabe said, his voice growing rougher, “we got intel that the last of the hostages had been spotted. A village about a day’s ride from the base. The original plan was to send a fresh SEAL team. My guys had just come off a seventy-two-hour op and needed rest. But the area had been quiet. No hostile activity for weeks. And we were already geared up and ready to go.”
Gabe’s hands tightened around the coffee cup until his knuckles went white.
“So I made the call,” he said. “Left a few men behind at the base for security and took the rest of my team. When we left, Abi was near the entrance to the medical tent. She waved goodbye, and my team was ragging on me about being married to the prettiest medic in the Corps.” His voice cracked slightly. “That was the last time I saw her alive.”
Jane reached across the table and took his hand, the same wayhe had held hers earlier. Gabe gripped back hard, as if she were the only thing anchoring him to the present.
“The mission went wrong from the start,” Gabe continued, his voice flat now, emotionless in the way people got when recounting trauma. “The intelligence was bad. There were no hostages in that village. Nothing but empty buildings and a few scared locals who scattered at the sight of us. We searched everywhere. Every structure, every hiding place. Nothing.”
He paused, drawing a shaky breath.
“I radioed it back to base,” Gabe said. “Reported that the intel was bogus, that we were coming back. But the person I’d been coordinating with, the intelligence officer who’d sent us out there, she was gone. The person who answered said she’d disappeared more than a day ago. That they’d been looking for her. That her credentials were fake and that she’d fed us false information.”
Jane felt her breath catch, already understanding where this was going.
“And then he told me,” Gabe said, his voice breaking now, “that I needed to get back to base immediately. That the base was under attack. Had been under attack for the past three hours. That it was a coordinated assault. With mortars, small arms fire, and explosives. We’d been lured away deliberately so the base would have minimal defense.”
Tears were forming in Gabe’s eyes, streaming down his face.
“We moved as fast as we could,” Gabe said. “Pushed our vehicles to their limits, drove through the night. But it takes time to cover that kind of distance, and we’d been sent a full day’s ride away. By the time we got back...”
He stopped, his breath coming in ragged gasps.
“By the time we got back, the rescue and cleanup crews were already there,” Gabe continued. “The attack was over. The hostiles had hit hard and fast and then disappeared. And the casualties...” His voice broke completely. “There were so many casualties.”
Jane squeezed his hand tighter, her own tears flowing freely now.
“I jumped out of the vehicle before it even stopped,” Gabe said. “I started running toward the medical tent because I knew that’s where Abi would have been. Where she would have stayed, treating the wounded, refusing to take cover while there were people who needed her help. That’s who she was. That’s what she did.”
Gabe’s shoulders shook with silent sobs.
