“But they wouldn’t let me near her,” he said. “My commanding officer physically held me back. He told me she was gone. That a mortar round had come through the roof of the medical tent. That she’d been trying to save wounded soldiers when it hit. She’d taken shrapnel, massive trauma, but she’d kept working for almost an hour even while bleeding out.”
“Oh, Gabe,” Jane whispered, her voice breaking.
“Three men,” Gabe said, the words coming out choked. “They told me she saved three men before she finally collapsed. She’d refused treatment herself, kept saying others needed it more. By the time they got her to the operating table, there was too much damage. Too much blood loss. She died during surgery.”
Gabe pulled his hand from Jane’s and covered his face, his entire body shaking with grief that was six years old but felt as fresh as if it had happened yesterday.
Jane stood up, ignoring the protest from her back, and moved around the table. She wrapped her arms around Gabe and held him while he cried, the way someone should have held him six years ago, but probably hadn’t, because he was a SEAL and SEALs were supposed to be strong, supposed to be able to handle anything.
“I wasn’t there,” Gabe said, his voice muffled against her shoulder. “I wasn’t there when she needed me most. I was chasing false intelligence, following orders based on lies, while Abi was dying. And if I hadn’t taken that mission, if I had questioned the intel more carefully, if I had sent another team like I was supposed to?—”
“It was not your fault,” Jane said fiercely, holding him tighter. “Gabe, listen to me. It was not your fault.”
“A kid came to me afterward,” Gabe continued, as if he had not heard her. “A fourteen-year-old boy. He’d been one of the hostages we’d recovered earlier, the ones Abi was treating. He had two little sisters with him. And he told me that when the attack started, Abi had protected them. She had thrown herselfover his sisters when the mortar hit. She’d taken shrapnel that would have killed them.”
Fresh tears streamed down Gabe’s face.
“He said she fought for them,” Gabe whispered. “Even while she was dying, she was still trying to protect them. Still trying to save everyone. That’s so like her. That’s exactly who Abi was.”
Jane held him while he cried, her own tears mixing with his. She understood now. Understood the crushing weight of survivor’s guilt. Understood why he had spent six years throwing himself into danger, trying to balance the scales, trying to make Abi’s death mean something by saving as many people as he could.
“My head knows it was not my fault,” Gabe said finally, his voice raw. “Knows that I was following orders, that the intelligence officer was likely a plant, that the whole thing was designed to draw defenders away from the base. But my heart keeps saying I should have known better. I should have questioned it more. I should have been there to protect her.”
“Or maybe you would have died too,” Jane said gently, echoing what she’d said earlier. “Maybe you both would have been lost instead of just her. Maybe those three men she saved would have died. Maybe that boy’s little sisters would have been killed. You cannot know, Gabe. You cannot torture yourself with what-ifs.”
Gabe pulled back slightly and looked up at her with red-rimmed eyes.
“For six years, I’ve been trying to convince myself of that,” he said. “For six years, I’ve been taking every dangerous mission, volunteering for every deployment, throwing myself into situations that should have killed me. Because part of me thought if I kept saving people, if I kept being the hero, maybe it would balance out. Maybe it would make up for not being there when Abi needed me.”
Jane understood that impulse completely. The desperate need to do something, anything, to make sense of senseless loss.
“But it doesn’t work that way,” Gabe said, his voice breaking. “I have saved dozens of people over the past six years. Hundreds, maybe. And it hasn’t brought Abi back. It hasn’t eased the guilt or filled the hole she left.”
“No,” Jane agreed softly. “It wouldn’t. Because grief doesn’t work that way. Loss doesn’t work that way.”
They stood there together, Jane holding Gabe while he cried for the wife he had lost and the years he had spent running from his pain. She understood that running. She had done it herself for three years, hiding at the inn and going through the motions of living without really being alive.
Finally, Gabe’s tears slowed. He pulled back and wiped his face with his hands, giving Jane a watery smile.
“Now I am a wreck too,” he said, echoing her words from earlier.
Jane smiled through her own tears. “We make quite a pair.”
“We do,” Gabe agreed.
They stood there for a moment longer, and then Jane helped Gabe back into his chair. She moved around the table to her own seat, her back protesting slightly from the awkward position, but she ignored it. Some pain was worth it.
“Thank you,” Gabe said quietly. “For listening. For not trying to tell me it gets easier or that time heals all wounds or any of the other useless platitudes people say when they do not know what else to offer.”
“Because it doesn’t get easier,” Jane said. “It just gets different. The pain becomes part of you instead of consuming all of you. You learn to carry it instead of being crushed by it.”
“Exactly,” Gabe said, relief evident in his voice that she understood.
They sat in silence for a while, both processing everything they had shared. The rain had lightened outside, no longer the steady downpour but a gentle mist. Through the windows, Jane could see the clouds beginning to break apart, hints of blue sky peeking through.
“Do you think,” Gabe said finally, “that we’re supposed to feel guilty for moving on? For finding happiness again after losing the people we loved?”
Jane considered the question carefully. It was something she had wrestled with herself over the past few days as her feelings for Gabe had grown stronger.
