That’s my first coherent thought as her fingers press into the muscle above my knee. Warm and surprisingly strong, kneading with practiced confidence. She wasn’t lying about knowing massage techniques.
“Tell me if the pressure’s too much,” she murmurs, working her way up toward the worst of the scarring. “Some of this tissue feels pretty tight.”
“It’s fine.”
“Finn.” There’s gentle reproach in her voice. “I can’t help if you don’t tell me what hurts.”
I exhale slowly. Force myself to focus on her question instead of the sensation of her skin against mine. “Higher. The scar tissue near the—” I gesture vaguely. “There.”
She adjusts, finds the spot, and I have to bite back a sound that’s half pain, half something else entirely.
“Sorry,” she says immediately, easing off.
“Don’t. It’s good,” I say, my voice gruff. “Hurts because it needs to.”
She nods, understanding somehow, and continues working, her thumbs tracing the edges of the scarring with a gentleness that makes my chest tight.
No one touches me like this. No one has touched me like this in years—maybe ever. Even the physical therapists at the VA were clinical, detached. Professional.
This isn’t professional. This is Marcella’s hair falling across her face as she concentrates, her lower lip caught between her teeth, her warmth radiating into me everywhere we connect.
“The IED,” she says quietly, not quite a question.
“Yeah.”
“You mentioned it last night. That you were checking a building when it happened.”
My jaw clenches. I don’t talk about this. Not with Moira, not with the VA shrink I stopped seeing, not with anyone. But her hands keep moving, steady and soothing, and somehow the words start spilling out anyway.
“Routine patrol. We’d done that route a hundred times. Jimmy was point, I was on overwatch, and the building on our left had been flagged for possible activity. I peeled off to check it while they continued down the road.” I stare at the fire, not seeing it. “Thirty seconds. That’s all it was. Thirty seconds, and when I came back out, there was nothing left.”
Her hands still on my leg.
“Six men. My brothers. And I wasn’t there.” The words taste like ash. “I should have been with them. Should have died with them. But I was fifty meters away, and when the blast hit, I just?—”
“Finn.” Her voice is thick. “Look at me.”
I don’t want to. Looking at her means seeing whatever’s on her face—pity, horror, the careful distance people put between themselves and tragedy. I’ve seen it a hundred times. Can’t stand to see it from her.
But I look anyway.
Her eyes are shining, but there’s no pity there. Just... understanding. Recognition. Like she’s looking at my pain and seeing something familiar.
“You survived,” she says quietly. “That’s not a betrayal. That’s just what happened.”
“It doesn’t feel that way.”
“I know.” Her thumb traces a slow circle on my scarred skin. “Surviving something terrible never feels like enough. You spend the rest of your life wondering why you got to keep going when everything else stopped.”
I stare at her. “How do you?—”
“My marriage.” She laughs, but it’s hollow. “I know it’s not the same. Losing your team, losing my marriage—they’re not comparable. But I spent three years slowly dying inside, and when I finally got out, I didn’t feel relieved. I felt like a failure. Like if I’d just been better, smaller, quieter, I could have made it work.”
“That’s not?—”
“I know.” She meets my gaze steadily. “I know that now. But for a long time, I believed it. I believed everything Stephen told me. That I was too much. Too loud. Too passionate. Toobig.” Her voice catches on the last word. “He had a way of making every part of me feel like a burden he was generously tolerating.”
My hands clench into fists against the couch cushions.
