“I mean it.” My voice cracks, but I don’t look away. “If you want me to walk away when the roads clear, I will. But you owe me the truth first. All of it. Because I’m standing here freezing my ass off for a man who won’t even fight for us, and I deserve to know why.”
The silence stretches between us, broken only by the wind and the distant creak of snow-laden branches. Finn’s face is a mask of conflicting emotions—pain, frustration, something that might be longing.
Then he drives the axe into the chopping block and exhales.
“Jimmy’s wife was pregnant when he died.”
The words hit me like a physical blow.
“She was seven months along. Their first kid. He used to show everyone the ultrasound pictures, talk about how he was going to teach his son to fish, coach his little league team.” Finn’s voice is flat, mechanical. The voice of someone who’s told this story to himself a thousand times in the dark. “The baby was born two months after the IED. A little boy. James Jr.”
“Finn...”
“I went to the funeral. All six of them, one after another. Stood there in my dress blues while their families cried and asked me why I survived when their husbands and sons and brothers didn’t.” His jaw tightens. “I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t.”
I want to reach for him, but something in his posture warns me off. He’s not done. Maybe he’s never told anyone the whole thing before, and stopping him now would be cruel.
“Jimmy’s wife—Sarah—she found me after the service. I thought she was going to blame me. Scream at me. Ask me why I wasn’t with them when it happened.” He laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “Instead, she thanked me. For being his friend. For serving with him. For surviving. She said Jimmy talked about me in his letters home. Said I was the one who kept them all sane out there.”
“That sounds?—”
“It was worse than blame.” His eyes finally meet mine, and the pain in them steals my breath. “Blame I could have handled. Anger, resentment—those I could have fought against. But gratitude? For living when her husband was in the ground?When her son would never know his father?” He shakes his head. “I couldn’t look at her. Couldn’t look at any of them. I took the first flight back to base and didn’t leave my bunk for a week.”
“Finn...”
“I moved up here three months later. Told myself I was healing. Really, I was just hiding. Building furniture because it was easier than building a life. Staying alone because it was safer than risking losing anyone else.”
The snow falls around us, soft and relentless. I’m shivering now, the cold finally penetrating, but I don’t move.
“You didn’t hide,” I say quietly. “You survived. The same way you survived the explosion. The same way you survive every day.”
“Surviving isn’t living.”
“No. But it’s a start.”
He shakes his head slowly. “You don’t understand. Every relationship, every connection—they end. They always end. Death or divorce or just people drifting apart. And I can’t—” His voice breaks. “I watched six men I loved die in a single moment. I can’t go through that again. I can’t love someone and lose them.”
“So you won’t love anyone at all.”
“It’s safer.”
“It’s cowardly.”
The word hangs between us, sharp and unforgiving. Finn flinches like I’ve struck him.
“You think I don’t know that?” His voice rises. “You think I don’t wake up every day knowing I’m wasting the life they didn’t get to have? They had families, Marcella. Futures. And I’m up here building furniture and avoiding people because I’m too fucking scared to try.”
“Then try.” I close the distance between us, grabbing his arms through the flannel. “Try, Finn. Not for them, not for me—for yourself. Because you deserve more than this half-life you’ve built, and somewhere underneath all that fear, you know it.”
He stares at me, breathing hard. The snow catches in his hair, his beard, his eyelashes. He looks wild and broken and beautiful, and I want to save him so badly it hurts.
But I can’t save him. He has to save himself.
“You want the whole truth?” I say, my voice steadier now. “Here’s mine. Stephen didn’t just criticize me. He systematically dismantled everything I believed about myself over three years.”
Finn goes still.
“It started small. Comments about my weight disguised as concern for my health. Suggestions that maybe I shouldn’t laugh so loud in public. Little corrections, little criticisms, until I didn’t recognize myself anymore.” The memories rise, bitter and familiar. “He told me my food blog was embarrassing. That no one wanted to see a fat woman posting pictures of her dinner. That I should get a real job and stop wasting time on something that would never amount to anything.”
