She wasn’t looking at me. Her gaze stayed on the plane, like it was something she could face down if she stared hard enough.
“You remember?” I asked.
“Every second,” she said. “Your dad told me you left in the middle of the night. Said you’d decided the Rangers were the only thing that made sense.”
“They were, back then.”
“I waited on your porch with a stupid cup of coffee for an hour before I realized you weren’t coming.”
Guilt stabbed me clean, even though those memories were years old and worn at the edges.
“Julia…”
She finally met my eyes. There was a sheen there that had nothing to do with the wind.
“I get it,” she said. “You were a kid trying to survive his own head. We knew each other our entire life, but we didn’t really know each other. I was too shy to talk to you most of the time, because I was afraid I would tell you that I love you. You didn’t owe me anything back then. I was just the girl down the road with a crush and a half-finished degree.”
She stepped closer, the wind snatching pieces of her hair and lashing them across her cheek.
“But I’m not that girl anymore. And you don’t get to disappear on me without warning this time.”
I reached up and smoothed a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’m not disappearing.”
“You say that like you can guarantee it.”
“I can’t guarantee anything except this,” I said. “I will do everything in my power to walk back to you when this is done.”
“That’s what scares me,” she whispered. “Because ‘everything in your power’ usually means setting yourself on fire for someone else.”
I huffed out a breath. “You’re not someone else.”
“Try telling that to the part of you that still thinks dying for the mission is the only way to make up for the ones you couldn’t save.”
She always did cut right through to the bone.
“Julia—”
“They’re going to see what Reese did to you and think they can use it,” she pressed. “Use your guilt. Your sense of responsibility. Convince you that you’re the only one who can prevent Echo 2.0. What if they’re right? What if you break yourself again trying to fix what they’ll break anyway?”
I didn’t have an easy answer.
The engines on the transport spun faster. Time bleeding away.
“I don’t know what they’re going to offer me,” I said honestly. “But I know what I’m willing to take.”
“And what’s that?”
I tightened my grip on her hand. “Any role that lets me come home to you at the end of the day instead of a flag-draped box. I have the Brave Team and that’s who I am.”
Something in her eyes cracked. Tears she refused to let fall gathered anyway.
“You say that now,” she whispered. “But what happens when you’re in that room and they pile the world on your shoulders?”
I stepped closer, close enough that if I leaned in an inch, I’d feel her breath on my neck.
“Then I remember what it felt like standing in that core thinking I’d lost you,” I said. “And I say no.”
Her throat worked.
