“My shoulder.” I touched the scarring. “Training exercise off Coronado. IED simulation went wrong. Shrapnel caught me and a guy named Weaver who was my best swimmer.”
She didn’t move. Didn’t stiffen or pull back.
“I was team lead. My call put us in that position. Weaver lost hearing in his left ear. I lost—” I paused. The words were hard not because they were complicated, but because I’d never said them to anyone who wasn’t wearing the same uniform. “The shrapnel tore up my lung. Healed, mostly. Enough to function, not enough to pass dive medical. They retired me with full honors and a handshake and I spent six months figuring out who I was if I wasn’t a SEAL.”
The frogs pulsed outside. She traced a line down my sternum, unhurried.
“And?” she said.
She didn’t offer pity or careful sympathy or the voice people use when they think you’ll break.
“And I moved home. Bought this place. Cal offered me S&S. Built a life that worked.” I looked at the ceiling. “A small one. A quiet one. Worked fine.”
“Past tense.”
I turned my head. She was watching me in the near-dark with those honey-brown eyes, and the look on her face wasn’t sympathy. It was recognition. Two people who’d built their lives around being enough on their own, lying in a bed that belonged to both of them and neither of them.
“What happened to Weaver?” she asked.
“Runs a dive shop in San Diego. We talk every couple weeks.”
“Does he blame you?”
“No.”
“Do you blame you?”
I was quiet for a beat. “Less than I used to.”
She pressed her lips to the scar on my shoulder. One kiss, firm, unhesitating. Then she settled back against my chest and closed her eyes.
SHE FELL ASLEEP BETWEENone breath and the next. I stayed awake.
Her breathing was steady beside me. The rhythm of someone who’d stopped bracing for bad news. The charts she’d taped to my wall caught the moonlight: the dispatch, her bathymetric overlays, a hand-drawn diagram of the debris field with arrows and dates in her handwriting. My bookshelf held her flip-flops and a stack of photocopied harbor records. The gear rack by the door had her wetsuit hanging next to mine, drip-drying onto the same pine floor.
My boathouse didn’t feel like mine anymore. It felt like ours, and the distinction had happened so gradually I’d only noticed after the water was already somewhere new—the way the tide changes, not a break but a shift in direction you register too late to mark the exact moment it turned.
I was in trouble. Deep, serious, the kind that doesn’t have an extraction plan.
The thought settled into my chest next to the sound of her breathing and the creek beneath the floorboards and the frogs filling the marsh. Warm. Certain. Almost peaceful.
I pulled her closer. She murmured something I didn’t catch and pressed her back into my chest.
I closed my eyes.
Chapter Five
Marley
I PACKED THE COOLERwhile Beau ran the pre-dive check.
It wasn’t much. Boiled shrimp from yesterday’s batch, still cold from his fridge. A bag of peaches I’d picked up at the farm stand on Marsh Road because they’d smelled reckless and perfect. Bottles of water, ice, two of the ginger beers I’d started stocking in his kitchen without either of us commenting on it. I loaded everything onto Reckoning’s deck while the sky turned from pewter to pale gold over the marsh, and the pelicans worked the channel in their heavy-shouldered patrol.
Beau glanced up from the regulator assembly. His eyes tracked the cooler, the peaches, the ginger beer. He didn’t say anything. But the corner of his mouth moved, and the warmth that spread through my chest had nothing to do with the sunrise.
“Fuel’s topped off,” I said. “Tide’s right in forty minutes.”
“Copy.” He finished the check and stowed the backup gear in the rack I’d reorganized last night while he was on the phone with Cal. His system was better than mine for hardware. I could admit that now without internal protest, which felt like growth, or possibly Stockholm syndrome.
