“Sometimes the mood has to be what it is. Right, Solo?” Shay squeezed Solo’s shoulder, and she nodded. “But we’re your family, and you can talk to us about anything.”
Solo took a long pull on her beer and dropped back into the soft lounge chair. “I’ve moved into the spare room. Janie doesn’t want to share the same bed with me anymore.”
Shay shared a worried glance with Gabe. If this was the end, Solo could go off the rails spectacularly; she’d never been good at handling bad situations, preferring to lose herself in the oblivion of alcohol than deal with them directly. Which was why no one could’ve been more surprised than Shay when Solo called to invite her to their wedding. She could never have imagined that Solowould settle down, let alone be the first one of them to do so.
In her peripheral vision, she saw RB almost bursting to make some amusing comment, so she shook her head. This wasn’t the time for their usual banter.
“Has she told you any more about the person she’s talking to?” Gabe asked.
“She won’t tell me anything about him, other than he’s a lawyer at her firm. And she says there’s nothing going on between them. She says he’s just a friend.”
Talk about mic drop. Judging by the look on everyone else’s faces, they’d assumed the same as she had: that the other person was another woman. Now that Shay thought about it, Solo hadn’t mentioned gender when she said Janie was “talking” to someone. The bombshell opened up a whole heap of other questions.
“I thought… Is Janie…” Shay sighed. If she couldn’t find the right questions, it was up to Gabe. She widened her eyes at Gabe, and her answering expression made it clear she didn’t know what the hell to say to that either.
“She’d never been with a woman until me,” Solo said finally. “Well, not since college, and she said they’d just made out.”
Shit. This was beyond any of their little family’s experience. What if Solo had just been a blip in Janie’s otherwise gold-star heterosexuality? Solo could compete with another woman, but a man presented a whole different challenge, especially if that’s who Janie had been used to in her bed.
“She’s bisexual?” Gabe asked.
Solo took another slug of her beer. “I don’t know, and I’m not sure Janie has a label for herself. It was a non-issue when we hooked up, and we didn’t really discuss it because it didn’t seem important. We were together, and the past was irrelevant because we were committing to each other.”
“And now?” Shay picked at the edge of the beer label.
“Now she’stalkingto a guy and says she needs some space to work things out.”
“Okay, that’s what she wants.” Shay looked at Solo. “What about what you want? Do you want to fight for your family or let her go?”
Solo frowned. “I don’t want to let her go. And I’m definitely not letting my kids go. But I don’t know how much control I’ve got over any of it.”
Everyone was silent for a few minutes. They were used to fixing broken engines—relationships were a whole lot harder to put back together once the cracks started appearing.
But that had been Rosie’s old job, hadn’t it? “Would you go to counseling?” Shay asked.
Solo nodded. “I’ll try anything. But I don’t know if Janie would go with me.”
“Maybe not, but she said that you’ve stopped seeing her since the kids came into your life. You could spend some time working on that issue and yourself. It would show Janie that you’re serious about fighting for the relationship. About fighting for her.”
Solo edged to the front of her chair, and some of the sadness in her eyes seemed to lift.
“That could work,” Solo said, sounding hopeful. “Do you know someone?”
Shay shook her head. “Not personally, but Rosie used to be a therapist. I bet she’ll have a recommendation.” She motioned to the house. “Do you want me to call now?”
“You wouldn’t mind?” Solo’s eyes widened. “At least then I can feel like I’m doing something instead of floating in this weird limbo.”
“You got it.” Shay stood and headed to the doors leading into the dining room. It was clear that none of them could offer any useful help and just being supportive couldn’t fix Solo’s marriage. She retrieved her phone from where they’d all put their devices before coming out onto the patio. She liked Gabe’s idea to shut out the rest of the world so they could focus on each other, just like they used to do when they were on base. But they needed some outside help right now.
“I wasn’t expecting to hear from you tonight. I thought you werespending the night with your team,” Rosie said when she answered on the third ring.
“I’m not calling for that. You sound out of breath. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I was in the kitchen fixing dinner, and my cell was in the bedroom. What do you need?”
Shay grinned. She liked the idea of Rosie being in a hurry to answer her call, even when it wasn’t for the usual reason. And she was low-key happy that she hadn’t interrupted Rosie with another woman. “It’s about Solo and Janie; they’re having some marriage troubles, and I thought you might have an old colleague who could help.”
“Oh… Sure. Give me a second.”
