I let it take me, the postcard under my fingers and the knock of his glove still landing against the picture under my Kevlar, repeating without sound:
Get back home, kid.
Got to get home. Holly.
But this time… I didn’t think I was going to be able to keep my promise. I whispered an apology that I prayed made it back to her. “I’m sorry, Malibu.”
Then my entire world went to black.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
♦Hannah♦
Julia Morgan’s apartment always smelled like old vodka and lemon cleaner that had lost the fight hours ago. I cracked the windows anyway. Habit. Trash first—bottles clinking into the contractor bag like bones—then dishes, then the ring in the sink that never stayed gone. I set a pot of chicken and rice on low and lined up her pills by the sink where she’d actually see them. Check the mail. Switch the laundry she’d forgotten she started. Make sure the smoke alarms still had batteries. The list lived in my head, same order every week. Sixteen years of it. Long enough for muscle memory to be a religion.
She’d fallen asleep in her chair, robe slipping off one shoulder, breath thick and wet. I tugged the robe up and tied it, tucked the blanket around her and checked her pulse with two fingers like I always did. Steady. Skin warm. Alive. Still alive.
“Hey, Julia,” I said, loud enough to thread into the fog. “Food in an hour. Your favorite. Try and eat today.”
Her eyes cracked open, all broken glass and defiance. “You’re bossy,” she slurred.
“Good thing,” I said. “The alternative is you dead.”
She huffed, closed her eyes again. I set a glass of water where her hand would find it and poured the vodka down the drain. It wouldn’t stop her. It never did. But it slowed her down. Sometimes slowing was all you could manage.
Sixteen years of this. Not because she deserved it. Because a boy with dirty knuckles and a jaw set too hard for his age had stumbled through my door one August afternoon and tried to barter work for food with a spine that refused to bend. Ten years old, maybe eleven, too thin for his boots, eyes already learned on how to read a room for danger. “My mom’s…busy,” he’d said. And I’d looked at him and known: somebody had to be not-busy for this kid or he wouldn’t make it.
I kept him coming back. August put tools in his hands and a sandwich in his pocket and the number to the clubhouse on a scrap of paper he pretended not to keep. He showed him how to swing a hammer and how to tell the truth without telling everything. I put my own number on every school emergency form I could slide past a secretary. And once a week, I came here and made sure the problem that birthed him didn’t swallow him whole.
Some days the anger still bubbled up stupid and hot. Did she know where he was? What he’d signed himself up to? Did she have any idea what kind of man he’d been building himself into while she built a shrine out of empty bottles?
I beat the anger back with a wooden spoon. I wasn’t here for her. I was here for the kid with his name stitched over his heart and a promise in his eyes he hadn’t even known he was making.
The knock startled me hard enough I almost dropped the spoon. No one knocked here. The mailman barely knocked. In sixteen years, if I wasn’t the one at the door, it was the landlord or a neighbor asking if the noise meant paramedics again.
I wiped my hands on a dish towel and went to the door. Habit had me look through the peephole. Habit had me go cold.
Dress blues. Two of them. And a third man in black—chaplain collar bright against a tired face.
No. No, no,no.
When I opened the door, it was all I could do to keep from trembling.
“Afternoon, ma’am,” the taller one said. Young. They were always too young for this job. The brim of his cover shadowed eyes that had done this before. “We’re looking for Julia Morgan.”
“She’s in the chair,” I said. My voice didn’t belong to me. It was too calm. It sounded like Mac when he was about to end a fight. “She’s…not sober. Don’t expect poetry.”
“May we come in?”
I stepped aside. The chaplain’s gaze cut to me and sat there like a hand on my shoulder I didn’t want and needed anyway. I led them through the kitchen. Julia blinked up at them, confused. The shorter Marine took his cover off, tucked it under his arm, and knelt. He did it like a man who’d practiced in a mirror to get it right. Hands where she could see them.
“Ma’am,” he said, voice soft in a way that made my teeth hurt. “I’m Gunnery Sergeant Lawson. This is Captain Rivera. We’re here on behalf of the United States Marine Corps.”
I stood behind the couch and gripped the back until my fingers went white. The chaplain stood opposite me, his eyes occasionally flicking to Julia but mostly staying on me.
Julia squinted at Lawson’s mouth like the words might be a trick. “What for?” Defensive, because defense was all she had left.
Lawson didn’t blink. “Ma’am, we regret to inform you that your son, Lance Corporal Jackson Morgan, has been listed Missing in Action, presumed deceased, following a helicopter incident during operations overseas on—” He gave the date, clean as a blade. “Recovery operations are ongoing. We have searched extensively. At this time, we have to list him MIA, presumed KIA.”
