More time. Two weeks of time. Two weeks of careful distance, of edited messages, of the harsh irony of someone who writes love stories for a living refusing to have one.
Riggs: T.B. THAT'S YOU
Riggs: she dedicated the book to you!!!
Riggs: this is the most romantic thing that's ever happened to anyone on this team and I'm INCLUDING Calder's wedding
Calder: My wife proposed to me during a firefight. Let's maintain perspective.
Riggs: okay second most romantic
I close the phone. Decker is watching me with the quiet, assessing look of a man who's seen this particular damage before.
"She's scared," he says.
"I know."
"So what are you going to do about it?"
"Give her time. She asked for time."
"There's a difference between giving someone time and letting them hide."
The words hit with the precision of a well-placed round. I look at Decker—solid, dependable Decker, who says twelvewords a day and makes each one count—and see something in his expression that I recognize. He's been here. Not with Kassidy, but with someone. The knowledge sits in the lines around his eyes.
I throw myself into work. The Charlotte assignment is a tech conference—low threat, high tedium, a gig where the biggest risk is dying of boredom during keynote presentations. I run the detail clean and tight, brief the client, debrief the team, and drive back to Beaufort with the road unspooling ahead of me and no destination that feels like home.
That night, in my apartment—a sparse one-bedroom above a hardware store that I chose for its exit routes and have never bothered to decorate—I open my phone and look at Kassidy's social media.
She's posted a photo someone took from a coffee shop. Laptop open, notebook beside it, a latte with foam art that she's captioned: Words are happening. First time in months that feels real. The post has three hundred likes and a comment from Diana Hartwell: That's my girl. Finish it.
She looks good. Happy, even. The shadows under her eyes from the retreat are gone, replaced by a brightness that makes something in my chest ache with complicated jealousy—not of anyone else, but of the version of her life that's working just fine without me.
The next morning, Calder calls me into his office. It's a glass-walled room at the back of the warehouse with a view of the harbor. He sits behind his desk—a man who ran combat operations for a decade and now runs a security company with the same controlled intensity.
"Close the door."
I close it. Sit.
"You're off your game, Brennan."
"The Charlotte job was clean?—"
"The Charlotte job was fine. You are not." He leans back. "You're going through the motions. I've seen that look before. In the mirror, after I left the teams. And in every guy I've hired who's still trying to figure out what comes after."
"I'm handling it."
"You're surviving it. There's a difference." He pauses, and when he speaks again, his voice has lost the commanding edge. This is Calder the friend, not Calder the boss. "The writer. Kassidy."
"What about her?"
"You're a SEAL. We don't give up. We assess, adapt, and execute. You've been sitting in the assessment phase for two weeks." He meets my eyes. "Stop being tactical and just tell her."
"Tell her what?"
"Whatever it is you've been not telling her. The thing that's keeping you up at night and making you useless to me during briefings."
I stare at the harbor through the window. A sailboat cuts across the water, heeling in the wind, moving with the certainty that comes from knowing your direction.
