“I’d like to stick a pin in it. A brass tack.”
“Yep,” Cary said.
“And you don’t bring it up. I bring it up.”
“Aye, aye.”
“Don’t be silly—I’m serious.”
“‘Aye, aye’ is dead serious. It means ‘understood and will comply.’”
“Oh. Then what do I say in return?”
“You don’t say anything. You’re the senior officer.”
She brought it up two months later. She said three was possible, but not in a way Cary should plan on or even hope for. Three was notimpossible, Shiloh said.
Cary was going to have to invite his sisters to this wedding.
He put STRATCOM at the top of his preference sheet for his next billet.
He wanted to live near Mikey. In the hills. Among the trees. He wanted to put Shiloh there, no matter what.
Eighty-One
Shiloh found herself acting like her teenage self with Cary. Sounding like that old self. Shifting easily into old jokes and teasing.
There was a kind of mirth that Shiloh only ever achieved with Cary and Mikey, and now she was living inside that dynamic again.
She realized there was a tone of voice—deeper, rounder—that she never used with Ryan, that she used all the time with Cary.
And she made jokes she never would have made with Ryan, even though Ryanlikedjokes. He was genuinely funny.
But Cary and Mikey were sort ofterriblyfunny—there was nothing they wouldn’t laugh about—and they made Shiloh terrible, too. There was a laugh she only laughed with them, throaty and fucked up. That laugh was back in her life, and it kept surprising her.
Cary made Shiloh feel like she was the same person she’d always been... But healsomade her feel like she could be someone new. For all the ways they knew each other, so much between them was barely precedented—everything romantic or sexual.
Shiloh could start over.
She could be a different sort of lover with Cary, and someday soon a different sort of wife.
She’d thought, with Ryan, that she was lucky to have someone who didn’t need to look in her eyes. She’d realized too late that hecouldn’t.
With Cary, Shiloh wanted to push through her own discomfort. To get over herself. To look directly at the sun.
Eighty-Two
Shiloh brought the kids to California for five days. Cary worried that he didn’t have beds for them. He bought two air mattresses. He made sure he had whole milk and bread and other things he’d seen in Shiloh’s refrigerator. Strawberry jam. Grapes.
He bought sand toys and beach towels.
He worried that his apartment felt less personal than a hotel room—and far less welcoming.
The kids were tired when they got there. It had been their first time on a plane.
Juniper was unusually shy, clinging to Shiloh. “Mommy,” she said, raising the middle of her eyebrows, “isthiswhere we’ll live when you get married?”
“No, sweetie, you know this already—Cary is going to live with us in Omaha when he’s not at work.”
