“Do you hurt the trolls?”
He cocks his head but still no words come from his mouth.
“Do you know the trolls?” Riley continues as if his silence means something to her.
His blond hair, down now, moves as he shakes his head.
“Well, that’s good. Trolls are nice. They sing pretty songs too.” She looks back at me and smiles her beautiful smile. “Let’s go, Livi. I’m ready now.”
She’s ready now? God, this child. My heart swells every time she opens her little mouth.
“Oh,” I start, clearing the hoarseness out of my voice. “You are now, are you?”
“Yup,” she responds, popping the p.
“Well”—I look up at Drew—“if you’ll excuse us.”
I start to walk around him, but he reaches out and grabs my bicep with the most gentle of touches. I look down at his hand, up to his beautiful eyes, then back at the hand on my arm again. Repeating the motion twice more before finally settling on his eyes. I hear Riley giggle, but all my focus is on him.
“I’ll walk you.”
Wow.
Again, that rusty baritone voice sends a jolt through me like my whole body has been hooked up to the entire electrical grid of Back Bay.
“Uh, that’s very nice of you, but we’ll be okay. We do this every day.”
His eyes get hard, narrowing slightly, but otherwise, he doesn’t move. Then, after a beat, he tips his head in the direction that we walk and raises one dark-blond brow—the one with the scar dissecting it.
“We don’t need an escort.”
He doesn’t say a word, per the norm.
“Really,” I continue.
“I’ll see you home,” he says, leaving no room for argument.
“Livi! Yay!” she exclaims. Riley rips her hand from mine, and she leaps at Drew. He’s a little delayed but doesn’t miss a beat in dropping my arm and grabbing her under her armpits before she just bounces right off him. “I’m going to climb a giant! Look at me, I’m like Jack, but I get to climb the giant and not the beanstalk. HEY! Beans. Like me, Auntie!”
The whole time she’s jabbering, my jaw drops farther and farther as she continues to do exactly as she says, climbing the muscular giant like it’s a completely normal thing for her—with his help, of course—which is even more confusing to me. I can tell the exact moment something changes for him. The storm settles a bit behind those eyes, the waters not churning uncontrollably but just calm and peaceful. He moves quickly, his arms dashing out as Riley’s legs lose their purchase, and she’s squealing in laughter as he tosses her up in the air in a spin, catching her so she’s facing the street and not his body. Then, in a move that I will never forget until the day I die, he settles her little body on his shoulders and hooks her ankles with his big paws, securing her on her new perch.
“Livi, look! I’m a giant now, too!” Riley yells as if I can’t hear her clear as day.
I clear my throat, blink a few times, and look from Drew’s very calm eyes up to her wildly excited ones. “I see that, my precious bean.”
“Let’s go, giant!” she exclaims, pointing her hand toward the direction of our condo.
“Let’s go, squirt,” Drew rumbles down to me.
“Excuse me?” I gasp, so confused at this turn of events that my brain just can’t move quickly.
Again, he tips his head and goes back to silence.
“This is the strangest day ever,” I mutter under my breath, but do I do anything to detach my niece from him?
No.
Like the basket case I feel I am at this moment, I do the only thing that makes sense.
I start walking home.
“Hurt” by Johnny Cash
A man experiences many things in life that scar him to the point that he’ll never be the same again.
Some good.
So good that you let those moments fill the space inside you the best they can—pushing the bad out.
Some bad.
Some, for a few, are only everything that nightmares are made of.
Those moments will hit you out of the blue and knock you flat on your ass. You could be in the middle of something mundane and routine, and the next thing you know, you’re struggling to breathe. Or, in my case, struck with so much desperate grief that you feel like you really are dead.
It’s been a battle for me mentally the past few days. Ever since I started walking Olivia and Riley home. Things I had long since stopped thinking about and dreaming of stayed in the forefront of my mind, not locked away where they belonged. I haven’t so much as explained myself to her, just made sure I was there every time she made that walk between her home and the coffee shop. It’s insane. I know this. Yet do I stop? No … I let the monsters in the dark start whispering louder in my head and keep showing up.
I place one hand on the railing of my balcony and look down at the water of Boston Harbor. The other absentmindedly reaches for my shirt while the past enters my thoughts against my attempts to keep it away. I lift the cotton from my flesh, tucking my hand underneath. I don’t stop until my fingertip hits the puckered scar directly between my abs. With my finger touching that old wound, I think about those nightmare flashes of pain that had just hit me and reach for the bottle of Bulleit with my free hand, consuming half the bottle with one gulp. I’ll need it. When these days come, I always fucking need it.
I don’t remember much from that first day. I know after I was patched up and my handler came in to explain what he needed from me, I demanded they take me to where I could see my family. Where I could watch them find out I was … dead.
My brother was the hardest. Though, I knew he would be. You don’t have a bond like we had and not realize the news of my “death” would break him completely. Somehow, I managed to stay put as the doctor walked out. I had been ordered not to move, not unless I wanted to really die because I was foolish enough to be on my feet after having surgery to repair the bullet that tore through my gut. But when I watched him process what the doctor said, I had to be held back. I remember Clark, my point of contact, holding his hand over my mouth to keep me quiet while two of his men held my body back as gently as possible. It didn’t matter, I still tore open what was just repaired the second my brother made a sound that came from his very soul being ripped from his body and fell to his knees.
There is no way to describe the pure heartache that comes from someone who has lost someone they love, but to have him experience that while I was watching from the shadows … there’s no way to make anyone understand that. Everything inside me demanded I rush in and tell him it wasn’t real, but I knew better. I knew the costs. And I would do it all over again and spend the past two-plus decades living the life of a ghost.
It wasn’t just my brother.
When I saw the rest of my family, my five brothers who life had given me through our time in the Marines—their wives and girlfriends—it killed whatever was actually left inside me.
At least, that’s what I thought before I had to watch my own funeral from the black windows of the SUV waiting to take me away from the life I had loved. The life I would never return to, not if I cared about what happened to the people I “died” to protect.