Can't Hold Back (21 page)

O
NE
Y
EAR
L
ATER

There he was.

Stepping through the glass gate doors at SeaTac. Striding, head up, not uniformed, as she’d expected, but clad in jeans and a gray T-shirt, hiking boots. A backpack slung over both shoulders.

Trina felt like she’d never seen him before, and maybe she never really had. Because
before,
he’d been somebody’s dad. Somebody’s husband. And then friendship had morphed into love, so she’d never had that first-time-I-laid-eyes-on-you, love-at-first-sight moment. No heart stopping, no breath catching, no hormones firing in one big surge—

Not till now.

Because,
damn.
Dark hair and dark eyes, stubble smattered over his jaw, shoulders that poured off strength. Six-feet-plus of him, moving with intention. A guy who’d catch your eye on the street, pheromones setting you back on your heels before you’d registered that you’d turned to look, and the hardness of his features, the every-man handsomeness making an impression only after it was too late to decide how you felt about his appearance.

There were more lines in his face than she remembered—the laugh crinkles at the corners of his eyes, yes, but deep lines in his forehead, too. His eyes combed the crowd, looking for someone.

I’m right here.

Then his gaze swept past her and locked somewhere else, and his pace quickened until he was almost running, and someone broke away behind her, flip-flops smacking heels.

“Daddy!”

Clara ran to her father and threw herself into his arms. Forgetting Trina’s and her grandmother’s warnings to be gentle with him. Clara was laughing and crying at the same time, and trying to tell her father everything that had happened in the last year, all at once.

“Slow down, baby.” Hunter had knelt so he could hug Clara in earnest. “Slow down. We’ll have plenty of time.” He was smiling, looking so much like the man Trina remembered, and she realized she was silently pleading for him to raise his eyes and search her out. To turn that smile on her. And she shook her head, because this moment wasn’t for her. It was for Clara and Hunter. And she’d have her moment with him later. When they were alone.

And then Hunter did raise his head, and her heart skipped.

But his eyes caught on something behind her, and he rose and strode forward: “Mom.”

Trina wasn’t going to panic. She clutched her
WELCOME HOME, HUNTER
sign tighter, and tried to slow her pulse down.

Homecomings are weird,
Hunter’s mom had told her when Trina had met
her
flight several hours earlier.
Don’t get your expectations up too high. He’ll need some time and space, and then it’ll be like he never left.

Plus, Trina had known they’d have to play it a little cool, to maintain the fiction for the girls.

In the meantime, Trina would remember what he’d said to her. Not only
I love you,
but also
I know my feelings, and they’re not going to change.

Hunter’s mom, Linda, was getting the full Hunter. Or the half-Hunter, maybe, because Trina was pretty sure that Hunter at full strength would have swept both mother and daughter off their feet. Certainly in all her fantasies he’d swept
her
off her feet.

But with abdominal wounds just barely healed—wounds that had almost killed him—he wouldn’t be sweeping anyone off her feet for a while.

She felt a hand snake around her waist. Phoebe, at her side. Her daughter, awkwardly eleven and yet so beautiful, with that coltish mix of woman and little girl.

Phoebe, feeling as awkward and left out of this homecoming as she was, and wanting solidarity.

That was the moment when Trina started to feel really, truly freaked out. Because she was fine with the fact that homecomings were weird and fine with his priorities being for his daughter and his mother and fine with the secrecy that they’d agreed to keep up a while once he got back, but—

He hadn’t made eye contact with her. Not once.

Something was wrong. Even Phoebe knew it.

And all at once, all the worry that she’d been holding at bay coalesced into a solid block in her chest. She had to fight it back so she could smile down at her daughter, wrap her arm around Phoebe, and squeeze her reassuringly to her side.

I know my feelings, and they’re not going to change.

For the first few months after Hunter had left, it had been so easy to believe, unswervingly, in their happily-ever-after. She’d had letters and emails, reminders of his devotion. Sometimes even instant message sessions in which they’d planned and plotted—where they’d have dinner, the movies they’d see, the places they’d take the girls, what, in detail, he’d do to her in bed—
when he got home.
She’d felt their intimacy deepening through all of that, the way he confided his doubts, his fears—a squad mate in danger of losing his shit, an unspecified plan from on high he couldn’t completely get behind, one too many small failures of leadership—details omitted—that had made him worry for his safety and the safety of his men.

And, over and over:
I love you. All I want is to make it through this and get home to you and Clara and Phoebs.

Then nothing.

He’d warned her he’d be off the grid for a while, on an extremely remote base where the satellite Internet connections were notoriously bad, where letters went to die, but even so, even with reassurance from the Army that everything was copacetic, the silence had been terribly unsettling. And then, most unsettling of all, the notification—only two days ago—that he’d been shot multiple times in the abdomen, stabilized in the field, evacuated straight to Landstuhl, and finally, flown to Walter Reed in D.C. By the time he’d called Linda with that barrage of bad news, he was already booked on a commercial flight home.

When Trina had gotten off the phone with Linda, the mix of
He’s okay, he’s alive,
and
He almost died
had made her ill enough to actually throw up, which she did, very quietly, out of sight and sound of the girls, in the downstairs bathroom.

The fact that the phone call had come from his mother and not him—she’d tried not to think about that. Maybe he’d had only enough energy for one phone call and figured the wrath of a mother scorned pretty much exceeded any other downside. And after all, he’d be home—
home!
—in two days. She’d tried to call him a few times in his hospital room, but the phone had rung and rung. She’d left messages with the nurses’ station, but hadn’t heard back. Still, she’d decided not to worry unduly. He had his reasons, she was sure—she told herself that his fatigue must be deep, the process of getting discharged from Walter Reed convoluted. There was no need to assume the worst.

But now, the fact that he’d called his mother and not her, the fact that he hadn’t returned her calls, seemed ominous. It went, part and parcel, with his failure to
see
her.

“Phoebe! Trina!”

Hunter’s voice, so deep that she could feel its lowest vibrations—and not only rippling her eardrums—rang out.

“Thanks so much for coming out to welcome me home!”

Hearty. Jovial. Impersonal, almost formal. He reached out to hug her, but in the hug, she felt the careful distance that men keep from women they’re not interested in. Maybe it was just that his wounded torso was sore.

Or maybe that was just a convenient fiction she’d manufactured to keep from falling on him and begging to know what the heck was going on.

His eyes, as he drew away from her, held only a faint curiosity, as if she were someone he had once felt something for and now was wondering what all the fuss had been about.

Clara was still talking a mile a minute, softball this and theater that, and Hunter was beaming at his daughter proudly and asking questions, and Phoebe, who hadn’t even rated a hug but only a hair ruffle, Hunter’s huge hand almost dwarfing her fluffy red head, looked small and lost at Trina’s side.

“What’s for dinner?” Phoebe whispered.

That made Trina smile for real. You could always count on kids to get down to essentials, even when there was an emotional mess around them.

“Spaghetti and pesto. Garlic bread. Salad.”

“Yum. At Hunter and Clara’s?”

She didn’t let Phoebe hear the hesitation she felt. “Yes.” Because, setting aside the weirdness of this reunion, if they didn’t go back to Hunter and Clara’s, they had nowhere else to go. Trina’s apartment was still sublet. The plan had been for them to stay, and even if Trina could hatch an alternative, they’d at least have to go back to Hunter and Clara’s to gather their things.

Besides, she had cooked dinner, the most recent act of service she’d performed—willingly, happily!—to take care of Hunter and his daughter and his house. And maybe it was only a defense against the shards she could feel forming in her chest, but she got mad. Because no matter what the hell had happened to him over the last eight months, he’d said those things to her. And no matter what they’d agreed to and no matter how tough the last year had been for him, he owed her more than a formal thank-you and an awkward hug, and if he didn’t deliver it the moment they were alone, she was going to demand to know what the f— heck was going on with him.

Hunter stood, looking into the open suitcase he’d laid on his bed.

There were pieces missing from his life.

He’d left Clara with his mother—or so he remembered—but listening to her bubbling, joyful stories on the ride home, it became apparent that his daughter had spent most of the last year living with Trina and Phoebe in his house.

He’d been one breath away from demanding to know why no one had told him about the change. And then he’d realized: They all thought he knew already.

In the space of that realization, he’d gone from spitting mad to deeply confused and more than a little freaked out.

Why would he have left Phoebe with Trina? Why wouldn’t he
remember
leaving Phoebe with Trina?

In the hospital, they’d asked him if he could remember the battle that had perforated his abdomen and required eighteen hours of surgery to repair. And he’d said no.

Retrograde amnesia,
they’d said. It meant forgetting things that had happened
before
a traumatic incident.
Very common after trauma.
There had been no evident blow to the head, but the battle had been chaotic, he’d been separated from his squad, and he’d lain for a long time, bleeding. The doctors hadn’t been certain whether the long period of unconsciousness that followed had had been the result of loss of blood or something more ominous. So they’d done something called a Glasgow Coma Scale—he thought—and asked him all sorts of questions about what he did and didn’t remember.

They explained to him that retrograde amnesia could stretch back days, weeks, or months before an incident, so to rule that out, they asked him if he could remember the events leading up to the battle, which had taken place in a small village in the north.

Yes.

They asked him what he remembered, and he’d reconstructed for them everything he could. The orders he’d received, the planning and preparation, how he’d distracted his squad the night before with a Skype session with Russell Wilson, the Seattle Seahawks quarterback and a friend of a friend.

The doctors had asked Hunter to let them know if any other holes appeared in his memory, and he’d promised to do so, but nothing had shown itself.

Not till now.

Now there were holes all over the place.

His mother seemed to have spent most of the last year on the back of a Gold Wing motorcycle driven by some guy named Ray who owned a double-wide in Southern California. A guy named Ray who, ostensibly, Hunter had met and liked. If the blushes and glow were any indication, his mother was in love with Ray.

Clara had gotten involved with theater, something she seemed to think wasn’t news to him. She’d also grown an absurd number of inches and—well, she looked more sixteen than eleven. Could all that have happened in a year?

And there was that look Trina had given him. Not one look, actually—a whole series, like she was wrestling with big emotions and, more to the point, like he should do something about it.

The first time that expression had crossed her face, something had taken a dive in the pit of his stomach. The last time a woman had looked at him with that much
disappointment,
it had been Clara’s late mother. It was the kind of look you only gave someone you were
involved
with. Which would explain so much else—Trina’s presence with Phoebe at the airport, her beautifully lettered and intricately drawn
WELCOME HOME, HUNTER
sign, the fact that she’d been so painfully quiet on the way home.

It would also explain the way she’d snuck looks at him throughout dinner, as if trying to figure him out, while he’d listened quietly to the girls’ chatter, saying as little as possible and desperately trying to piece together the puzzle of his own mind. There must have been two battles in a small village in the north, and somehow he must have combined them in his head to make one, so that what he remembered as the “before” of his injury had actually happened at some point in a past deployment.

And if that was true—it was quite possible he didn’t remember anything from the whole most recent deployment, or the weeks immediately preceding it.

Jesus.

How much time had he lost? How much of his life? How much of
himself
? God, that was disturbing to think about. He’d always thought of amnesia as waking up and not knowing who you were. He knew who he was—

Or…

He knew who he’d
been,
more than a year ago…

But since then, what had happened to him?

Obviously, something had happened between him and Trina. Something that had made him willing to leave his daughter and house in her care. That had put that look on her face, as if he
owed
her an explanation.

What had he done? He’d been so damn careful, since Dee, not to lead anyone on. Not to create expectations he couldn’t meet.