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India held up the note.
Helen leaned into the camera. “You’re going to have to help me out here. Number one, this video isn’t clear enough for me to read it, and number two, I bet it isn’t in English.”
“It’s French.”
“The man’s name is Gerard-Pierre,” Helen said dryly.
“He knows English, though. He just refuses to use it. I bet your man writes you notes in English.”
“Well, yeah, but his name is Tom Cross, and he’s an American. Are you breaking up with Gerard-Pierre because he wrote you a note in French, or is it because he said something awful in French?”
“He wrote...” India scanned the note. “That he wants to talk to me tonight after dinner—that’s after his dinner—because he just found out that his parents and his sister and his nieces are going to be here for Christmas. He says this affects our holiday plans.” India waited as the satellite in space did its thing.
And she waited some more.
Helen tilted her head, and looked like she was waiting, too.
“Is our connection frozen? Did you get that?” India asked.
“No, I only heard that his family is coming for Christmas.”
“Yes, that’s it.”
“What is?”
“That’s why we need to break up. I can’t do the family thing.” India tugged at the black tab tie at her throat until the Velcro closure gave with a satisfying little ripping sound. She unbuttoned the top button of her white blouse. “No family. It never goes well.”
Helen shook her head slowly, like she felt sorry for India. “It could go well. His family could love you. You could love them.”
That’s what I’m afraid of.
“No family scenes for me. I have to call it off. I’m just better at being alone.”
* * *
Major Aiden Nord stared at the note in his hand. He’d never felt more alone.
He hated being alone.
Once upon a time, he’d been happy enough to be on his own, swaggering his way through the army as a bachelor officer, spending time with women who enjoyed spending their time with him. He vaguely remembered being free to schedule his off-duty hours without worrying about anyone else’s wants or needs, without worrying about whether or not anyone else liked what he’d chosen for dinner, or whether or not he was staying up too late and the volume of his television was keeping them awake.
Whether or not the fairy book had been read more times than the puppy book.
Whether or not the sandwich should be cut into triangles or squares.
Aiden was a family man now. Four years ago, his wife had given birth to their fraternal twin girls, and Aiden hadn’t stopped worrying about other people’s needs since. Two years ago, his wife had died—the unfairness of her shortened life still maddened him, would always madden him—so he shouldered all those worries himself. Were his daughters hungry? Tired? Happy? Scared? It all mattered now, far more than his own wants and needs mattered.
Aiden worried about Poppy being on the small side of the pediatrician’s height-weight chart, although his wife had been petite, and the doctor thought Poppy was simply taking after her. Aiden worried about Olympia, who was turning out to be tall with darker coloring like his, but who would surely stunt her own growth by refusing to eat practically every food in existence. He worried about things he’d never known parents worried about until he’d become one himself. It was constant. It was exhausting.
He loved it.
He loved them, and he loved being with them, but the note in his hand included the address of the vacation beach house where his sister had taken his daughters for the week to visit with his parents. An entire week lay before him without constant negotiations, constant questions, constant little fingers reaching for things they weren’t supposed to touch. An entire week without his children.
In black ink on white paper, his sister had written “Enjoy being a bachelor for a week.”
Not likely. He didn’t remember what it was like to chug milk straight from the carton rather than pouring it into purple sippy cups. He didn’t remember how to swagger through work without keeping an eye on the clock and the day care center’s hours in the back of his mind. He didn’t remember what it was like to take a woman out on a date without checking his watch to make sure he still had time to get the teenage babysitter home before her teenage curfew.
He didn’t want to remember. He wanted his family.
* * *
“Would it really be so awful to meet Gerard-Pierre’s family?”
India unbuttoned another button on her blouse and cleared her throat. “It’s hard enough to tell someone that you no longer want them in your life. It kills me when I’ve met the family. Do you remember the guy I dated in Germany? His oma made me a whole cake to take with us when we left her house. His baby sister drew me a birthday card. It was awful.”
“India, that’s not awful. That’s a loving family.”
“When I broke up with him, I had to reject a sweet grandmother and a cute little girl, too.”
“You had to talk to them? They were there?”
“No, but he reminded me how much the whole family had loved me. I told him his family was wonderful, but that only made the breakup harder for him to understand.”
That wasn’t exactly true. It had made things easier for him to understand. India could still see Adolphus standing there, handsome in his quiet way, hands in his pockets and tears in his eyes. I see, he’d said. My family is wonderful, but I am not wonderful enough to make you want to be part of us. They will be very disappointed in me for losing you.
The guilt had just about killed her. She still thought about it sometimes. Somewhere out there, a little old lady with a Bundt pan and a girl with crayons thought she had rejected them personally. She wasn’t going to add Gerard-Pierre’s probably adorable nieces to her list.
“It’s better when I date a man to keep things just between the two of us.”
“But people have families. That’s life.” Helen leaned a little closer to the screen and lowered her voice. “Tom’s family isn’t easy to deal with, I have to say, but my parents love Tom and he loves them. He says that’s icing on the wedding cake. He gets an extended family along with a bride. You’ve been with Gerard-Pierre for a year. Why not meet his family? If you love someone, you’ll probably love the family that made him who he is.”
Ah, Bernardo. Before Adolphus, there’d been Bernardo. He’d been loud but affectionate, and when she’d met his family, she’d immediately seen why he was the way he was. The Italian language had stormed all around her as his extended family talked over one another, cheered for one another, cooked for one another. They’d been appalled she was an only child, but they’d lovingly demanded that she bring her parents with her on the next visit. Since Italian wasn’t one of her languages, she’d awkwardly and accidentally said she’d become an orphan that year, when what she’d meant was that her mother had left her for her first trip around the world that year. Bernardo had cleared up the misunderstanding, but his family had kept their real concern whether or not a girl who had no family would know how to make a family with their precious son. Bernardo had started worrying, too.
They were right. I wouldn’t know how.
“I enjoy being just two adults who share some time together, you know? Nice and simple. Meeting the family is always the kiss of death. I’d rather not go there with Gerard-Pierre.”
“It’s just sad that you’re breaking up with a man you enjoy sharing time with just because his family is visiting for Christmas.”
“We haven’t shared a lot of time. Not lately. We were going to try to get to Paris for the holidays, but now that his family’s here, I’m guessing that’s off.” She waved the note again. “That’s probably what he wants to talk about after dinner, which could be midnight, by the way. I wish he’d just say he has to cancel Paris. It’s not a big deal.”
In fact, it was a relief. The prospect of reviving their sex life in a hotel near the Eiffel Tower had been a little intimidating. She didn’t know why he’d lost interest, but she’d had a feeling Gerard-Pierre was going to use this trip to list all of her shortcomings as a sexual partner—neatly, and in French.
“Canceling plans for a romantic trip to Paris is no big deal to you? I’d be weeping.”
“It’s only a train ride from here. Maybe an hour and a half. Maybe a hundred bucks. I didn’t really want to go.”
“Honest, roomie?” Helen pointed at her through the screen, wagging her finger in warning. “Are you telling the truth? I don’t have to worry about you being lonely at the holidays?”
“Honest, roomie.” But as India looked at the extra sparkle in her friend’s eyes and that sparkle on her ring finger, that pang of longing for that something sharpened.
* * *
Aiden folded his sister’s note and slipped it into one of the pockets of his camouflage uniform. Two pennies in the pocket jingled together, one from Olympia, one from Poppy. He used to carry a penny from their mother. There would never be another penny from her; it made the other two pennies all the more priceless.
There would never be another penny from any woman. He dated now and then, when there was some event that was clearly for adults only: a rock concert, a wine tasting. But he couldn’t imagine loving another woman enough to turn his little family of three into a family of four. She’d have to be so special, impossibly special, someone he wanted very badly, someone who loved his daughters as much as she loved him.
He stood and shoved in his desk chair, then left his office to head for the battalion headquarters conference room.
He couldn’t imagine it...but if he could, what would that be like?
The pang of longing that hit his heart was sharp.
Unexpected.
There was plenty of love in his life. He’d be a greedy man to want more.
He strode into the conference room, tossed his binder onto his seat near the head of the table, then headed for the window. He had four minutes to get his mind back on work before the battalion commander arrived and expected him to conduct the meeting.
The view was boring: square army buildings on flat Texas land. The grass had turned brown for the winter, but there was no snow. They never got more than flurries in Central Texas. It was just as well; there was nothing to remind him how close to Christmas they were.
The reason his sister had been able to take his daughters for a week of fun was that her employer had given her the time off for the Christmas holiday. The reason Aiden had watched them leave for the airport without him was because he was an officer in the army; he didn’t get to decide when he got time off with his family.
That came with the job. In his twelve years of service, he’d missed family holidays before, twice while deployed to combat theaters. But today, it chafed. The reason he had to be parted from his family wasn’t something critical, like combat overseas. It wasn’t an essential task, like security or law enforcement here on post. There was no natural disaster to respond to, no citizens who needed immediate help.
Instead, Aiden was looking at a week without his girls because of a training exercise. A pretend deployment. That was what the army did when they weren’t at war: they pretended they were at war.
Bad attitude, Nord. Check yourself.
They rehearsed their wartime missions.
Better.
But the week before Christmas was just about the worst time to schedule a monster-sized training exercise that could have been scheduled for any other week of the year.
That’s not a bad attitude. That’s a fact.
It wasn’t his call to make. The schedule had been set by someone much higher up. He would stand at this window and get his head in the game because today’s meeting mattered. It was their last opportunity to fine-tune their plans before the simulation began tomorrow at dawn.
Those plans were Aiden’s responsibility. He was the battalion operations officer, known as the S-3. The S-3 wrote the orders. The S-3 designed the training that kept the entire battalion in readiness for future missions, and the purpose of this week’s exercise was to test that training.
The battalion consisted of four military police companies here at Fort Hood, including the 584th MP Company, where Aiden had first served as a young lieutenant. Back then, he’d led a platoon of thirty soldiers. Now, twelve years and six other posts later, he was once more at Fort Hood, serving as the operations officer for roughly six hundred soldiers.
Out of six hundred soldiers, the order of command responsibility went from the battalion commander to the executive officer to him, the operations officer. The CO to the XO to the S-3. Put bluntly, if the commander and the executive officer were to die, Aiden took over command of the battalion. That had never happened, never come close to happening in real life, but during these training exercises? Yeah. They’d pretend to kill off the CO or the XO at some point, and Aiden would take over the battalion.
In other words, he had to be here.
His children did not. It was better for them to go have fun with his sister than it would be for them to stay in the house with a sitter, wondering why Daddy didn’t come home for ninety-six hours straight. He’d done the right thing by letting his sister take them away.
Aiden looked out the window at the dead grass and jingled the two pennies in his pocket.
Chapter Two (#u34d815ff-7d69-5859-b003-7b6aa34a7a08)
“Okay.”
“Okay?” India asked, just to be sure Helen meant it.
“I agree you should break up with Gérard-Depardieu-Pepé-Le-Pew, but not because he wants you to meet his family. It’s because you can live without going to Paris with him. That is proof that he is not a man with whom you will ever be madly in love. You might as well end it now.”
“Thank you very much for your approval.”
“It’s what you called me for, isn’t it?”
India was startled into silence. Maybe it was.
“I should go,” Helen said. “We’re starting a monster-sized training exercise tomorrow. I won’t see daylight for a while. Show me the view before I hang up. Pretty please. Make me jealous.”
This was the traditional way they ended their calls. Helen was crazy for all things European. Ironically, her friend was also one of the few soldiers whom the army had never stationed in Germany—not yet, at least—so she used India to get a little peek at Europe now and then.
India held her phone up as she walked toward her window, a rectangle cut out of stone walls that were almost two feet thick. The square beyond was a mix of old and new, eighteenth-century spires soaring into the sky with the flashing green cross of a modern pharmacy sign below. It was a great view. If India squinted to block out the modern traffic that rolled over the old grey stones, she could imagine herself living in a past century, looking out this same window.
Undoubtedly, other women had looked out this same window in past centuries. Other women would do so for a century after India left, too. She was just a brief visitor, one who would leave nothing behind. Buildings lasted. People disappeared. She was just passing through.
India stood by the two-foot-deep stone casing and felt small.
“Bye now,” Helen said. “Fun talking to you.”
“Wait. I just—I just—” India’s heart was beating a little too fast. She felt so insubstantial. Insignificant. But everyone was just passing through, weren’t they? Everyone looked out their window and felt a little...untethered.
Not her friend. Helen was part of something.
“I want to see your view for a change.”
“Mine? A boring army base in Central Texas? It’s just brown in December.” But Helen obligingly turned her phone so that India could see out of Helen’s second-story, modern office window. The view of brown grass and miles of flat land was anything but boring to India. Soldiers in camouflage and absurdly comfortable-looking combat boots were walking on the sidewalk below. A civilian pickup truck drove by on the smooth asphalt road. Then another pickup truck. Another. Texans sure drove a lot of pickup trucks.
India felt herself beginning to smile. She’d forgotten just how big American trucks were compared to European vehicles. She hadn’t been home—or rather, back to her native country—in four years.
Helen turned her phone back around. “It’s pretty sad compared to a medieval town square, isn’t it? I swear, India, I’m going to show up on your doorstep with Tom one of these days and surprise you.”
“I’d love it, but I don’t know where you’d sleep. My place isn’t even big enough for two people.” Not that Gerard-Pierre had let that stop him from moving more than a few of his things here. He kept clothes here, toiletries. Books. A laptop. He liked to work at her high-top table and enjoy her view of the old city square. He liked her television. Since her job meant she always needed to go to sleep before he did, he’d stay out on the couch and watch shows. More often than not, he’d fall asleep on her couch. In the mornings, she had to tiptoe out of her own apartment with her pumps in her hand, so she wouldn’t wake the man who found her apartment more convenient than his own.
She looked at the note again. It had been written on her notepaper. It had been taped to the door with her tape. The tape dispenser had been left on her high-top.
Her man was a mooch.
“Actually, if you wanted to visit, you and your husband could take the bedroom. It won’t hold a queen-size bed, but I do have a full in there. I could sleep on the couch.”
Because Gerard-Pierre will no longer be sleeping on it.
