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“I couldn’t put you out like that.”
“Three would be a crowd for a honeymoon, wouldn’t it? But the offer stands.”
“It’s sweet of you, but we won’t put you out anytime soon. To actually take a honeymoon, we’d have to be done with the contractors in the house, and we’d have to find someone to watch the dog for a couple of weeks, and—hang on.” Helen tapped on a keyboard. “Got an urgent message from the brigade CO. Let me read this real quick.”
India marched the three whole steps from the window to the sofa. Gerard-Pierre’s red sweater was thrown over the arm. Feeling like she was reclaiming her home, she whipped it off the sofa. It left red lint on the creamy-beige upholstery. A bit of teal peeked out from between the cushions, too, Gerard-Pierre’s shirt or scarf or something. He favored flamboyantly fashionable French scarves with his winter wear.
She yanked on it. The cloth turned out to be a strap. The strap turned out to be part of a lacy, teal bra. It was darling and daring and so very French.
It wasn’t hers.
She sank down onto the beige cushions, a little dazed. A little nauseous.
Helen’s voice penetrated her thoughts. “Oh. My. God.”
“I know, right?” India said, but her voice sounded funny. “Talk about three’s a crowd...”
“This is the single best message I’ve ever read in the United States Army. That monster training exercise? Canceled. They decided the planning phase was a success and canceled the execution. We’re standing down. A training holiday has been granted instead. Wait until Tom gets the word. Hang on—he won’t get the word if I don’t pass this memo down to battalion.”
India stared at the lacy bra. Gerard-Pierre was cheating on her. They hadn’t had sex in months, but he’d had sex. In her apartment.
“India? Hello? Can you still hear me?”
“Fine.” Why would he put so much effort into it? He wasn’t very exciting in bed. He’d take a fine glass of wine over a round of sex.
“Are you okay?”
He’d wanted her to cancel her holiday vacation so he could present her to his parents as his accomplished, multilingual girlfriend. And then what had been his plan? To take up with his side piece again in January? To keep cheating until he got caught?
Of course.
Then, when his infidelity caused their breakup, India would have known there was another family out there wondering why she’d decided to break up with their son after they’d had such a nice visit. Hadn’t she liked them? Had they scared her off in some way?
The shock was quickly being replaced by anger.
There was an even worse scenario possible. Tom loves my parents, Helen had said. What if India had spent Christmas with Gerard-Pierre’s family and loved them? She would have lost them when she lost her cheating boyfriend.
She clenched the bra in her fist. This was why Major India Woods, US Army, was thirty-two and single. She didn’t do families. She didn’t do complicated. She didn’t do any of this.
“You’re looking awfully serious,” Helen said.
“I...” She dropped the bra on the floor. The truth was too humiliating. She lied. “I reread that note while you were sending your message. There was more to it. I’m really, really ticked off.”
She was ticked off at herself. This was her home, an impermanent rental unit, but the only home she had, and she hadn’t protected it. She’d let someone use her home, she’d let someone use her and now—
India stood up. She didn’t want to sit on the couch. She didn’t want Gerard-Pierre’s stuff to be in her apartment. Most of all, she didn’t want to be here when Gerard-Pierre came over tonight. He didn’t deserve an audience for his excuses or his accusations—and that was all there would be. Certainly, he’d offer no apology. He’d still probably expect her to play hostess for his family, anyway. It wouldn’t be civilized to cause a scene so close to the holidays.
“I want to go somewhere,” she told Helen. “My leave was approved. Just because Gerard-Pierre decided not to go, that doesn’t mean I can’t have a Christmas holiday, right?”
“Right. Where do you want to go?”
Home.
The pang was strong enough to cut through her anger. She wanted to go home, to a place where she was part of something. To a place where she belonged.
It didn’t exist.
“I want to come back to the United States,” she said, the words surprising her even as she spoke them.
It would feel familiar. There’d be all the foods and the stores and the street signs she’d grown up with. She’d be surrounded by American accents and oversize vehicles. She wanted to eat in a McDonald’s that did not serve gazpacho or koffiekoeken, in a KFC that served tea on ice without asking, because they didn’t even sell hot tea.
Her friend laughed. “The grass is always greener on the other side of the pond, then. You want to come to the United States, and I’m dying to go to Europe.”
There was a pause, and then, despite the satellite’s relay delay, the old roomies spoke in unison. “We should swap places.”
India seized on the idea. “We really could do that. We could swap houses.”
“Now?” Helen asked.
“Yes. You could spend Christmas here.”
“My reflex is to say ‘No, I couldn’t,’ but Tom and I just got extra days off. Minutes ago.”
India looked at the bra on her floor. A lot had happened in the past few minutes.
“It’s like fate,” Helen said, half-serious.
India pressed her point, trying not to sound frantic. “It would be perfect for you. My place could be your home base for your honeymoon. From here, you could catch trains to Paris or Rome. You could take a ferry to England. You could drive to Amsterdam or Luxembourg.”
“Stop, stop. I’m sold. I’ve been sold since you first pointed that phone out your window last year.”
Thank God. India really needed to get out of here. What she wanted was...
Well, it wasn’t here. What she wanted was time away, time to herself to decide what she wanted.
Helen was apologetic. “It’s great for me, but what would you get? An unfinished house and nobody to talk to except our goofy dog.”
“Do I have to meet the dog’s family?”
“No.”
“Sounds like heaven.”
* * *
This is going to be hell.
Aiden brooded at the brown, barren view. He’d been through worse, of course. Combat tours, with their eternal stretches of boredom flavored by the underlying knowledge that monotony could explode into a life-or-death situation at any second of any hour. There’d been the extreme sleep deprivation for months at Ranger School. The steady, prolonged pressure of four years at West Point. Those had each been their own sort of hell, but he’d made it through each one because he’d had a sense of purpose during them.
He also hadn’t been a father during any of them.
He wasn’t feeling particular purposeful this week. Nobody in the battalion seemed to be. As the staff arrived one by one, Aiden glanced at the array of expressions: resignation, anger, glumness. Plain old bad moods—and this was the senior leadership. The barracks full of eighteen-and nineteen-year-old privates must be a real barrel of laughs. Dragging an unmotivated unit through an unnecessary exercise? Yes, that counted as a kind of hell, when it took his children away from him.
He’d survive it, of course. He could survive anything, and he’d learned that not overseas or in a Georgia swamp or in the granite-walled environs of a military academy. He’d learned that in a hospital, by his wife’s bedside. He could survive anything, even if he didn’t want to, even if it was grossly unfair of the universe to expect him to take another breath.
He closed his eyes, blocking out the brown flatness, and missed the unsullied joy of his daughters. They gave him breath. They gave him purpose. They gave him happiness. They were gone until Christmas Eve. He rubbed the two pennies between his fingers.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.” The battalion commander entered the boardroom with energy, clapping his hands together and rubbing them in anticipation. It was entirely too much cheer for the start of a three-hour meeting.
Aiden turned away from the window and took his seat.
“The preparations for this exercise have been executed in an outstanding manner,” the battalion commander said, then he turned to Aiden. “Major Nord, well done.”
“Thank you, sir.”
It was an unexpected way to open a meeting, but Aiden supposed he couldn’t ask for better than that. The commander went around the table, congratulating each staff officer and each of the four company commanders, including Tom Cross, Aiden’s new neighbor. Captain Cross and his wife, Captain Helen Pallas, had bought the acreage adjacent to Aiden’s. Their new house was not quite complete. They’d moved in about a month ago, anyway.
“Which brings me to the highlight of this meeting.”
Aiden exchanged a look with the executive officer, who raised his brow and shrugged. Neither of them had been informed there was going to be a highlight of this meeting.
“The powers-that-be have completed their review of the plans and preparatory work we’ve submitted. They are certain that we have prepared for every contingency.”
A few of the officers and senior NCOs gave appropriately restrained, indoor hoo-ahs in response.
“In fact, they are so certain we’ll ace this exercise, they have decided not to hold the actual exercise.”
Silence.
The lieutenant colonel seemed to enjoy it. “Please, ladies and gentlemen, try to control yourselves. I know you were looking forward to ninety-six hours of no sleep and delicious MREs, but you’re going to have to find a way to cope with a training holiday instead.”
A training holiday? Time off without having it counted against his annual leave? Time off when he’d been expecting to work around the clock for days? Time off?
The stunned silence held. It was like they’d all just witnessed a Christmas miracle.
Aiden didn’t trust it. “The entire exercise, sir? The brigade as well as the battalion?” If the brigade was still a go, then he would still work. The brigade S-3 would want input from the battalion S-3.
“The whole enchilada. I don’t think it takes a genius to realize that, in addition to reviewing our plans, someone higher up also reviewed the amount of fuel the exercise would require and the amount of fuel budget they had left for the year. They don’t have a burning need to deploy hundreds of vehicles across Central Texas’s highways this week, after all.”
All around the table, faces were starting to smile.
The commander was openly laughing. “Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some of their spouses reviewed the calendar with them, too. This level of exercise being conducted this close to Christmas while all the kids are out of school was guaranteed to piss off some very important spouses—or entire organizations of spouses.”
No kidding.
Aiden’s surprise was wearing off. Anger was taking its place. Couldn’t they have foreseen the blow to morale among the military families? Couldn’t they have counted their damn money and their damn fuel and canceled the whole damn enchilada sooner? Before he’d promised his sister that she could have his girls for the week?
The three-hour meeting was over in five minutes.
The battalion commander stayed, wishing each person a happy holiday as the team cleared out with alacrity, everyone dialing their cell phones as they left to give their families the good news. Aiden was in no hurry. He had no one to dial.
Only one person came in the door instead of out, and that was Captain Helen Pallas, who’d no doubt sprinted over from the brigade headquarters building to see her husband.
They were both in uniform, so they could not share any newlywed hugging and kissing—thank God, because Aiden couldn’t leave before he gathered up the papers it turned out he didn’t need—but their high five, a hard slap of victory, made up for it. Just the sound of that clap made his hand sting.
“Pack your bags,” Helen said. “We’re going to Europe, baby.”
“We’re what?” Tom asked.
Aiden stacked papers and listened as his new neighbor explained that she’d set up a house swap with an old friend in Belgium.
“How long before I knew the exercise was canceled did you know?” The laughter and approval in Tom’s voice as he spoke to his wife gave Aiden another pang of...wistfulness. He remembered what that had been like, to have a coconspirator. A friend. A lover. Long ago—it felt like a million years ago.
Helen made a show of checking her watch. “About fifteen minutes.”
“You set all this up in fifteen minutes?”
She pretended to dust off her fingernails on her camouflage lapel. “That’s right. One European honeymoon, arranged in fifteen minutes. We’re already on the list for a Space-A flight to NATO headquarters tonight. If we don’t get a seat, then we’re going standby on a commercial flight to Amsterdam out of Austin, and we’ll rent a car and drive to Brussels. Colonel Reed already signed my leave form. Any questions?”
Tom looked past her to the battalion commander. “Can I get a leave form signed in the next half hour, sir? I hope the answer is yes, or else I’m apparently going to miss my own honeymoon.”
Helen turned to Aiden. “Major Nord, I hate to impose on you. My friend India will take care of our dog once she gets to our house, but there’s going to be about ten hours where we’re passing each other over the Atlantic. Could you come over and feed Fabio in the meantime?”
Aiden had already met Fabio, a golden retriever with long, flowing hair. Aiden and the Crosses had already exchanged house keys, too. Not only were they all in the same brigade, theirs were the only two houses along half a mile of road.
“If you’re not going anywhere yourself, sir, that is.”
“I’ll be home.” Rattling around an empty house.
“Great. Can I leave your name and number for my friend, just in case she has any questions?”
“The name is India?”
“Yes. I’ve known her a long time. She’s...well, she was my mentor, really, when I was first commissioned.”
“She’s some kind of weird savant with languages,” Tom offered.
Swell. A mentoring, motherly, older lady who studied foreign languages and took vacations alone, in houses that were out in the middle of nowhere.
“I doubt she’ll need you,” Helen said, “but just in case.”
“Sure. Give her my number.”
At this rate, a call from Tom and Helen’s house sitter would probably be the most exciting thing that would happen to him all week.
Chapter Three (#u34d815ff-7d69-5859-b003-7b6aa34a7a08)
She was running on empty.
