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Was.
Was a good man.
Not is. Not present tense. Past. As in no longer existed. As in... Claire’s entire body felt hollowed by the bright white light of a nuclear blast. Yet she didn’t shake. Her legs didn’t give way. She remained perfectly still. Funny how that could be.
“Jonathan, go on now,” she gasped.
“But, Momma...” he wheedled, his admiring eyes running over the uniformed men. Their stripes. Medals.
“Now,” she snapped, and remorse jabbed her when he flinched, unused to that tone from her. But he’d get familiar with all kinds of pain now, she thought, dazed. He just didn’t know it yet. Her mind raced. Poor baby. Poor her. Poor Kevin. Oh. No.
Jonathan scurried to his room, slammed the door, opened it again, then shut it properly, his attempt to behave making her eyes sting. Like that mattered.
Like anything mattered anymore.
“May we come in, Mrs. Shelton?”
She nodded automatically and stepped back, letting the large men inside. A bitter taste curdled at the back of her throat, as if she’d spent the morning drinking old coffee out of a rusted can. Her eyes felt gritty. Her body numb. Or was that her heart? She couldn’t tell.
They studied each other for a long moment before she gestured them toward a flowered sofa and collapsed into Kevin’s mammoth recliner.
“I’m Army Chaplain Edward Caston and this is Corporal James Finkly.”
She opened her mouth and started to say “nice to meet you,” only nothing came out. It wasn’t nice to meet them. In fact, she wished she’d never laid eyes on either of them. That she was dreaming this, and that the buzzing in her head would morph into her alarm clock, waking her up.
The officers exchanged glances and the younger one rubbed his hands on his thighs. “We regret to inform you...”
Claire watched his lips move, her peripheral vision growing dark, tunneling, until the soldier grew smaller and more distant. With a blink, she could make him vanish. Disappear. Dissolve this nightmare.
A hand gripped hers and she shook her head clear.
“Ma’am. Did you hear what I said?”
She dragged in slow, deep gulps of air from her diaphragm, as she did when she led her yoga classes. It didn’t help.
Calm down, she scolded herself, as her thoughts careened in hot, helpless circles. Be strong. Kevin had always been her rock. The man who carried her through the minefield of her old life. She needed to be that for him. For Jonathan. Claire took a deep, shaky breath and pulled herself together with all the strength that she had, as if she were heaving herself back up from a cliff edge.
“How did it happen?”
“His vehicle passed over an IED. He and another member of his unit were killed instantly. Take comfort that he didn’t suffer.”
Pain seared the center of her chest and she pressed her palm to it. The chaplain fell silent. Was that supposed to ease her agony? Did he think some kinds of loss were easier to bear than others?
“His remains?” she managed.
“Will be here tomorrow. Another officer, Captain Traynor, will help you make the funeral arrangements.”
“Funeral,” she repeated, trying the word. It tasted like dirt. She wanted to spit it out.
The younger officer shifted on the sofa and leaned forward. Earnest. “Ma’am, we deeply regret your loss. Kevin’s commanding officer wanted us to share his and your husband’s fellow guardsmen’s condolences with you.”
“But they’re alive,” Claire murmured, trying to imagine how they could be sorry when they still lived. When they would be coming home soon, like Kevin. Only...not like Kevin. He’d be in a box.
She shivered, her skin shaking over her bones at the image. She replaced it with his kind, honest face that broadcast “what you see is what you get.” And what you got was the sweetest, most honorable, bravest man she’d ever known. A childhood friend who’d stepped up when she’d been left pregnant and brokenhearted by a callous ex. A hero who’d made her feel wanted again. Safe. Loved. And in return, she’d given him her heart. Forever, they’d promised when they’d married just after Jonathan’s birth.
She gritted her teeth.
Death didn’t change anything. She’d never stop loving him. Only now he wouldn’t be here to love her back. The thought dropped straight into Claire’s head with a thud.
“May we call your pastor, ma’am?” The chaplain’s eyes scanned her face, his gaze assessing. “Someone to stay with you?”
How many times had he done this, she thought wildly. How many more? She pressed two fingertips to her forehead and closed her eyes, unable to look at him any longer.
“My father. I’ll call him.”
“If you’re sure. We’re more than happy to—”
She shook her head, suddenly needing them gone. The sight of their gleaming, intact uniforms made her ill. What did Kevin’s uniform look like? Claire opened her eyes and felt a hard ball of fury lodge at the back of her throat, almost choking her.
“Please go.”
She nodded stiffly at their murmured apologies and goodbyes as she stared at her lap, grateful when the door clicked shut behind them.
The refrigerator hummed in the sudden quiet. Outside the house she could hear the soft weekend sounds of her neighborhood: the twitter of sparrows, the far-off buzz of someone’s lawn mower, the slam of a car door. In the distance, children’s laughter bubbled. Life went on. Except Kevin’s. She’d never hear his voice again.
The thought shoved her to her feet and hurled her down the short hall to their bedroom. She jerked open Kevin’s sock drawer and yanked out the letter she’d discovered ten months ago. She stared at the front, mouthing his scrawled words. The ones she’d hoped to never read again.
To Claire: Open if I don’t come home.
A wet splotch fell from her cheek and blurred his handwriting. She carefully slit the envelope and unfolded the page, the paper shaking. Her eyes raced over the lines.
Sweetheart,
If you’re reading this note it means I’m gone and this is my last chance to say how much I love you. Maybe that makes me a little lucky. Not everyone gets to tell the person they love how they feel before they go.
I’m not much of a writer. But you know that. Always was better with my hands. If I could build something to show you how I feel it’d be the Eiffel Tower. Then I’d take you all the way to the top and give you everything as far as we could see.
Remember how we’d do that when we were kids? Put our fingers over the top and bottom of the sun, or a cloud, or a mountain and give it to each other? You gave me everything, Claire, and I gave you my heart, young as it was. Didn’t matter that I was a kid, I always knew you were the only one for me. Even when someone else came into your life for a spell, I never lost hope.
And I was right not to give up because you came to love me back. Even more, you gave me a son who’s mine in my heart, where it counts. Jonathan is our boy and I know you’ll raise him to be the man we’d want him to be. Please tell him his daddy is always proud of him, even when he sticks up for himself but gets knocked down, even when he drives his first miles and dings up one of my trucks, even when a girl crushes his heart but he goes on believing because I did and look what it got me. Two of the most loving people a man could ever be blessed to have.
Sure, I’d wish for more years, but some people live an entire life and never find the love I found. Guess that’s the luckiest part of my life. Having you and Jonathan at all. Know that I’ll always be with you. I give you the moon, the stars and most of all, my heart.
Your loving husband,
Kevin
P.S. I hope they make potato salad as good as yours in Heaven. I’ll miss you, baby girl.
She read it twice more before lowering the paper. A steel vise wrapped around Claire’s chest and squeezed so hard she felt as if she was suffocating. She turned from the bureau and fell back on the bed, burying her face in Kevin’s pillow. It would never hold his head again, and neither would she.
She was pure liquid loss then, sobbing into that pillow, the band around her chest tightening. Her husband. Gone forever. Though she could smell his cologne on the fabric she hadn’t washed since he’d deployed. Someday she’d die, too, and that clamp of grief would still be around her. She didn’t want it to go away. It’d be as if Kevin had never existed, and she couldn’t bear that. Not after everything he’d done for her. Given her. The moon. The stars. The world. A second chance when she hadn’t thought she deserved one.
Did you call for me, Kevin?
The thought was like the tip of a knife twisting and turning at her very core.
But the chaplain had said it’d been instant.
No suffering.
Not so for her. Nor for Jonathan. He’d now lost two dads, though she’d make sure he’d never learn about the first. Kevin would be the only father Jonathan knew and Claire’s one true love.
They would honor Kevin that way.
Always.
She rolled onto her back and pressed the heels of her palms to her wet eyelids. Losing Kevin felt like an actual breach between her ribs, a tear at the bottom of her lungs.
“Momma?” Her son’s voice quavered from the doorway.
She swiped her eyes, sat up and held out her arms. Time to think about Jonathan. She gestured when he stayed still, his short nose scrunched, green eyes wide, as if he sensed the bad coming his way.
“Come here, honey. Momma’s got some sad news.”
He glanced over his shoulder at a scratch against the back door. “Can Roxy hear it, too?”
Claire dug her fingernails into the soft fabric and nodded. “Of course. Go on and let her in.”
Jonathan flew down the hall, one sock half off his foot, trailing from his toes like a streamer. A chasm cracked open in her chest. How to make sense of this to her son? Cushion its blow?
Their silver-haired terrier rocketed into the room and leaped onto the bed, lavishing Claire with tongue kisses. Jonathan hitched up his slipping shorts and climbed next to her and the squirming dog.
“How come I had to go to my room?”
Claire smoothed back his cowlick. Kevin loved—had loved, she painfully corrected herself—ruffling it.
“Is Daddy okay?” Jonathan grabbed Roxy and pulled the writhing dog to his chest.
Kids. Never underestimate them, she marveled. He climbed into her lap and buried his face against her neck. His little body was warm and heavy. She pressed her lips against the silken skin of his cheek and protectiveness surged. After this, she’d never let Jonathan hurt again. Would keep him safe always.
She took a deep breath and began explaining the inexplicable... How their life would be now, even though, deep down, she hadn’t a clue.
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_07db5926-31ff-5e0b-a064-de3b69066869)
Two years later.
“HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, DARLIN’,” Claire murmured as she drove past a Route 36 sign just outside of Coltrane, Texas. A car’s lights flared in her rearview mirror.
She adjusted the mirror, the only thing she ever changed in the vehicle. Everything in her husband’s vintage truck stayed as he’d left it. All but the paint job. She’d added the teal body coat when he didn’t return from Afghanistan to finish its restoration...or take her on that promised first ride.
Her eyes stung and she cranked the volume dial on her radio. An old country tune played and Claire hummed along, feeling as if she knew the heartbroken singer...or, at least, what she’d gone through. The years since her husband’s death had been tough, and she still felt the need to commemorate their wedding anniversary and talk to him, strange as some might think her.
“Can you believe this would have been nine years?” She twisted her wedding ring then picked up her coffee thermos.
A sports car flashed its brights then sped past. Her gaze dropped to the speedometer. Thirty miles per hour in a forty-five zone. Slow, but not slow enough to make this annual trip last as long as she wished.
The countryside loomed gray wherever her headlights touched, bluebonnets waving in thick clusters from the roadside, their sweet fragrance carrying on the warm March wind through the open windows. The road unrolled in front of her and she felt its thrum in her bones.
“Jonathan’s doing well. Got all A’s in homeschool. He’s smart, like his daddy.”
Her voice cracked at the end, evaporating in the back of her tight throat. She recalled Jonathan’s hushed voice when he’d admitted to being bullied and had begged not to return to public school. To spend his days on her father’s ranch, the home they’d moved to after she’d been widowed. He’d always been small for his age and she’d hated thinking of him being pushed around by the bigger boys.
Would Kevin have handled it as she had? Let their son stay away, even after the bullies were punished? Jonathan had grown so withdrawn after losing his father, and she was concerned that the lack of social interaction with kids his age kept him from maturing the way he should. He was different from the rambunctious child Kevin had left behind.
A night bird ghosted over the Chevy Apache’s hood and vanished. Outside the windshield, the full moon ran wild with streaks of cloud, its light pouring down thick enough to drench her on this humid night.
“Dad’s got his speech back but his left side’s still troubling him. Can’t get around like he wants and won’t use the electric scooter. But he’s dragging his foot less, so that’s progress. Right?”
Silence unfurled in the space and she imagined Kevin nodding, his hand dropping from the wheel to cradle hers. He would have known how to help her father accept his post-stroke limitations with that quiet self-assurance that had once steadied her spinning world.
“We finally got an offer on the ranch. Mr. Ruddell, the neighbor who’s been helping us, said he’ll take it off our hands. He can’t afford much, but it’ll be a quick sale so we’ll beat the bank foreclosure. Just.”
Her father’s grim face and terse silences around her lately practically screamed “traitor.” As if she’d engineered the proposed sale. Had twisted his arm to accept it...
Well...she had, but how else to avoid bankruptcy? A total loss on their generations-old ranch? With her dad’s health failing, he didn’t need extra pressure trying to save a lost cause. The doctor said more stress could kill him.
Ever since she’d intercepted a bank call and uncovered the horrible financial news, Claire would wake up each morning in a panic, sure that she’d run out of air. Then the breath would hit her like a horse’s kick to the heart. She couldn’t imagine selling her childhood home, but what choice did she have? Even her older sister, Dani, a horse wrangler who managed a Colorado dude ranch, supported the decision. Although, she’d never been as attached to the ranch as Claire. She’d preferred wandering on horseback to rocking on a porch swing as Claire did every night with her father.
If her dad passed away, leaving her as Kevin had... The thought scared her so much she wanted to take it back, swallow it down in a great gulp and drive faster, flee the possibility before it caught her.
“Do you remember the time you stopped by to help Dad fix one of the tractors and caught me sleeping in it?” She took a sip of her cooled coffee. “I was such a mess then. You knew I was.”
She could imagine her husband’s firm head shake. He’d built her back up when she’d been breaking down. Restored her as he repaired everything else, like this 1959 truck. Not content there, he always improved on the original. Even her.
Especially her.
“I miss you, babe.” And she did, the stabbing loss as deep as the day the Army broke the news. “But I’m doing okay.”
She envisioned the skeptical, downward slant of his eyes.
“Want to hear our wedding song?”
A yellow light in the near distance caught her attention. She attempted to replace her thermos in its holder, missed and grabbed for it before it spilled on the reupholstered front seat. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed the top edge of the traffic fixture as she entered the intersection.
Everything happened at once and in slow motion.
A crushing jolt shuddered through the truck. Her wheels skidded sideways. She smacked against the window when her pickup rolled down an embankment, as if punched by something large and lethal. Glass rained deadly sharp. The earth tumbled around her, her truck in spin cycle. When a massive tree loomed, the Chevy slammed into it then stilled.
