Kabul, Afghanistan August 2021
“Nate,” Izzy whispered, staring at the ring I’d carried with me for nearly three years.
“You didn’t want me. You didn’t really love me. Maybe the idea of me, but not who I actually am.” It was the simple truth I’d told myself every time I put the chain on or laced it into my boot on missions that didn’t require being sanitized. I said it to remind me why it was okay that I gave my life in service to my country, why it was necessary that I not show up on Izzy’s doorstep between deployments and beg her to reconsider.
Beg her to love me again.
“That’s not true.” She ripped her stunned gaze away from the ring and lifted it to meet mine.
“You said no.” I had enough practice saying the phrase that it didn’t eviscerate me anymore. Instead, the words were more like a piece of sandpaper over a raw wound that refused to heal.
“I didn’t say no!” She reached for me, and I sidestepped past her.
If she touched me, all bets were off. I was at the edge of my self- control, torn between doing whatever it took to push her away and pulling her close. She wasn’t engaged to Dickface anymore. She wasn’t his. But she’d still given him the yes I’d never received.
“You said, I can’t,” I reminded her. “And I might not have a Georgetown Law education, but I’m pretty sure I can’t and no are pretty fucking synonymous.”
“But they don’t mean the same thing!”
“We’re seriously going to argue semantics?” I walked to the window and checked the courtyard again. Somehow it looked like there were even more people in it now.
“About this? Absolutely,” she retorted.
I turned to face her. “Okay, even if you want to debate the meaning of I can’t, then we’re still left with me telling you that you were the only woman I had ever loved or would love, proposing to you, and then what were your other phrases?” Glancing at the ceiling, I recited them all from memory. “This isn’t right. That one hurt, but let’s not forget my personal favorite, You can’t seriously be proposing right now.”
Her mouth snapped shut.
“Yeah, I remember every single word you said while you blatantly told me that I wasn’t what you wanted. I wasn’t what you chose.” Ugly, gut- twisting feelings beat at me, demanding to be let out of the box I’d kept them in for three years. “Was it because I did it wrong? What did Covington do right? Did he make some grand public gesture? Take you to some exclusive restaurant where everyone notable could watch, or some jumbotron where his commitment was blasted to the world to see?”
“No, Nate.” She shook her head and looked at me like she had any
right to act like the injured party.
“Was it the bigger ring?” I studied every nuance of her expression, looking for a lie. “The bigger bank account? The bigger family connections? The fact that your parents actually approved of him? Or the fact that he had a family jet to come rescue you in?”
“How could you even think that?” Her cheeks flushed again, turning the tips of her ears red. “You know me better than that!”
“I thought I knew you better than that,” I admitted. “But then I’m standing on a tarmac, told that it’s my job to keep you alive, and you’re wearing a ring that could signal a plane from thirty-two thousand feet, doing a job you swore you’d never do.” How had it only been nine days since that moment? “And I could have lived with it if he’d been a decent guy, but Dickface?”
“Oh. My. God. Will you shut up for half a second?” Her voice pitched upward.
“Sure. I mean, whatever you have to say to me can’t be worse than what you already have.”
Her eyes narrowed into a glare. “I never said no.”
“And we’re back to this again.” I folded my arms across my chest. “And I sure as hell never said that I didn’t love you.” She walked
forward slowly. “I know, because I’ve never lied to you. Not once. Can you honestly say the same?”
I winced. “I’ve told you what I can.”
“In our lives, we’ve spent what? Twenty days together?” She swallowed.
“Twenty-seven, actually, and if you even start to tell me that proposing marriage after those days was too much, then I’ll remind you it had been seven years of knowing you and four years of loving you.”
Her lips parted. “That wasn’t what I was going to say. We’d spent less than twenty days together, and I was so in love with you that I couldn’t fathom what my life would look like without you in it.”
“You loved me, but you turned me down?” I stared at her and waited for whatever excuse she had teed up.
“Telling you that I couldn’t accept your proposal had nothing to do with not loving you, Nate. That was never an issue. Not for me.” Her brow furrowed.
“Was it because I stood you up in Palau? Because I wouldn’t let you in when you asked when we were in Fiji?” My chest constricted. Why the hell was I poking her for answers now? Why had I opened the box marked Isabeau Astor in my heart?
“No—it didn’t have anything to do with that.” She took a single step. “Did I want you to let me in? Absolutely. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, but it didn’t—”
“You want in? Fine. I killed one of my best friends, Izzy. How’s that for letting you in?” I threw up my hands.
Her lips parted, and she stopped short.
“Bet you’re regretting wanting in now, huh?” My arms fell to my sides.
“I don’t understand,” she said, confusion puckering her forehead. “Are you talking about Ju—”
“Yes!” I interrupted. “It’s my fault that he’s dead. He yanked me out of the way when a timber rattlesnake struck after we’d both finished our forty- mile ruck march during selection, and it bit him instead.” It was the first time I’d said the words out loud.
She blinked. “Nate, that’s not your fault.”
“Yeah? Well, when I told him we had to tell someone, he refused and said he hadn’t come this far to get med-boarded before the interview portion, which was the final part of selection. Getting through the first courses—” I set my hands on top of my head and closed my eyes. “It was the hardest thing I’d ever done. The hardest thing any of us had done.” It took two deep breaths to steady me before I could continue. “So, I told him fine. I wouldn’t tell as long as he agreed to get help as soon as the interview was over.” And he’d grinned at me, so certain we’d both make it. “I let him walk into his interview with a venomous snakebite, and when it was my turn for the interview, when they told me one of my best friends had just died due to anaphylactic shock in the next room, I rolled with it, thinking it was part of the fucking interrogation. That they’d want a calm, cool, collected soldier in the unit, so that’s what I gave them. Figured we’d both get a laugh out of it afterward, except he really was dead.” There. I’d said it.
Someone knocked on the door.
“Oh God. Nate, you didn’t kill him.” Sadness filled her eyes, and I didn’t deserve an ounce of her pity.
“Yes, I did. If I’d told, gotten him help sooner, he’d be alive. Instead, I’m the one in the unit and he’s the one in the ground. How is that for letting you in, Izzy?”
Another knock sounded.
“That’s why you were so distraught. It wasn’t just that he died.” She came toward me, her face crumpling in a way that made me want to take every word back and just hold her. “I knew something was wrong with you. I was so worried that I stood there for a half hour, soaking wet—”
“You were inside when I proposed.” “I came after you!”
“You . . . what?” The wires in my brain must have crossed because it felt like I was short-circuiting.
The knock turned to a pound. “I hate to interrupt you guys, but I need to talk to you now,” Graham shouted through the door.
“I came after you,” she repeated in a whisper, desperation clogging her voice as she grabbed hold of my uniform.
“Come in,” I managed to call out.
The door opened, and Graham walked in, his face tight. “What’s up?” My stomach tensed, bracing for bad news. “I’m sorry to tell you, but Mazar-i-Sharif is falling.”
