Total pages in book: 122
Estimated words: 115997 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 580(@200wpm)___ 464(@250wpm)___ 387(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 115997 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 580(@200wpm)___ 464(@250wpm)___ 387(@300wpm)
“He’s not here.” My voice came out just as flat as I felt.
“Nate?”
“He’s not here,” I repeated, forcing myself through the words. “Has anyone come by? Anyone . . . in uniform?” My tongue tripped over the words. It was the only other explanation I could think of.
“No, Izzy. No one’s been here,” she said, her voice softening. “Are you okay?”
“No.” My eyes watered and my nose stung as I blinked back the torrent of tears. “Maybe he’s deployed? But I mean, he’s always slipped me some coded warning in a text or a call. And I don’t know any of his friends. I can’t think of a single person I could call and ask.” I knew so little about his actual life that it was embarrassing. Serena was right. He could have an entire family that I knew nothing about. He’d kept me on the fringes of his life, never letting me in.
But no one had batted an eye when I’d stood at his side at the funeral.
A new girlfriend maybe? A new . . . wife?
“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry.”
“What am I supposed to do? Staying makes me foolish, and leaving means . . .” I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud.
“Come home or stay and soak up what sunshine you can.” So sensible. So Serena.
“I don’t want to be here without him.”
“Then you have your answer.”
I started crying and didn’t stop. I worried the resort staff as I checked out, and then frightened the attendants when the tears kept coming on the flights I’d changed. The tears came and came and came as I crossed time zones, date lines, and what felt like years. People stared and offered tissues, which only made me cry harder.
My eyes were nearly swollen shut, hot and scratchy, by the time I walked into my apartment, and when I saw Serena, the waterworks started again. It was like I had an unending supply of tears.
She held me tight and rocked me like we were little again. “It’s okay,” she whispered as I sobbed on her shoulder.
“I have to let him go, don’t I?” The words were stuttered and broken. “It doesn’t matter if he did it on accident or on purpose—I can’t keep living like this, Serena. I have to let him go.”
“I’m so sorry.” Her arms tightened around me.
Nate and I had waited so long to take our shot that we’d missed it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
IZZY
Kabul, Afghanistan
August 2021
How dare he.
He didn’t see the allure of marrying someone who was at least present?
“And there has become the baseline for your standards?” The bewilderment on Nate’s face was almost laughable.
“You’re kidding me, right?” It was a damn good thing I didn’t have anything in my hands or I might have thrown it at him. “I wonder who set that baseline?” I cocked my head to the side. “If you think my standard of showing up is low, then you only have to look in the mirror to see why that is. Out of everyone in my life, you were the one person I trusted to show up when needed, and you vanished.”
He put up his hands and backed away slowly. “I think I should leave before we get into shit we have no business dragging up.”
That extraordinary talent he had for compartmentalization, for remaining calm and cool when I was ready to throw down, was the one thing I both envied and loathed about him.
“‘Dragging up’?” I shook my head. “It’s hard to drag something up that never got buried.” Emotions I couldn’t handle welled up with the force of a tidal wave, devouring every shred of self-control I’d clung to in one all-consuming wave of love and grief and everything that had been left to die between us. “And you lost the right to know anything about my love life years ago.”
“You don’t think I know that?” He turned away from me and walked to the water he’d left on the counter, then slammed back the whole thing like it was a bottle of vodka. He crushed it in his fist before turning back to me, his customary composure slipping. “You think it didn’t kill me not to ask who you’d actually deemed worthy of marrying you the second I saw that hunk of ice on your hand?”
“Well, it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?” I lifted my left hand, showing its obvious bare state. “He’s not my fiancé anymore. Does that make you happy?”
“The better question is if it makes you happy.” He wasn’t even shocked that the ring was gone. Of course he’d noticed at some point. Nate noticed everything. But he hadn’t asked why. Because he didn’t want to know? Or because he didn’t think he had a right to?
I opened my mouth and shut it again. “It’s complicated.”
“Would you like to elaborate?” He leaned against the end of the counter, taking up more space than he should have. Everything about Nate still felt larger than life, and though I thought I’d grown accustomed to seeing him in their version of an unmarked combat uniform, I really hadn’t.