Total pages in book: 123
Estimated words: 116708 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 584(@200wpm)___ 467(@250wpm)___ 389(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 116708 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 584(@200wpm)___ 467(@250wpm)___ 389(@300wpm)
I felt the blood drain from my face.
“Are you okay?” she asked, eying me with a soul-plundering scrutiny only children possessed.
No. I was not. I was so far from okay I couldn’t see the horizon anymore.
But if I had any hope of her being okay—better than okay, happy, peaceful, safe—I had to get my life together.
“Hey, you wanna go to The Grille?”
Her eyes lit, an incredible smile splitting her face. “Go there?”
Nerves rolled in my stomach at the mere thought of leaving the house with her. I didn’t trust myself anymore. I didn’t trust that I wouldn’t miss another cell phone or whatever other dangers lurked in the shadows of my mind. But her smile… I would move entire mountains for that smile.
Or at least I’d try.
“Yeah. Why not.”
She bounced on her toes and then sprinted toward me, colliding into my legs. “Can I have your bacon?”
My hollow chest filled with warmth as I smoothed down her mess of brown curls. “Uh, obviously.”
“We don’t have to tell Mommy, right?” She stuck out her tongue. “She made me a bean sausage for breakfast today.”
Gwen was a vegetarian, so our tradition of me sneaking Kaitlyn meat had started as soon as she’d gotten the teeth to chew it. For years, we’d been making secret trips to The Grille on the nights Gwen would work. I’d always order a bacon cheeseburger. Kaitlyn would get an order of cheese fries and then swipe my bacon.
For obvious reasons, we hadn’t been since I’d gotten home from my deployment. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to sit through a whole meal, but dammit, I wanted to give her some normalcy before I rocked her world all over again.
I couldn’t live like that anymore. I needed help—more than just the doctors and therapy appointments I’d been dodging. I’d been told about an out-of-state rehabilitation center that specialized in veterans with combat-related post-traumatic stress. I’d brushed it off at first, not willing to admit how bad things had gotten, but now, it seemed like the only way.
If I wanted to be present in her life, it was up to me to make that happen.
It was a Wednesday night and exactly six p.m. when we slid into that booth at The Grille. Instead of my usual burger, I ordered a club sandwich, no mayo, bacon on the side, and lived in the moment the way Nutz, Steve-O, Skytrash, and S’arnt would have wanted.
Kaitlyn laughed, filling my ears with stories about her stuffed animals and the perils of kindergarten. I’d thought I’d done a pretty good job of hiding the fact that I felt like I was going to peel out of my own skin, but just as I felt like I couldn’t do it anymore, she moved to my side of the booth, took my hand, and said, “Let’s go home, Daddy.”
Home.
Home.
Home.
Gwen
Tears leaked from my eyes as a blanket of sadness made it difficult to breathe. “Oh my God, Truett. I had no idea.”
He gave my leg a squeeze, but I immediately reached down to take his hand, intertwining our fingers. When I scooted over, our thighs became flush. I would have crawled into his lap if I’d have thought I could have absolved him of even a fraction of his pain.
“You didn’t know because I didn’t tell you. That’s on me.” He hung his head. “So, yeah. She saved my life that day, and then three months later, I failed to save hers.”
I started to give him a whole speech about how it wasn’t his fault. How he never could have known what he was walking into that day at the mall. It wasn’t going to help; I knew that firsthand. I’d spent a long time beating myself up about moving to Watersedge and subsequently paving the path for Kaitlyn to be sitting with him that day at the mall.
If only I’d moved somewhere else.
Taken a different job.
Fought harder for my marriage even when Truett had given up.
But that was the thing about life. You can only operate in the present with the experiences you learned in the past. Hindsight was no more realistic than unicorns or dragons when it came to decision making. It was simply a tool people used to convince themselves that they had control over the trajectory of their lives.
The truth was none of us knew where life was going to take us. When I’d lain in that hospital, a terrified teenager, holding the most precious baby girl God would ever put on this Earth, while the man of my dreams stood beside me, promising me the world, I never could have fathomed that six years later it would all be gone. But the future happened whether you were ready for it or not.
All at once, I released his hand and stood up.