Page 53 of Ashes to Ashes

Chapter Twenty

Ash

And that was exactlywhy I was able to sit here now and reveal the biggest, most profound mistakes of my life. “I know that,” I said, my voice hoarse. “It’s why I can open up toyou.”

She leaned her head back against my chest and flicked her eyes up. “I understand what it’s like to carry your burdens silently, how they can eat away at you until you don’t recognize yourself anymore.”

I dropped a tender kiss on the top of her head. “Is it wrong, that even though I wish you’d never had to go through any of that, I’m happy you did because otherwise we never would havemet?”

Rae’s fingers danced absentmindedly across my forearm, tracing light circles in the whirls of my hair. “Eighteen months ago—hell, even three months ago—I would have smacked you for saying that, but I have to believe things are playing out the way they were supposed to. How else do you explain our paths crossing so randomly, not once but twice?”

“Would you call me a pussy if I said it might be fate?” I pulled a few strands of her hair through my fingers and let them cascade like silk to her shoulders.

She chuckled. “You’re only a pussy if you’re worried sharing your feelings makes you a pussy. Men are allowed to have emotions too, youknow?”

“Yeah,” I murmured. “Just as long as we don’t talk aboutthem.”

We fell silent and then our breathing synced—our heartbeats moving in perfect rhythm—giving me the courage to continue. “Sonia stayed home from work that day. She was in PR and rarely took time off, but Ethan hadn’t come home, so crawled in bed with me. We spent the morning … well, youknow.”

I hesitated to call what Sonia and I had been doing making love. I’d told her countless times that I loved her, and I did. Probably more than Ethan had, I’d wager. But thinking about my feelings for Sonia compared to what I felt at this moment with Rae in my arms … well, there really was no comparison. What Rae and I had—what we could have in the future if we let ourselves trust one another with our hearts—was better and brighter than anything I’d ever had with Sonia.

For all the ways I’d loved her, I’d hated her too for stringing me along the way she had. Only in hindsight could I see that she’d used my feelings against me. I’d been complicit, but that didn’t make her manipulation right. Or make how I’d deceived my brother okay. As much as I hated Sonia now, I hated myself more for not having the strength to break things off withher.

“Yeah, I know,” she answered, letting me off thehook.

As I sat here now with this beautiful, complicated, trusting woman against me, I could finally see that my grief over Sonia’s death—my guilt—had heightened my memories of our time together. Had maybe even twisted the love I’d felt for her into something grander, something more than it ever was or ever could have been. I didn’t want to diminish the passion I’d had for her because those feelings had been genuine, but now I could admit Sonia hadn’t been the great love of mylife.

“Ethan finally called around eleven o’clock to say he wanted to have lunch with her. Apparently, he had some big news to share and he wanted to meet in the lobby of her building atone.”

“But she wasn’t there.”

“Nope, she wasn’t.” I traced my way up and down Rae’s smooth skin and zeroed in on a freckle that was darker than its mates. Circling it with the pad of my finger, I asked, “How familiar with San Francisco areyou?”

“I played there a few times,” she said. “I was across the bridge that day, in Oakland.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So you know what that day waslike.”

She shrugged against me. “I never saw the carnage, but we were on lock down for almost fifteen hours.”

“It’s better that you didn’t see it,” I answered, my voice full of sorrow. I’d been to war, had seen my fair share of atrocities, but there was something about that warm autumn day that still kept me up at night. Maybe because it’d been the first time I’d seen so many dead bodies at one time, so many severed limbs, that it had stuck with me. Maybe it was because for years, I’d felt like I’d sent someone I loved to die in the carnage? If I’d ever gone to therapy, maybe a doctor could explain it properly, but the guys I’d been deployed with later had said the first time was always the hardest. Anything you saw or did afterward would never compare.

I swallowed down the lump in my throat. “She rushed in to San Francisco, but at one-thirty texted to say Ethan had never shown. Instead of coming home, she’d decided to head upstairs and get some work done. She’d planned to tell her boss that her ‘sick day’ had actually been a dentist appointment.” I rolled my eyes. “I never realized before how easily Sonia could lie. They just slipped off her tongue like honey.

“She texted me again a couple of hours later to ask if Ethan had ever come home, but I was out hiking so I didn’t get her message. I’d turned my phone off so I could think, really try to figure a way out of the situation we were all in. As I walked back, I decided I was going to end it. When I got back to my car and turned my phone back on, it was blowing up with messages from my mom and Ethan, freaking out over where I was. That’s when I learned what had happened.” As I finished speaking, the only sound in the room was our breathing and my heavy heartbeat drumming in myears.

Eventually Rae broke the silence. “Her death wasn’t your fault, Ash. I can’t absolve you of the guilt you have for carrying on a two-year affair with your brother’s wife, but her dying in the attack isn’t on your shoulders.”

“But it is,” I argued. “Itis.”

Rae twisted against me, and leaned back so she could see my face. “Explain to me how Sonia being at work when a terrorist attack hit is onyou?”

“He knew!” I bit out. “That’s why he called to meet her. He was going to tell her he wanted a divorce on the grounds of her adultery.” I looked away, afraid to see her faith in me turn into recrimination.

“Look at me,” she commanded harshly. When I brought my eyes back to hers, she said, “Regardless, she should have been at work that day. Her playing hooky to fuck you all morning has no bearing on what happened later. She’d have gone into work like every other day, and it would have ended the same exactway.”

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