Page 55 of Ashes to Ashes

“There was no way he could. He killed himself.”

Rae’s horror was instantaneous. Covering her mouth with her hand, her eyes begged me to explain.

“The gun I mentioned? After he told me everything, he picked it up and aimed it at me. Then, at the very last second, when I was sure he was going to pull the trigger, he turned it on himself.” I made a pistol out of my fingers and placed the “barrel” under my chin. “I watched his brains splatter all over thewall.”

With a sob, Rae fell against me and wrapped her arms around my middle. Even as she cried, my own tears wouldn’t come. I’d stopped crying for all that I’d lost a long, long time ago. It wasn’t that I’d gone numb to the pain; I’d just learned to live with it, the way you learned to live with a broken bone that never healed properly. You could be fine for days and then wham! You were laid flat in agony.

I rubbed my hand over her back in an effort to calm her, but I felt the motion working on me too. There was something about having Rae in my arms that made me feel like all wasn’t lost. That there were still good things in the world, and if I just opened myself up to them, something positive could bloom and flourish out of the ash of my incinerated heart. Out of the burned-out wreckage of a life wasted.

“I enrolled in the Army the day after his funeral. The rest, as they say, is history.”

Rae sat up, her eyes rimmed in red. “I’m so sorry, Ash. I’m so, so sorry.”

I didn’t want this beautiful, strong woman crying for me. I didn’t deserve those tears. I wiped a trailing tear away with my thumb, let it trace the tracks marking her cheeks. “Please don’t cry for me, baby. I’ve learned to live withit.”

“I can’t help it. You lost everything.”

I nodded and glanced away. I had. I really, really had. And no one had ever truly known just how much—untilnow.

From the outside, it made sense when I threw myself into military service. I’d lost my sister-in-law in the attack. Then, as far as anyone knew, my brother’s pain had been so all-consuming that he couldn’t stand to live without her. How anyone who’d truly known them—who had seen what their marriage was like up close and personal—believed that’s what had transpired, I’d never know. Somehow though, the story stuck. And who was I to correctit?

“In those first few seconds after the gun went off, I hadn’t been thinking clearly. I pocketed the sonogram showing my unborn baby growing in her belly, and then drove straight to a recruitment station. When word finally reached me that Sonia’s remains were identified, I cried for the first time. And then for thelast.”

Rae caressed my cheek. “I get it now. Why you didn’t want to let mein.”

“I honestly can’t believe you’re still here,” I said. “I’m no good for you, Rae. Surely you can seethat.”

She chuckled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “First of all, where would I go? I’m not really at liberty to go wandering off, am I? And second of all, I’m hardly innocent. We’ve both done terrible things, Ash. But we’re both here now, the wiser for our mistakes. We know what we did wrong in our past, and I don’t know about you, but I have no intention of ever going back to the person I was before. You need to move ontoo.”

“I don’t know how,” I admitted. “I’ve held onto this for so long, I don’t know who I’d be without it. I don’t know what that guy lookslike.”

“If you don’t try, though,” she said, “you’ll neverknow.”

I sighed and ran my free hand through my hair. “I want to be the man youneed—”

“Then just be you,” she said. “I fell for you, scars andall.”

“I’ll try,” I promised. It would be harder than anything I’d ever done before, but if it meant I could have Rae, I would have moved mountains. “For you, I’lltry.”

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