Page 59 of If This is Love

Luke shrugged with the bag. “I’m friggin’ starving, bruh.” He shook the bag of grapes at Skye. “Y’know, if I’m going to come over here and papercut my hands to hell and back as afavor, y’all should at least have some decent snacks or some shit. Y’all don’t even have microwave popcorn.”

A tight, placating smile stretched Brennan’s mouth. “There are plenty ofsuppliesfor hors d’oeuvres, and you are free to put together something for yourself. Unless you need help cutting something that’s not your fingers.” He arched one eyebrow. “Would you like me to put together a charcuterie board for snack time, Luke-y? I could read you a story, too.”

Luke was in the middle of popping three grapes in his mouth at the same time and then mumbled through chipmunk cheeks, his brow drawing low with exuberance, “Would you do that?” He quickly chewed and swallowed. “The charcuterie board, I mean. That actually soundsamazingright now.”

Brennan’s jaw pulsed as he stared at the bag of grapes. “Stop. Eating. The. Grapes.”

Chloe covered her mouth and laughed quietly. “No, it’s okay, Brennan. Don’t worry about feeding him.” She glanced at her phone and then waved it at him. “We should probably head out now anyway because Ophelia has to leave in like forty-five minutes, and I don’t trust the traffic. We can pick up something in the neighborhood.”

Luke lowered the bag of grapes as his shoulders sank a little. “I’m going to need a snack for the road.”

“Jesus, Corporal,” Connor grunted, pushing out of his chair at the front of the room near the fireplace and then holding his hand out for Liza, who was in a chair next to his. “You have got to be the oldest toddler I’ve ever met.”

Connor, Liza, Luke, and Chloe all said their goodbyes to everybody in a flurry of hugs, cheek-kisses, and back pats, and I kept my seat on the couch, which now had an empty seat for when Gabe and Gunner came back inside. He’d only had this one cigarette in all five hours we’d all been here, and I silently, discreetly beamed with pride. I knew he’d been working really hard to quit smoking, and he was making good, steady progress.

“Well,” Brennan said after everyone had filed out, leaving only him, Skye, Austin, Emma, and me in the front room, “Anyone need a coffee or something while I’m up? I can put on a fresh pot.”

“I think I’m okay,” Emma said. “We’ll probably get going soon, too. I think we’re going to that cemetery tour.” She cast a giddy glance at Austin, who opened his mouth to speak, but then she sucked in a tiny, quiet gasp like she just remembered something and turned to me. “Oh, Ruth, did Skye tell you what I heard at a trafficking symposium I was at last month?” She raised both eyebrows at me just as Gabe and Gunner slipped through the doorway and stepped into the front room. “Guess where Louisiana ranks for trafficking numbers.” She waved her arm through the air. “Out of the whole country.”

I grimaced just as Gabe quietly sat down on the couch next to me while Gunner sprawled out between our feet. “I feel like it’s somewhere at least in the top ten.”

Emma held up two fingers, wiggling them in the air. “Numbertwo.”

I nibbled my bottom lip and rubbed my fingers across my clavicle. “Lord, that’s just awful, but not too surprising. Millions of people pass through just this city in any given week.” I turned over my palm. “Probably twice that when there’s a football game.”

“Exactly, but what they found was the real problem here is the interstate corridors are basically the perfect location to host a trafficking site.”

“Hmph,” Skye huffed. “I could’ve told them that five years ago. I had dozens of women I knew who just disappeared forever because they were ‘taking them on road trips.’” She curled her fingers in air quotes and then dropped her hands on her lap listlessly. “It’s impossible to locate victims when they’re being moved around constantly.”

“That’s exactly what we’ve seen at UNHCR,” Emma added. “That’s why it’s almost impossible to find victims in areas of conflict like Syria and Iraq. They hold them at locations that have been ravaged by war and then abandoned, so nobody’s even there to look for them. Nobody can even get close.” She nodded at Gabe, who was staring blankly at the space in front of his eyes like he was lost in thought. “Gabe, Chloe mentioned that you encountered something like that during your last deployment.”

Gabe cocked an eyebrow, not looking at her, and mumbled,“Hmph.”

Emma eyed him expectantly and clarified, “Like, for example, at the checkpoints between Lebanon and Syria there were all these—”

“Chloe doesn’t knowshit,” Gabe clipped, his tone aggressive out of nowhere.

There was an uncomfortable pause. I knew he and Chloe had dealt with some issues recently because of their shared past with his ex-wife, and I wasn’t sure if they were still dealing with it. My hand went automatically to rest on his knee, and I asked quietly, “You okay, friend?”

He ignored me.

“Well, I’m sure it’s hard to really know what it’s like if you weren’t actually there,” Emma went on, still pleasant, albeit now eyeing him a bit warily. “The women I encountered had already fled transitory locations, and I don’t know what—”

“Yeah, you don’t know shiteitherbecause you didn’tdoshit,” Gabe snapped.

I whipped my head around to look at him. “Gabe,” I quietly started, noticing his pewter-gray eyes were glazed over like he was three sheets to the wind.

Emma arched an eyebrow. “I beg your pardon. Do you suddenly have a problem with me, Gabe? I was just asking a question.”

“Yeah, you’rereal goodat asking questions,” he said, pupils shrunken and eyes unfocused, but he stared in the direction of her face. Gunner pushed himself up off the floor and growled as he placed his head in Gabe’s lap, andoh no.Oh no, oh no, oh no…“Did you actually do anything for anyone over there, or did you just ask a bunch of questions and leave people to die?”

“Hey, buddy, maybe take it down a notch,” Austin interjected, holding his palm in the air neutrally. “It’s not a reporter’s job to attempt to execute a humanitarian effort. Her job was to—”

“The work we did brought that crisis to the world’s attention in a way that allowed relief efforts to reach people that nobody otherwise knew existed,” Emma cut in, holding her hand up in front of Austin as if she didn’t need anyone, not even her husband, to speak for her.

“Yeah, but you didn’t actually do anything for them,” Gabe clapped back, sounding robotic and hateful. Another deep growl rumbled in Gunner’s throat, and I set my hand on the side of his arm, only for him to jerk away from me. “I had reporters embedded with my unit a hundred times, andyou peopledo nothing but get in the way and require extra security to keep your worthless asses alive. We have to keep you safe when we could be looking out for each other andactuallysaving civilian lives.”

“I wasneverembedded with any military,” Emma countered, pitching forward on the couch, jaw stiff. “We were on our own. We had no security. Hence why—”

---