Page 60 of Worth the Ruin
So,maybe being snowed in with Melody isn’t so bad. Now that she’s lowering the walls again and letting me back in, that is. It was hard talking about the beginning, about that night when I watched the city burn, and I realize that it’s been years since I’ve told anyone about it. Years since I had anyone—other than Doc—that I could really talk to about much of anything deeper than patrol schedules and supply inventories. No one else knows my past. No one else has ever wanted to.
Sleeping beside her had been a special kind of torture, but one that I’ll gladly take every night for the rest of my life if she lets me. It had taken all of my self-control not to slide across the mattress, wrap her in my arms and hold her through the night. I refuse to think about everything else I’d wanted to do in that damn bed.
The snow had stopped falling early this morning, but the feet upon feet of it that had piled up wasn’t going anywhere for a good long while. I’ve been in contact with Landry and Johnson, and they were able to get off the island and on the road back to FOS before the worst of the snow stranded them. Haven gothit with the storm too, but not quite as bad as we did here. All of the settlements are good—plenty of supplies and there were protocols in place for events like this. Everything is good on all fronts, so I try not to worry. Not like I can do anything even if something is wrong, but I have faith that my people can handle it if and when something comes up.
I kind of hope that this is another sign that I’m no longer needed as the leader of Haven. I’ll be more than happy to step away from it. The evil, sadistic king persona had only been necessary in those first few years to get everything under control and settled. I’ve let it fade a bit over the years, and I rarely have to “prove” myself anymore to make a point. The threat of me is mostly enough. But now, I wonder if maybe even that isn’t necessary. We handled all of the people who wanted to pretend that the end of the world meant they got to just run wild with no rules and do whatever they wanted. We established trustworthy leadership and processes for supply distribution and growing food. We have a solid security force in each settlement and protocols in place for almost every situation you can think of.
Haven is running like a well-oiled machine. So maybe I really can just leave it all behind. Maybe I can put the mask down for good and start my real life again.
“What about your wife?” Melody asks, pulling me from my thoughts. She looks pointedly at my hand where I’m rubbing my thumb over my ring finger, where a silver band once sat. I always do it when I’m thinking and I guess she’s noticed. Of course she has. She sees everything. We’re playing the princess matching game, both lounging across the mattress.
I tense and clench my jaw. I know this is a good sign, that we’re finally talking and really getting to know each other. Or learning about each other’s pasts anyway. I feel like I know Melody better than anyone else somehow, despite not evenknowing half of what her past is hiding, and that she can see straight through to the very heart of me.
But still, some memories are harder to talk about than others.
“She was my best friend’s little sister, actually. We were high school sweethearts, but ended things when we both went off to college. Wanted to sow those wild oats and all that.” I shoot her the crooked smile that she pretends to hate, but I know damn well works its magic on her. It had gotten me out of trouble more times than I could count in my younger days. “But we ended up reconnecting years later at a retirement party for a mutual friend’s father. Both of our life plans had gotten a little derailed—my baseball career ended in the minors after a blown rotator cuff, and she’d followed a guy across the country and it didn’t pan out—and we ended up back at home. Got married three months later.”
“And the guilt?” she asks. “I’m sure part of it was that you weren’t with her when it happened, but…I think there’s more to it than that.” Sometimes I wish she wasn’tquiteso good at what had apparently been her fucking job: reading me like a fucking book.
“We were fighting. Before I mean. Things had been rough for a while. She…cheated on me with a coworker, but wanted to work things out. I told her I would try but I knew deep down that I couldn’t get past it, that we were done. So, things were pretty miserable. But she was trying so hard and it was destroying her. And I still couldn’t just man up and tell her it was over.” I stare at the wall, remembering the last time I saw her so clearly. “She wanted to come with us to the tournament, thought it would be good for us, time out of the house and out of the town with too many ghosts following us around all the time. But I said no. When I left that day, she just stood in the doorway and watched me go, tears in her eyes. I think…I think she knew it then. Sheknew that we were done and that I could never find my way back to her. I should have justtoldher though. She messed up and broke things, yeah, but I still owed it to her to tell her the truth, to not drag her along with hope when I knew damn well there wasn’t any.”
Melody is quiet for a long minute, so long that I finally turn to look at her, letting the vision of Emily crying in the doorway fall away.
“I’m sorry,” is all she says and somehow, it’s enough.
I shrug. “It was a long time ago, I just…I wish things could have ended differently. I’ll never get the chance to make it right.”
“I get that.”
“I managed to keep my best friend through it all though—the cheating, the terrible home life award, the zombie damn apocalypse—so that’s a silver lining I guess.” Her brows lift and I smirk, anticipating her face when I drop this bomb. “Doc Hastings.”
She blinks. And then blinks again.
“Doc Hastings is yourbrother-in-law!?”
“Yep. He actually stepped in for the school’s athletic trainer for that tournament for us—she’d come down with food poisoning the day we were leaving and Doc volunteered to go in her place. I think he was happy for an excuse to get out of town for a while too. All of the issues with me and Em stressed him out. Neither of us ever tried to make him pick a side or anything of course, it wasn’t like that, but he felt torn in two either way. Two people he loved, both hurting, both needing him to lean on. Anyway, he’s been with me since Day Zero. When we first started working on pulling all the settlements together to create Haven, there were three pregnant women at The Cove. I knew he needed to be there for them and…well, I was stepping into my Emmy-winning role as Traeger, so, it was better that no one really knew he was related to me.”
She shakes her head, laughing, but then her eyes fly wide like something is clicking.
“You told him to let Jonah know I was alright? To tell him…the truth about FOS?” I nod. She looks like she wants to say more, but doesn’t, just turns her thoughts inward, working everything out herself. I know she’ll arrive at the right answer without me having to explain it. I swallow hard and decide to shift gears, to see if she’ll let me in a little bit farther.
“Am I pressing my luck if I ask about your husband?”
She takes a long breath in, twirling one of the cardboard squares in her fingers as she mulls it over.
“Mitch,” she finally says. “His name was Mitch.” Her throat bobs and there’s a small, sad smile on her face as she dives back into her memories. “He was great. We met at a hot wing eating contest—I wiped the floor with him, of course.” She grins. “He said it was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen and that he had to get the number of a goddess among mortals.” She rolls her eyes, still smiling, but then it slowly fades.
“He was killed overseas a few years before the end of the world. He and Jonah’s husband, Sean were in the same truck when they hit an IED. We lost them together, somehow kept ourselves from falling apart together, survived the apocalypse together, survived…” She trails off, eyes watering. She scrunches her nose, trying not to let the tears fall and something inside my chest twists painfully. I would do damn near anything to keep her from crying, to hold any pain at bay or take it from her and shoulder it myself.
“What if he came to FOS?” I offer. “Him and Mulligan both.”
“You would do that?”
“Of course. I…I want you happy, Melody. That’s all. If having them at FOS would make you happy, then it’s a done deal.”
She studies me for a long time. So long, I start to feel a little self-conscious.
Finally she says, “I’m pretty tired,” letting the topic of her past and of Jonah relocating fall away for now.
