Page 36 of Every Little Kiss
“Sorry, man, I don’t believe you. Because you’re running around like some JV player trying to impress the homecoming queen.”
His friend’s lack of faith hurt like a double shot to the chest. Especially since Ford had meant it when he said it, but suddenly it felt like a lie. And wow, he felt like an idiot.
Had he come here to Sequoia Lake with the goal of swooping in like some kind of fly-by-night hero and impressing her? Damn straight he had, because if he did manage to impress her, then maybe she’d manage to forgive him. And eventually he could forgive himself.
“I don’t want her to think of me as some hotheaded rookie who made an impulsive decision that ended up costing her husband’s life,” Ford admitted. “I hope she never finds out what happened that day, but if she ever does, I don’t want her to think that her husband was lost because some FNG didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t understand what was at stake.”
“You might have been new to the team, but you were far from a fucking new guy, Ford,” Harris said evenly.
Ford swore and rested his head in his hands. He took a deep breath, but it didn’t help. Nothing helped. The anger and frustration and guilt—a hell of a lot of guilt—had coiled in his stomach tighter and tighter until he’d gone numb with regret.
He’d tried to ignore it, tried to bury himself with work, but that hadn’t helped either. Which was why he’d missed his certification. Ford could hike up that twelve thousand feet and sleep in subzero temperatures a million times over, but it wouldn’t change that night. Wouldn’t give him his unflappable calm back. Ford would always question his intuition, his decisions, and hesitating wasn’t an option when in the field.
Problem was, the field was the only place Ford excelled. And if he couldn’t let go, find some sort of peace with memories so he could sleep at night, then he was going to lose that too.
“I sent the chopper back,” he heard himself say. “When we got the call, we were briefed that it was a single male in his midthirties who’d skidded off the mountain and down into a ravine. We knew he’d left his car on foot and was probably headed toward one of the caves by the river for shelter.”
Ford blinked away the image of the accordioned SUV, hood dug into a snowbank, the windows missing, the doors and roof shredded from the hundred-foot slide down a jagged mountainside. He would have thought it was bad intel if they hadn’t seen the footprints leading away from the wreckage.
“The chopper lowered me down right as word came that the storm had turned. I knew if the team didn’t get out right then, they’d be stuck.” He looked up and met his friend’s gaze head-on, ready to accept whatever came at him. “I sent them back to base camp.”
Harris blew out a pained breath. “You made the right call. Safety first, subject second. If they’d stayed, then another team would have been sent out and in danger as well.”
“I saw the empty car seat,” he admitted. “I saw it and could have called them back, but I thought,What kind of asshole would have his kid out at three in the morning in a storm like this?” Ford choked on a humorless laugh. “The kind of asshole who was trying to get his son back to his mother for Christmas morning.”
Ford had just come off a three-day search in a nearby mountain range and was so tired he’d forgotten it was Christmas Eve. It wasn’t as if he had family to rush home to spend the holidays with. But Sam had, and he never made it.
“That’s every rescuer’s worst nightmare. A call nobody wants to make, but you made it, and you made the right call.”
“How do you know?” Ford yelled, then cupped the bill of his cap so he didn’t have to look at his friend. Because what guy wants to lose his shit in front of his buddy?
And just great, now Harris was standing and coming around the desk to sit in the chair next to Ford. Like he thought Ford was a delicate flower.
“Because I know you,” Harris said simply, and Ford’s throat tightened. “And I know that valley, how hard it is to navigate a Bell Ranger through there when the winds are whipping, and how dangerous it would have been to try to land in that storm. And if you still don’t believe me, then know this—any other search team on the planet wouldn’t have plowed into that storm and come out with a survivor.”
Ford waited for the guilt to subside, waited for his heart to finally catch up with his brain and admit he’d made the right call. But whatever freedom he’d hoped would come from this confession never came. “I start to believe it, and then I get called out to some site, and once I hear that a kid is involved, I start thinking about Paxton and how Christmas will forever be the day his dad died, and all of the what-ifs and doubts come back.”
“You start giving in to the what-ifs and you’ll never get out from under them,” Harris said.
Ford slid him a sidelong glance. “Every time that kid sees another dad, takes up baseball, makes it through his first day of school, he’s going to wonder about his dad. He won’t be able to let it go, so I guess it’s only fair that I can’t either.”
Harris turned his body toward Ford and rested his elbows on his knees. “Because of you he gets to play baseball and go to his first day of school. And he’s got an amazing mom who loves him. Emma’s only got one parent, and trust me, that kid is loved.”
“He barely smiles.”
“Neither do you.”
“He doesn’t talk.”
“And Emma can talk a doorknob deaf. Kids are different. And every call-out is different, which is why when you hand over your case file at the end of a rescue, you hand it all over. You walk away and know that you did all you could do. That job is finished.”
“It doesn’t feel finished,” he said. “I made a promise to Sam that I would make sure Liv was okay.”
Harris laughed. “Have you met the woman? She is the most stubborn, independent person I’ve ever met. Well, besides you.”
She was also the loneliest. Looking at Liv was like looking at his mother. Too proud to take help, too tired to enjoy her life. She’d always said she’d get to the fun part later, but Ford had been a wild kid, and for his mom, later never came.
He refused to do that to another woman.
