Once we pushed out the front doors and back into the idyllic scenery that made up his hometown he grabbed my arm and hauled me around so that we were nose to nose. He was breathing hard and there was an unhinged panic in his eyes that I had never seen before. This was Church close to the edge. The edge of what, I had no clue, but I was smart enough to recognize that I needed to shut my mouth or else there was a real risk I would end up pushing him over.

“Elma Mae loves me and nothing I could do or have done would ever make her stop. I wasn’t nervous or scared about how she would handle seeing me after all this time.” His eyes flashed a million different emotions at me and his lungs pushed out breaths as rapidly as he could pull them in. “I didn’t want her to be dead.”

He dropped the bomb at the same time he let me go. I rocked back on my heels and put a hand over my chest where my heart was racing, trying to keep up with his erratic behavior.

“Why would you think that? You knew she was doing fine other than her injuries. Why would you think that she would be dead just because you finally made it to see her?” He wasn’t making any sense but I could see he was as serious as could be.

His eyes drilled into me and his voice was icy cold and devoid of all emotion when he flatly responded, “Because the women I care about don’t make it. I get a good thing in my life and it goes away before I realize just how good it is. Bad can always get worse and there isn’t a damn thing I can do to stop it.” He pulled his eyes away from mine and turned his back on me as he started walking towards the motorcycle. “Why do you think I refuse to let myself think about there being a me and you, pretty girl? You’re all good and I don’t want to bring you into the kind of bad I can’t seem to shake.”

His words floored me. They left me frozen on the spot and unable to think straight. He started the bike and refused to look at me while I stood stuck and immobile a few feet away.

We needed to talk. I needed to understand. He needed to make what had just happened here make some kind of sense, because I knew for a fact Church was a lot of things, some I liked more than others, but none of those things was bad.

I was starting to see what all those dark clouds and shadows that hovered over him were made of.

Memories and regrets and a whole lot of loss that he couldn’t stop. He was still feeling old wounds like they were freshly sliced into his soul. I didn’t know if there was a sunny day bright enough to shine through all of that but I’d be damned if I didn’t try to find one for him.

Church

I’d spent the last ten years of my life putting myself in dangerous situation after dangerous situation. I’d lost friends and come close to losing myself on more than one occasion. I’d been injured and broken down. I’d been exhausted and pushed to the limit, but in all of that time I’d refused to let fear be a factor in how I did my job. It was there, always hovering on the periphery of my consciousness, but I tuned it out and ignored it. I focused on the task at hand, on the mission, and I never froze. I believed I was bigger, badder, and my mission was more important than the things that scared me and I brazened my way through every situation I found myself in, even the ones that should have terrified me. I went into the army with a purpose.

Today all of that long-practiced bravado fled.

Today I couldn’t wrestle back the fear and camouflage it with bluster and balls.

Today my hands shook so badly I couldn’t even hide my fear that another person I cared so deeply about had left this world for whatever was beyond.

There was no hiding the stark terror that had made it almost impossible for me to open the door keeping Elma Mae from me and there was no stopping the truth from rocketing loose from the jagged place in my soul when Dixie questioned my obvious hesitation. It ripped free from the place inside where I kept it perched high and visible to constantly remind me why I refused to let myself care about anyone in a deep and meaningful way. I couldn’t withstand the loss of another vital, beautiful, loving, and generous woman. I already carried around the weight of the loss of both the women Jules had loved, and if there was any more added to the load I would buckle and never be able to get back on my feet. Senseless and wasteful. There was no rhyme or reason to why we couldn’t keep the women we loved safe and that shredded me, especially when I thought about the way I squandered time with one of them and wasted days being mad at the other because they both chose to love a good man. I should have done better, been better.

I knew Dixie wanted an explanation. I could feel her tiny frame practically vibrating behind me and it had nothing to do with the rumble of the motorcycle and everything to do with the conversation she was waiting to have. A conversation I wanted to have about as much as I wanted to spend another year eating nothing but MREs. Telling her about my mother passing far too soon had been hard and had forced me to be far more honest than I wanted to be with anyone. If she pinned me down and made me tell her about how I knew things could go from bad to worse especially when it came to Caroline there would be no more softening of her eyes when I asked her if she was okay and no more little grins when I told her I wanted to keep her safe. She looked at me like I was a hero and I selfishly wanted to keep it that way. The truth was anything but heroic.

Taking her from the hospital to the house I grew up in was a literal trip down memory lane. I absently catalogued all the things that were the same in the sleepy suburb where Jules’s sprawling brick ranch home was located, but it was all the things that were different that really stuck out. I forced myself to believe that home was better off without me, and me without it, but I hadn’t really prepared myself for home to go on and grow and prosper without me. The streets were lined with new homes and happy families playing in the perfectly landscaped yards. There was a park on the corner that hadn’t been there years ago, and instead of a single stoplight in the center of town there were now three—and a slew of convenience stores and a new chain superstore that felt woefully out of place in the memories I had of my hometown.