Page 10 of Her Forever SEAL

For a moment the room held the particular silence that followed a briefing, the quiet in which many years of working together did the thing immediately that words would take ten minutes to accomplish. Then Drake pushed back his chair and looked at Mason with the expression that meant he was about to say something that was true but was going to be wrapped in enough nonsense that Mason couldn't get irritated about it.

“Well,” Drake said, leaning back with his arms crossed, “guess you're stuck with us a little bit longer, Lieutenant.” He let that sit for half a second. “Honestly I'm starting to think the higher-ups are just going to keep sending you out on missions indefinitely. Just keep finding new ones. There's never going to be a pinning ceremony. You're going to be just a Lieutenant until you die.”

The room laughed. It was real laughter, the kind that came from tired men who were about to go somewhere dangerous and needed thirty seconds of something human before they compartmentalized everything else.

Dare shook his head, grinning. “Works for me.”

Jack nodded. “Same.”

Finn, who had been quiet since he walked in, looked at Mason from across the room. Something in his face settled, like he had made a decision about whatever he hadn't been ready to say outside. “Couldn't imagine working for anyone else,” he said simply, without the frame of a joke around it.

The room took that in. Nobody added to it, because nothing needed to be added to it.

Mason looked at his team, these men he had moved through the world with for over a decade, who had bled and carried and come home alongside him more times than he could count. He looked at all of them and felt the weight of it, clean and solid.

“Oh-four-hundred,” he said. “Get your gear.”

3

Sophia was the first one up.

She hadn't slept much after Mason left, which was nothing new, and she’d stopped pretending otherwise years ago. It took her a few nights to get used to sleeping without him, and the house had a different quality of silence when he was gone, not peaceful… empty. She lay there for a while staring at the ceiling and then gave up and got up, because lying in the dark feeling sorry for herself had never once made anything better.

Coffee first. Always coffee first.

She stood at the counter and watched the machine do its work and thought about nothing in particular, which was a skill she had developed out of necessity. When Mason was deployed she could not spend every waking hour imagining worst-case scenarios or she would lose her mind. You made coffee. You got your children to school. You ran your business. You called your friends. You lived your life, because that was what he was out there doing, his job. Just like any other spouse.

Yeah sure.

She poured her mug and took it through the sliding door to the back deck.

Their house sat on a hillside in Eastlake, a master-planned community in Chula Vista that was clean and well-kept and full of families, which was exactly why they had chosen it. There were a lot of other Navy families in the neighborhood, which helped. The streets were palm-lined and the parks were maintained and the neighbors knew each other, which in Southern California was not something you took for granted. From the back deck you could see the rolling hills to the east and, on a clear morning, the blue-gray outline of the mountains beyond them. Further down the slope, the walking trails that wound around the edges of the Otay Lakes reservoir were already dotted with early joggers. The hills were dry and golden in the way San Diego hills always were by October, and the sky above them was just beginning to lighten at the edges.

She and Mason did this together every morning he was home. Two mugs, two deck chairs, usually not much talking. Just the canyon and the sky and the particular ease of being next to the person you had built your life with.

She sat in her chair and put her feet up on the railing and drank her coffee alone.

She let herself think about the early days for a few minutes, the way she sometimes allowed herself to when she was missing him. Twenty-two years old and eating cup noodles on a blanket at Moonlight Beach, watching a surfer she didn't know yet and projecting all her loneliness onto him. The girl she had been then… so young, so hollowed out by everything she had already been through, so certain at some fundamental level that she was not worth very much. She had carried that belief around like a stone in her pocket for years before Mason reached in and took it out of her hands.

She smiled into her mug.

Her knight in shining armor. She had called him that once, sincerely, and these days it made her laugh. Not because it wasn't true, but because she was so far from the woman who had needed rescuing. She owned a bakery. She ran a catering company that was, frankly, doing extraordinarily well. She had a fourteen-year-old on the JV volleyball team and a ten-year-old who could talk the ear off a statue. And a husband who still looked at her the way he had looked at her in that hospital room when she was bruised and broken and he'd called himself her fiancé to a doctor who didn't know any better.

Not bad, Gault, she thought. Not bad at all.

She finished her coffee and went inside to start the morning get-ready-for-school wars.

Lisa required three attempts. This was not a surprise. This was a law of nature, as reliable as gravity.

The first attempt produced a groan and a burrowing motion deeper into the covers. The second produced one open eye and a sound that was technically a word but not one Sophia could make out. The third produced Lisa upright, hair in a blonde tangle, blinking like a newborn.

“Is it really morning?” Lisa asked.

“It really is.”

“That's so unfair.”

“I completely agree. Bathroom, please.”