Page 24 of Her Forever SEAL

Mandy shouldered her backpack. “I'm sorry,” she said. “About the other day. In the hallway.”

“It's okay.”

“It wasn't.” She looked at Kayla steadily. “I was being awful and you didn't deserve it.”

“Mandy—”

“I just—” She stopped. Something moved in her eyes, something that was right there, right at the surface, and Kayla went very still the way she went still when she knew that pushing would close a door and waiting might open one.

She waited.

Mandy looked at the ground. Then back up. The thing in her eyes was still there but it was going back down, being pressed back below the surface. It was just like her mom did when dad was on a mission. But what had Mandy in such a twist?

“Mandy?” Kayla finally coaxed. She couldn’t stop herself.

“I'm fine,” Mandy said. “I promise.”

It was the same thing she'd said in the hallway.

“Okay,” Kayla said. Because pushing was not going to work, and she knew it. “Are you sure you don’t want my mom to give you a ride home?”

“It’s too far out of the way,” Mandy said for the last time. “The bus is fine.”

They said goodbye. Mandy walked to her bus stop. Kayla waited for her mom. She knew she was going to be another ten minutes because of Lisa’s play rehearsal.

She sat on the bench outside the library and stared at nothing while she waited, going over it all methodically, the way her father had taught her to go over things. No jumping to conclusions, just facts.

Mandy and Bree were distracted. No, that wasn’t right, Bree was distracted. Mandy was hiding something. She was worried. Mrs. Bowman wasn’t acting right. She’d actually been late, and in the five years Kayla had known her, that had never happened.

Cat was fine.

Mandy and Bree were both military brats like her. In fact, their fathers worked together.

That wasn’t much. But it felt like a whole lot.

There was a lacrosse game on Saturday. She’d see Bree and Mandy’s parents there. Maybe she’d see something more. Something that would explain the weirdness.

A horn honked.

She looked up. She’d missed the SUV pulling up in front of her. Lisa was waving from the backseat, her grin huge. Kayla jumped off the bench, grinning back. This is what mattered. Her family. But…

She couldn’t stop feeling like something was really wrong with her friends, and until she got that sorted, she wasn’t going to be able to truly enjoy the time she had with her family.

Dammit.

7

The phone didn't ring so much as it hummed, low and insistent on the nightstand. Sophia was awake before she fully understood why, reaching for it in the dark because she had trained herself over twenty-two years to sleep lightly and wake fast.

She didn’t need to look at the screen to know it was Mason.

She took one breath. Composed herself. Then she answered.

“Hey.” Her voice was quiet and even. A SEAL's wife knew how to answer a call at three in the morning without falling apart all over the phone.

“Hey.” Just that one word, and she could hear everything in it. That he was okay. That he was somewhere he could talk, at least for now. That he had been waiting for a window and had finally found one. “Did I wake you?”

“No,” she said, which was close enough to true.