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“Yeah,” she replied, even though she was far from it.
“Any word?”
The same question.
Every day.
And like every day, it was the same answer.
“I’m sorry, hun,” her father said gently, taking her silence for an answer, and she wiped at the tear that escaped.
When everyone had said that marrying James young would be hard, she hadn’t cared. Neither of them had cared. They had been madly in love, and nothing was going to change their minds.
But time was a monster to young love.
It played tricks on your mind.
And when your husband was deployed a mere three weeks after you were married, and had only been home once in four years, it started to wear on you in a way that not even that long-ago warning could help.
“Maybe tomorrow,” her dad said, but he knew, like her, that it wasn’t coming then either.
“I’m really worried.” She whispered the words that she had been too afraid to say.
“I know. Have you tried calling anyone?” She had to remind herself that he was just trying to help, as a flash of annoyance and anger filled her. Leaning forward, she rested her forehead against the steering wheel.
“Yeah. It’s the same answer. It’s a no-contact, high-priority mission. It’s just that, the longest we have ever gone without contact is, like, two weeks at most.”
It had been three months.
And any military wife could see the signs.
But James was her high school love.
The only man that she had ever loved and the only man she ever would.
She refused to accept the signs.
“Maybe you should come stay with me for a bit. I don’t like you being in that big house all alone.”
The big house he was referring to was James’s family’s place. It was a big house on over fifty acres. When James’s parents had passed in his senior year of high school, it had gone to him. It was way more than the two of them needed, with five bedrooms and several barns. But when he had told her that it would make him feel closer to his family if they lived there, she had willingly packed up her little room she had been renting and moved out there with him.
That was five years ago.
That had been when he was home.
She couldn’t tell her Pop that being without him in that big house was starting to wear on her, because the truth was, she couldn’t leave. It was the only thing of James that she had left.
“Thanks, Dad, but I’m okay.”
“Honey…” her dad started to object.
“It’s all I have left of him,” she choked out, the words hitting to close to home.
“It’s going to be all right,” he whispered, even though they both knew it did little to ease the pain that she was trying to fight off.
Because it would never be okay.
This couldn’t be happening!
