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I’d failed.
Again.
* * *
I hadn’t expected the day to get much better after hurting Fiona before the fucking sun rose.
But I also hadn’t expected it to implode my fucking life.
We were on-site. A rare day when both Rowan and I were working together. He made it so that didn’t happen often. We still hadn’t spoken except on shit regarding work. He’d been leaning by his truck on the phone when I came out of the house to grab some more tools. My eyes just happened to go in his direction as I was carrying them back in.
Rowan got off the phone and walked toward me, his face grave.
The tools in my hand tumbled to the ground.
I knew something was wrong the second I saw his expression. Fucker had one hell of a poker face—I’d lost many a Benjamin to it in the past. But his expression struck fear into the core of me.
And the fact that he was walking toward me. Willingly. My best friend had kept his distance from me over the past few months.
It hurt more than I’d expected it to.
I hadn’t realized how much I relied on him. To keep me even. Stable. Keep me tethered to sanity, to stop me from spiraling into a destructive cycle that ended in me eating a bullet.
And the rare times I wasn’t being a miserable bastard, I just missed sharing a beer with the fucker.
Those times were gone.
“What?” I asked, my heart already in my fucking boots. I’d been here before, hadn’t I? I’d seen the face of a man who had to deliver world-ending news to someone. He’d been the one to deliver it to me five years ago.
“It’s Fiona,” he said, gripping my upper arm. “She’s been in an accident.”
And that’s when the bottom fell out of my motherfucking life.
* * *
Rowan was driving to the hospital.
I fought him on that.
“State you’re in, you’ll be arriving in an ambulance of your own,” he said in response to my protests. “Get in the fucking truck.”
I wasn’t quite in the state to admit to him that he was right, but I was also present enough to understand that standing here arguing with him wasn’t going to do shit but prolong the whole process.
So I got in the truck.
To his credit, he drove like a fucking maniac.
And it was a drive.
Jupiter had a small hospital that could handle most minor to moderate shit.
They ‘stabilized’ Fiona there and then airlifted her to a hospital two hours away.
Two. Hours.
Then again, it had nothing on the journey home from Iraq.
I’d spent twelve hours, thirty-eight minutes, and about forty seconds on that flight. All I knew was my wife and daughter had been in a serious car accident, and that they hadn’t made it.
