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“I do, but like I said,” she laid a hand on his knee, “you’re not you when you’re like that. Even the way you talk to me now is more aggressive than it used to be.”
“Like how? When?”
“Like now.”
“Sydney, am I supposed to be happy that you don’t want to be married to me anymore?”
“I never said I didn’t.”
He hacked out a laugh. “Oh? Then what’d you leave for me at the house? On the nightstand? It wasn’t a children’s book.”
“There’s something else,” she said. “Something bigger. The biggest issue.”
He knew what it was.
But he didn’t cut her off, as requested.
“Joel, I keep having the same dream—me with two little kids, twin boys, and we’re crying over a casket. They keep asking me why you left us. Then you get lowered into the ground, and no matter how much dirt gets thrown into the hole, it never fills.”
The lump in his throat grew.
Tears she’d been holding at bay flooded over, and she tossed her face into her hands, shoulders shaking as she cried. He reached over and pulled her up against him, and she cried harder.
“Why didn’t you tell me this?” he softly asked. “Why would you just leave?”
His shirt muffled her response.
With a gentle tug, he coaxed her onto his lap and drew further back onto the cushion. When she removed her hands, slowly swelling eyes stared back at him.
“I did tell you,” she whispered.
“Sydney, no. You didn’t.”
“I told you I was worried about what would happen to you. That I was scared you might not come back one day.”
“And you can’t see how that’s different from what you’re telling me now? Don’t you think Larke has the same concerns? Tayler? Ari? Hell, whether or not she’ll admit it, Mo?”
“How much do you know about Ayesha Savea?” she asked.
He sighed.
It wasn’t much.
All he knew was that she was the widow of the fallen member he’d, in a roundabout way, replaced. She had a young son named Josiah and Theo, a baby boy, and she’d been early into her pregnancy with Theo when Curtis died.
“We’ve met a few times,” he said. “She seems really sweet. Quiet but sweet. I assume much of that has to do with grief, though.”
“I had lunch with Ari and Larke, and she was there. She joined us, and she brought the boys. She looked so,” Sydney looked up at the ceiling, “depressed. Tired. Like, if she could do it all again, she wouldn’t have had kids.”
He frowned. “Did she say that?”
“She didn’t have to.”
“I doubt she regrets her kids.”
“You weren’t there.”
“After that lunch, is that when you started having the dreams?” he redirected. Ayesha was grieving, yes, but all he saw when he looked at her was a woman who, despite the losses life had bestowed upon her, loved her boys with everything in her.
