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Delight infused her voice, making him glad for his decision. “Sounds perfect. I’ll be there.”
“Can’t wait. See you then. Bye, Fitz.”
“Bye.” Doubt assailed him as he lowered his office phone into its cradle. It would be even harder to shake off thoughts of Faith after spending an evening with her. He enjoyed her company so much. But he’dhada family already, and he didn’t want another one, so he would acknowledge her gesture of thanks. And then he’d leave.
Just go and stop overthinking it.
* * *
The record-breaking, late July heat summoned a trickle of sweat between Grace’s shoulder blades, just as it had in humid Venezuela. She would give anything to be there now, with Mateo, and not at the front door of her condominium in Virginia Beach, struggling to insert a key in the lock, weighted down by grocery bags and that day’s mail.
The lock yielded with a click, and she pushed into the air-conditioning with relief. She had bought the condominium a year ago. It still smelled new, unlived in. As she dumped her groceries on the kitchen counter, the mail slipped free to scatter on the floor.
Close to tears, Grace bent and scooped up the half-dozen bills. She hadn’t had the courage to investigate her finances yet, which were already strained from paying for Mateo’s adoption plus airfare to Venezuela earlier that summer.
An envelope addressed to her in a forceful but old-fashioned scrawl caught her eye. She picked it up, her pulse leaping to see the postage stamps were Colombian.What’s this?
She laid the bills aside and eased on one of the three barstools at her breakfast bar to open the envelope, praying Peter Doyle had written with news of Mateo. But it was too soon for him and Amanda to have returned to Venezuela, too soon for them to have gotten hold of her adoption papers.
Unfolding the single sheet of lined paper within, she stared in confusion at what was obviously a poem. “To My Son,” it was titled. Her gaze dropped to the signature at the bottom,Amos McLeod, and her heart stopped.
McLeod, code-named Mako, had kept Mateo from getting on the helicopter with her. She had thought his name would be spelled like McCloud. What was this about?
Intrigued, she read the poem, once quickly and then a second time, unable to reconcile the tender, poignant message with the one who sent it.My boy, he had written,my beautiful, my own.
In disbelief, she sought a return address, but there wasn’t one.
She couldn’t wrap her head around this. He had put into words her complete and utter despair at having had Mateo ripped from her arms. How dare he bring that up when he’d been the one to do it? Yet how could he describe the way it felt, unless he’d lived through something similar?
Frowning, with her tears blurring his old-fashioned cursive, Grace felt her assumptions give room to unexpected possibilities. She laid the sheet of paper on her breakfast bar and smoothed out the creases.
Perhaps she had been hasty in condemning him. The senior chief’s surliness might have been a reaction to the awful task ahead of him. Who but the most sensitive man could write,Is he, my earthly idol, gone?
Why send this to her? She could think of only one reason: Perhaps this was his way of apologizing. Only, she would rather have someone to blame and rail against, wouldn’t she?
She read the poem again. This time, it left her feeling exposed, like he’d glimpsed a side of her she had vowed no man would ever see again.
At a loss for what to do with the poem, Grace stuck it back in the envelope and left it with the rest of her bills to look at later when she felt less fragile.
She put away her groceries. As a part of her evening ritual, she called Faith and confirmed that she would be over for dinner Friday night. Then she fixed her supper and ate it at the breakfast bar, as opposed to the adjacent table. Her attention rested thoughtfully on the envelope.
On her way to bed a few hours later, she picked it up and carried it upstairs, leaving it on her bedside table, where it remained while she showered and slipped into her pajamas. Her emotions were too raw to allow for reading it again that night. She slipped under the covers and turned out the light.
The fact that Amos McLeod, a stranger, recognized her pain made it even more crushing. Turning her back on his letter, she wept over the loss of her stillborn son and then Mateo. The memory of his tentative smile, his big trusting eyes, and his fierce grip followed her into her dreams.
Until her dreams turned to nightmares. The soldier she had dreamed of while hiding in the cellar of the cathedral caught up to her, snatching Mateo away from her arms. When he spun around, she expected him to have the face of Amos McLeod. Instead, reddish brown eyes glinted on his broad face. And then he smiled, murmuring in Spanish,You’re almost mine.
Grace came awake with a start, scanning her moon-frosted bedchamber.Just a dream, she assured herself. But her heart skittered, and a clammy sweat kept her nightshirt sticking to her skin.
As she dropped her head back on the pillow, her gaze fell again on the senior chief’s poem. She was certain he had once suffered the way she was.
* * *
One of Amos’s best-kept secrets was that he enjoyed sitting behind his desk at the Team building on Dam Neck Naval Base in Virginia Beach. Senior chiefs were supposed to prefer working outside with the men, and paperwork was for lowlier enlisted to generate and officers to sign. But Amos loved anything to do with the written word. Indeed, he suspected he had read many more books than his commander, James Monteague, aka Monty. That man had a master’s degree in finance, but Amos had been to his house, and he didn’t own a library like the one on Amos’s houseboat.
Back from his TDY in Colombia, Amos returned with alacrity to the dozens of emails with attachments that required his oversight. He shut his office door, cozied into his leather desk chair, and started in on them. An hour later, he sifted through his physical mail, sitting in a pile on the corner of his desk. Amidst the pile, he came across a handwritten envelope that had been forwarded to the Team Six building at Dam Neck from his previous command post in Florida.
The return address of Mantachie, Mississippi, looked entirely unfamiliar, as did the loopy, feminine script. He slit the envelope with his sterling-plated letter opener, finding two pages inside, one a handwritten letter, the other a death certificate. His ex-wife’s death certificate.
