And that was exactly why I was able to sit here now and reveal the biggest, most profound mistakes of my life. “I know that,” I said, my voice hoarse. “It’s why I can open up to you.”

She leaned her head back against my chest and flicked her eyes up. “I understand what it’s like to carry your burdens silently, how they can eat away at you until you don’t recognize yourself anymore.”

I dropped a tender kiss on the top of her head. “Is it wrong, that even though I wish you’d never had to go through any of that, I’m happy you did because otherwise we never would have met?”

Rae’s fingers danced absentmindedly across my forearm, tracing light circles in the whirls of my hair. “Eighteen months ago—hell, even three months ago—I would have smacked you for saying that, but I have to believe things are playing out the way they were supposed to. How else do you explain our paths crossing so randomly, not once but twice?”

“Would you call me a pussy if I said it might be fate?” I pulled a few strands of her hair through my fingers and let them cascade like silk to her shoulders.

She chuckled. “You’re only a pussy if you’re worried sharing your feelings makes you a pussy. Men are allowed to have emotions too, you know?”

“Yeah,” I murmured. “Just as long as we don’t talk about them.”

We fell silent and then our breathing synced—our heartbeats moving in perfect rhythm—giving me the courage to continue. “Sonia stayed home from work that day. She was in PR and rarely took time off, but Ethan hadn’t come home, so crawled in bed with me. We spent the morning … well, you know.”

I hesitated to call what Sonia and I had been doing making love. I’d told her countless times that I loved her, and I did. Probably more than Ethan had, I’d wager. But thinking about my feelings for Sonia compared to what I felt at this moment with Rae in my arms … well, there really was no comparison. What Rae and I had—what we could have in the future if we let ourselves trust one another with our hearts—was better and brighter than anything I’d ever had with Sonia.

For all the ways I’d loved her, I’d hated her too for stringing me along the way she had. Only in hindsight could I see that she’d used my feelings against me. I’d been complicit, but that didn’t make her manipulation right. Or make how I’d deceived my brother okay. As much as I hated Sonia now, I hated myself more for not having the strength to break things off with her.

“Yeah, I know,” she answered, letting me off the hook.

As I sat here now with this beautiful, complicated, trusting woman against me, I could finally see that my grief over Sonia’s death—my guilt—had heightened my memories of our time together. Had maybe even twisted the love I’d felt for her into something grander, something more than it ever was or ever could have been. I didn’t want to diminish the passion I’d had for her because those feelings had been genuine, but now I could admit Sonia hadn’t been the great love of my life.

“Ethan finally called around eleven o’clock to say he wanted to have lunch with her. Apparently, he had some big news to share and he wanted to meet in the lobby of her building at one.”

“But she wasn’t there.”

“Nope, she wasn’t.” I traced my way up and down Rae’s smooth skin and zeroed in on a freckle that was darker than its mates. Circling it with the pad of my finger, I asked, “How familiar with San Francisco are you?”

“I played there a few times,” she said. “I was across the bridge that day, in Oakland.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“So you know what that day was like.”

She shrugged against me. “I never saw the carnage, but we were on lock down for almost fifteen hours.”

“It’s better that you didn’t see it,” I answered, my voice full of sorrow. I’d been to war, had seen my fair share of atrocities, but there was something about that warm autumn day that still kept me up at night. Maybe because it’d been the first time I’d seen so many dead bodies at one time, so many severed limbs, that it had stuck with me. Maybe it was because for years, I’d felt like I’d sent someone I loved to die in the carnage? If I’d ever gone to therapy, maybe a doctor could explain it properly, but the guys I’d been deployed with later had said the first time was always the hardest. Anything you saw or did afterward would never compare.

I swallowed down the lump in my throat. “She rushed in to San Francisco, but at one-thirty texted to say Ethan had never shown. Instead of coming home, she’d decided to head upstairs and get some work done. She’d planned to tell her boss that her ‘sick day’ had actually been a dentist appointment.” I rolled my eyes. “I never realized before how easily Sonia could lie. They just slipped off her tongue like honey.

“She texted me again a couple of hours later to ask if Ethan had ever come home, but I was out hiking so I didn’t get her message. I’d turned my phone off so I could think, really try to figure a way out of the situation we were all in. As I walked back, I decided I was going to end it. When I got back to my car and turned my phone back on, it was blowing up with messages from my mom and Ethan, freaking out over where I was. That’s when I learned what had happened.” As I finished speaking, the only sound in the room was our breathing and my heavy heartbeat drumming in my ears.

Eventually Rae broke the silence. “Her death wasn’t your fault, Ash. I can’t absolve you of the guilt you have for carrying on a two-year affair with your brother’s wife, but her dying in the attack isn’t on your shoulders.”

“But it is,” I argued. “It is.”

Rae twisted against me, and leaned back so she could see my face. “Explain to me how Sonia being at work when a terrorist attack hit is on you?”

“He knew!” I bit out. “That’s why he called to meet her. He was going to tell her he wanted a divorce on the grounds of her adultery.” I looked away, afraid to see her faith in me turn into recrimination.

“Look at me,” she commanded harshly. When I brought my eyes back to hers, she said, “Regardless, she should have been at work that day. Her playing hooky to fuck you all morning has no bearing on what happened later. She’d have gone into work like every other day, and it would have ended the same exact way.”

“But—”

“There are no buts, Ash. You did a despicable thing, but it’s not your fault she’s dead. Do you hold yourself responsible for all the others who died that afternoon?”

“No,” I choked out.

“Then you need to let go of the responsibility you feel for her. It was a tragedy, but it wasn’t your doing.”

“It gets worse,” I groaned from between clenched teeth.

“I want to know everything about you, Ash, but what you told me just now took courage. I don’t need to hear anymore today. You can tell me when you’re ready. All I’ll say—again—is that you’re not responsible for what happened to that woman.”

Rae giving me a pass for Sonia’s death was one thing, but when she found out came later, I didn’t think she’d ever be able to look at me the same way. That she hadn’t already walked away from me, knowing what I’d done to my own brother, was a minor miracle. She was either the most forgiving woman on the face of the planet, or the most naive. Then again, she’d spend a long time learning to forgive herself, so maybe she was just better at it than I was.

“I’ve already told you this much, I may as well finish.” I blew out a breath. “Besides, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to talk about this again and I need to tell you. You’ve shared so much of yourself with me and you’re right—if I can’t do the same, there’s no hope for a future between us. I want that Rae. Goddamn, but I want it.” I pulled her in tighter, as I fought to bring the stinging in my throat and eyes under control. I hadn’t cried in years, and I had no desire to start now.

Her eyes turned watery and she gave me a small smile. “It means so much to me that you’re willing to expose your past like this. I know it’s painful. Trust me, I get it.”

I dropped a kiss to her forehead. “I know. That’s why I feel safe telling you.”

“I’m glad,” she answered, curling into the crook of my arm and resting her cheek against my chest.

It was the best damn feeling in the world, having her support, knowing that she understood how personal demons worked and was willing to meet mine head on. I yet I worried that despite her understanding so far, when I pushed the rest of my demons out into the light of day, she might be tempted to flee. I hoped she wouldn’t, but nothing I knew of Rae’s past was as bad as what I’d done.

“The next day I went down to help with the rescue efforts. It was mayhem. Oh god, the smell.” I shuddered at the memory. Sometimes I could still smell all that charred flesh on the wind. “I pulled a few survivors out of the rubble, but mostly it was just mangled bodies, mutilated beyond belief. You never forget a sight like that.

“I didn’t see Ethan for two days, and when I did … well.” I pulled in a deep breath. “Keep in mind, I didn’t know that he knew about Sonia and me. Because he’d never acted like he cared, I guess I didn’t think he actually cared. But that day …” I trailed off, the pain of that encounter as fresh now as it had been all those years ago.

“The second I walked through the door, he flew at me. I saw then what our affair had cost him.” I shook my head, but couldn’t dislodge the memory of his scorn. “I was bigger and stronger than he was, so I just stood there and took the beating. Eventually, he tired himself out and flopped onto the couch. When I got up, that’s when I saw the gun.”

Rae’s whole body tensed up and I literally felt her holding her breath. “No.”

I wrapped my arms around her tighter. “Yeah, and something else too.”

“I’m afraid to ask.”

“A sonogram.”

Rae sucked in a gasp and rolled into my embrace. “Oh Ash,” she cried against my chest.

“Sonia was pregnant. Apparently, that’s what finally set him off. He told me then he’d been fine knowing I was fucking his wife since he rarely did anymore, but he couldn’t forgive me for putting a baby in her belly, too.”

“She didn’t …” Rae couldn’t get the question out, but I knew what she was asking.

“No, she never told me. It turns out, the nights Ethan did come home, he’d wake up to find her riding him. Knowing that she was fucking me, he never instigated sex with her. So when she resorted to those types of tricks, he became suspicious and figured out she’d wanted him to think the baby was his.”

“She was going to pass off your baby as your brother’s?”

“That’s the conclusion we both came to.”

“I know it’s not polite to speak ill of the dead, but fuck that bitch!” Rae moved out from my embrace. Standing with her hands on her hips, her rage broke free. “Who the fuck does that? She seduces you literally the first day you meet, then she strings you along for years by crying on your shoulder, and then when she gets pregnant with your baby, she wasn’t even going to tell you?” Rae’s chest sawed in and out as her breath came in quick, angry gulps.

All at once, Rae straddled my legs and sat in my lap, our faces only a foot or so apart. Placing her palms against my cheeks, she leaned in close enough that I could feel her breath on my skin. Her voice dropping low, she said, “I know you loved her, Ash, but she was a lunatic. I’ve done some pretty shitty stuff in my day, but even at my lowest I always knew there were some things you just didn’t do. Some lines you absolutely did not cross.”

Her face went soft, her lips began to tremble, and her eyes turned liquid. And then she whispered, “Oh my god. That’s what this is about. You didn’t only lose the woman you loved that day; you lost your baby too.” Her hands slid from my face and hung limply at her side as she sat back on my thighs.

I nodded. “And my brother.”

“I assume he’s never forgiven you?”

“There was no way he could. He killed himself.”

Rae’s horror was instantaneous. Covering her mouth with her hand, her eyes begged me to explain.

“The gun I mentioned? After he told me everything, he picked it up and aimed it at me. Then, at the very last second, when I was sure he was going to pull the trigger, he turned it on himself.” I made a pistol out of my fingers and placed the “barrel” under my chin. “I watched his brains splatter all over the wall.”

With a sob, Rae fell against me and wrapped her arms around my middle. Even as she cried, my own tears wouldn’t come. I’d stopped crying for all that I’d lost a long, long time ago. It wasn’t that I’d gone numb to the pain; I’d just learned to live with it, the way you learned to live with a broken bone that never healed properly. You could be fine for days and then wham! You were laid flat in agony.

I rubbed my hand over her back in an effort to calm her, but I felt the motion working on me too. There was something about having Rae in my arms that made me feel like all wasn’t lost. That there were still good things in the world, and if I just opened myself up to them, something positive could bloom and flourish out of the ash of my incinerated heart. Out of the burned-out wreckage of a life wasted.

“I enrolled in the Army the day after his funeral. The rest, as they say, is history.”

Rae sat up, her eyes rimmed in red. “I’m so sorry, Ash. I’m so, so sorry.”

I didn’t want this beautiful, strong woman crying for me. I didn’t deserve those tears. I wiped a trailing tear away with my thumb, let it trace the tracks marking her cheeks. “Please don’t cry for me, baby. I’ve learned to live with it.”

“I can’t help it. You lost everything.”

I nodded and glanced away. I had. I really, really had. And no one had ever truly known just how much—until now.

From the outside, it made sense when I threw myself into military service. I’d lost my sister-in-law in the attack. Then, as far as anyone knew, my brother’s pain had been so all-consuming that he couldn’t stand to live without her. How anyone who’d truly known them—who had seen what their marriage was like up close and personal—believed that’s what had transpired, I’d never know. Somehow though, the story stuck. And who was I to correct it?

“In those first few seconds after the gun went off, I hadn’t been thinking clearly. I pocketed the sonogram showing my unborn baby growing in her belly, and then drove straight to a recruitment station. When word finally reached me that Sonia’s remains were identified, I cried for the first time. And then for the last.”

Rae caressed my cheek. “I get it now. Why you didn’t want to let me in.”

“I honestly can’t believe you’re still here,” I said. “I’m no good for you, Rae. Surely you can see that.”

She chuckled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “First of all, where would I go? I’m not really at liberty to go wandering off, am I? And second of all, I’m hardly innocent. We’ve both done terrible things, Ash. But we’re both here now, the wiser for our mistakes. We know what we did wrong in our past, and I don’t know about you, but I have no intention of ever going back to the person I was before. You need to move on too.”

“I don’t know how,” I admitted. “I’ve held onto this for so long, I don’t know who I’d be without it. I don’t know what that guy looks like.”

“If you don’t try, though,” she said, “you’ll never know.”

I sighed and ran my free hand through my hair. “I want to be the man you need—”

“Then just be you,” she said. “I fell for you, scars and all.”

“I’ll try,” I promised. It would be harder than anything I’d ever done before, but if it meant I could have Rae, I would have moved mountains. “For you, I’ll try.”