His nightmares have been getting worse lately. Almost every night, he wakes up covered in sweat and screaming. He’s always had bad dreams when he gets home from a tour and he’s always let me hold him, run my hands through his hair and do whatever I could to calm him until he was able to go back to sleep, telling me I was the only thing that could make it all go away. Now, he jumps out of bed and goes to the spare bedroom, slamming and locking the door behind him. I’ve never felt so alone, even when he was halfway across the world. I’m living in this house with my husband and I get to see him every day, but it feels like I’m living with a ghost. He’s been honorably discharged due to permanent nerve damage from some shrapnel he took to the shoulder during this last deployment, an injury I didn’t find out about until after he came home. I’ll never forget the fear that clawed at my throat seeing those scars on his back, realizing how very close I’d come to losing him. Even then, when I’d broken down in tears and raged at my husband for refusing to allow his commanding officer to contact me when he’d been injured, Fisher showed absolutely no reaction. The man who couldn’t stand to see me cry was totally and completely blank, walking calmly out of our home as I sobbed.

It was after a military doctor declared the damage to his nerves too severe to resume his duties that Fisher’s drinking started to escalate. I want to be happy that he’ll never be taken from me again and he’ll never voluntarily leave me for a year, but it’s obvious he’s not happy about never going back to combat again. He watches the news every hour of the day, waiting for information on the war and the friends he left behind and curses his shoulder for messing up his chance of going back and helping them. Doesn’t he understand that his life and his mental health aren’t worth it? Leaving our life together isn’t worth it? Every time I get the nerve to tell him that I’m happy he’ll never leave again, I stop myself at the last minute. Being a Marine was his life, this war was something he believed in and protecting this country was what he’d wanted to do from the first time I met him. I can’t be happy about him losing something that is such a huge part of him. I just want him to talk to me, to let me take away some of his demons, but I don’t know how anymore. I don’t know how because he won’t let me in. Every time he moves into the spare bedroom and slams the door, I feel like he’s slamming a door to his heart and I no longer have a key that opens it anymore.

Chapter 4

Fisher

Present Day

“I don’t care if you don’t drink anymore, man, you still have to come up to Barney’s and say hi to everyone,” Bobby argues as he watches me run a piece of sand paper over the arm of a rocking chair I started working on this morning. My shoulder is killing me, but working with wood is one of the few things in my life right now that brings me pleasure. Since the shrapnel from an IED damaged the nerves in my shoulder on my last deployment, I’ve had to limit the time I spend in my makeshift workshop. If I work for more than a few hours at a time, the pinch in my shoulder either travels down my arm and hurts like a bitch or makes me lose all feeling in my hand. Numbness plus power tools is never a good equation.

Tossing down the sandpaper, I roll my shoulder and rub the kinks out, cursing myself for not taking a break earlier. As I continue to stretch out the tight muscles, I head up the stairs of Trip’s house and Bobby follows. When I decided it was time to come home, I naturally assumed I’d just go back to the house Lucy and I shared that’s been sitting empty for over a year. A small, yellow cottage with white trim in a quiet part of the island that overlooked the ocean and provided us with our own, small private beach, I surprised Lucy with it when I came home from my second tour, right before we got married. Surrounded by trees and flowers in the front to provide privacy and nothing but a view of the ocean and a boardwalk leading down to our beach in the back, it was the perfect home for the two of us to start our lives.

I walked into the place last night when I arrived on the last ferry to the island, nearly losing my dinner as I looked around at the empty shell of a home that had been wiped clean of every trace of her. I knew Bobby had cleaned out the house, putting my furniture and extra clothes in storage, but I wasn’t prepared to walk in and see our house devoid of my Lucy. Everything that made this place a home and every memory of the life we’d built together was no longer there. It was like she never even existed, like the eight years we spent living under that roof never happened and I couldn’t stand being in that place for one more second. I backed out of the house, locked the door behind me and went running to my grandfather’s house like a fucking pussy. He told me I could stay for however long I needed, as long as I helped him out with odd jobs around the island when I had time.

I wipe my hands on my jeans and turn to face my best friend once we get up to the kitchen. It’s kind of surprising that we’re still friends after all these years and all the shit that’s happened in between. I practically ditched him for Lucy in high school and I was so caught up in her and my life with the Marines that it didn’t leave much room for anything or anyone else, but Bobby was always here, on the island, waiting for me whenever I needed him. He was the best man in my wedding, kept an eye on my grandfather and Lucy whenever I was out of the country and he knocked me on my ass last year when I lost my shit all over the town, dragging my passed-out body two blocks to the ferry and then right up to the front doors of the VA’s rehab facility.