Page 85 of Single Mom's Firefighter SEALs
BUCK
I’ve spent three years carrying Tyler, Mason, Reed, and Holt like a live coal in the center of my chest.
Some days, the memory of what happened to them burns hot enough to make breathing feel like work. Other days, it just sits there, heavy and familiar, and I couldn’t imagine myself setting it down.
I told myself it was loyalty, and guilt was the price of surviving when part of my team hadn’t.
Then, Elena moved to Moon Ridge.
When I realized I wanted her, my guilt expanded into something I figured I’d spend the rest of my life trying to make peace with but never fully forgiving.
But now that Kozlov is dead and the threat is finally over, something inside me is loosening.
It’s not disappearing—I don’t want Tyler and the other men gone—but the heaviness is easing.
Elena is tucked against my side on the couch in her living room. One leg is folded beneath her, and she’s absently tracing the seam of my t-shirt near my ribs. Weston’s at the other end of the couch, close enough to brush Elena’s calf now and then. Calder’s in one of the armchairs, elbows braced on his knees, even quieter than usual.
It’s late, and the house is still now that the dishes are done and T.J.’s gone to bed.
Elena tips her head back against my shoulder and looks up at me, then at the other two men. “This is going to sound strange.”
Weston squeezes her leg. “Are we talking regular strange or Moon Ridge strange?”
“Moon Ridge isn’t strange.” She sounds like she’s frowning at him.
“You haven’t been here long enough,” I say. “Just wait.”
“Hmm,” she says, and I can feel the hum of it against me. “Now I’m intrigued.”
I brush my knuckles along her arm. “Tell us what you were going to say.”
The teasing fades from her voice, and her body stiffens slightly. “When I put Tyler’s things on the shelf the other day … when I hung that photo …” She pauses for a second. “I felt peaceful. More than peaceful, really. It was like something settled.”
Weston and Calder both fix her in their gaze.
“I don’t know if I believe in signs,” she says after swallowing. “I don’t know if I believe Tyler was really there,but it didn’t feel like I was leaving him behind. It felt like … maybe he was letting me go. Like he was giving me permission to be happy.”
My first instinct is to reach for logic. Grief does strange things to people. It opens doors in the mind and makes patterns where maybe there aren’t any. I’ve seen it in widows at funerals and fathers standing over flag-draped coffins. I’ve experienced it myself when I’ve spent nights staring into the dark and wishing for one chance to go back and do something differently.
But this is Elena. Tyler’s wife. A woman who has every right to decide what peace feels like if it’s finally found her.
I drop a kiss to her temple. “I’m skeptical as hell.”
Her laugh is soft. “I know.”
I lean down so I can see her face. “But if anyone was stubborn enough to find a way to communicate from beyond the grave, it’d be Tyler.”
That gets a laugh out of Weston and a low snort from Calder.
“Man never knew how to quit,” I say with a faint smile. “If there’s any way for him to get a message through, he’d have figured it out just so he could feel smug about it.”
Elena’s eyes shine, but she’s smiling, too. “That does sound like him.”
“Damn right,” Weston murmurs.
Things go quiet after that, and Elena’s body is soft against mine again, but my mind won’t settle.
All this time, I’ve felt like I was stealing something from Tyler by being with Elena. Like I was failing him twice.
