Page 91 of Everything You Hate
He goes quiet. The house creaks. Somewhere downstairs, a pipe knocks. Shea’s probably already awake, because Shea is the kind of person who wakes at four-thirty out of spite for the very concept of sleeping in.
Dean’s breathing slows. Not all the way. But the ragged edge smooths, and his hands settle on his thighs, and when he finally speaks, his voice has the same flat quality I heard in his sleep. Stripped. Clinical. A man reporting facts he has recited to himself so many times they’ve lost their edges.
“2014. Coast Guard rescue swimmer. Stationed out of Port Angeles. Night call. Fishing vessel taking on water twenty miles offshore. Storm conditions. Worse than forecast. Visibility near zero. We got two people in the water by the time we reached coordinates.”
He stops. His jaw works. The scar through his eyebrow catches what little light filters through the curtains.
“Two people,” he says. “I had to choose which one to reach first.”
I don’t say anything. The silence between us is heavy, deliberate. I know what lives in that silence. I’ve interviewed enough veterans to recognize the shape of the story he’s not telling.
“I got the first one to the basket. Went back for the second. Took too long. Current had shifted. Storm had worsened. By the time I reached the coordinates, she was gone.”
“She.”
He flinches. Just once. A small, involuntary contraction of muscle around his right eye. “Yeah.”
The word sits between us. I don’t reach for his hand. I don’t fill the silence with platitudes about impossible choices or the cruelty of circumstance. Those are things people say when they want to feel better about someone else’s pain. Dean doesn’t want to feel better. He wants the pain to mean something, and twelve years hasn’t given him that answer.
“I never told anybody the whole thing,” he says. “Not Bodhi. Not Henry. Definitely not Zade. He was there. Different boat, different sector, but he heard it on the radio. He knows the broad strokes. He doesn’t know...” He trails off. Rubs the back of his neck. The tremor has moved from his hands to somewhere deeper, a vibration I can feel through the mattress where our shoulders press together. “Captain picked it up. The abort call. I was shouting it into my radio. The boat was taking on water. The basket was compromised. I knew we were losing her and I couldn’t—” He stops. Starts again. “The bird hears everything. Especially the things you don’t mean for anyone to hear.”
I think of Captain on his perch, repeating “Abort” with perfect mimicry, and the tourists who laugh when he says it because they think it’s cute. A parrot with a dirty mouth. Quirky local color. Nobody knew they were laughing at the worst nightof a man’s life, broadcast on loop for the entertainment of strangers.
“That’s why you hate the drones,” I say.
He looks at me. Something shifts in his expression—surprise, maybe, that I connected those dots. “Yeah. That’s why.”
“The noise. The way they hover. Reminds you of the basket.”
“The basket was quieter.” He scrubs a hand over his face. The stubble makes a rough sound against his palm. “I should’ve reached her first. The second one. She was closer to the boat. Better odds. I went for the father instead because he was struggling harder. Made the wrong call.”
He says it like he’s stating a navigational fact. The water is eight fathoms deep. The channel runs east. I made the wrong call. No emotion. Just the flat, exhausted certainty of a man who has carried this verdict for so long it has become part of his skeleton.
“You don’t know that,” I say.
“I know exactly that. I had the coordinates. I had the current data. I had twelve years to run the math. I chose wrong.”
“Dean—”
“Don’t.” His voice hardens, but I know he’s not angry at me. “Don’t do that. Don’t tell me it wasn’t my fault. It was my call. My training. My responsibility. The fact that the conditions were shit doesn’t change whose hands were on the line.”
I bite my tongue. He’s right. Not about the choice—I wasn’t there, I can’t know—but about what he needs. He doesn’t need me to absolve him. He needs me to hear him. To sit in the dark beside a man who has been punishing himself for twelve years and not offer the easy out.
So I don’t. I sit. I listen. I let the silence hold what his words can’t.
His breathing evens. Slowly. The tremor in his shoulders subsides. Exhaustion pulls at him visibly now—his eyelidsheavy, his posture softening by degrees until he’s leaning into me without seeming to realize it and his head drops onto my shoulder. His breathing has gone deep and regular.
The nightmare has released him, and exhaustion has taken its place. sweep his hair back from his face, and all at once realization hits me…
I am falling in love with him.
Oh. My. God.
I am in love with Dean Kinsella.
I love the scar through his eyebrow. I love the way he holds a coffee mug. I love the set of his jaw when he’s trying not to care about something and failing completely. I love that he talks to a parrot like the bird understands him, and the bird probably does. I love that he searched a storm for two strangers because it was the right thing to do, and I hate that he will carry the weight of that choice for the rest of his life.
I love him, and the knowledge of it frightens me more thoroughly than any shadow on a balcony.
