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“Are you mad at me?” I whispered, looking at the ceiling.
“No. Why would I be?”
“Because I didn’t bury the hatchet with my father.”
“Just because I disagree with it doesn’t mean I don’t support you. If you aren’t ready, you aren’t ready. Simple as that.”
He let me off the hook, but somehow, I didn’t feel better.
“But I admit I thought you would be touched by the things he said.”
“Such as?”
“Retirement. Prioritizing the things that matter. You basically have your father back, the version of him that you deserved in the first place. Keeping your distance and hiding behind your grudge seems like a waste.”
“Even if it is, I’m just not there. I can’t move past his betrayals so easily.”
“I never said it was easy.”
“Well, you sure make it look it.”
We lay there in silence for a while. It was one of the rare times when we didn’t have sex before we went to sleep. There was too much heaviness in the air for that. My thoughts were on other things, not my husband.
“Time heals all wounds,” he said. “Perhaps you just need more of it.”
“Maybe…”
He moved to me, scooping me into his arms and spooning me from behind, hugging me the way a grizzly bear would hug a cub. His face moved into my hair then he lay still, ready for sleep.
I lay awake for a while longer until I fell asleep.
I was jarred awake by something. Just wasn’t sure what.
Axel had jerked upright in bed, his breathing escalated.
I thought I’d heard a gunshot, but maybe I’d just heard him. “What—what was that?”
He jumped out of his bed and snatched his phone off his nightstand. He never answered me.
Something felt wrong…very wrong, so I sat up in bed and stared at him.
He opened his phone, and the light lit up his face in the dark. His thumb scrolled then he opened an app. He seemed to be looking at his security system. He started to flick through the camera feed, looking from one image to the next.
My heart started to race. The sweat came from nowhere and formed on my forehead instantly. “Axel?”
“Fuck.” He headed to the closet.
“What’s happening?” I got out of bed, and my leg got caught on the sheet, making me trip to the floor.
Axel didn’t check if I was okay, which told me this was bad.
He came out of the closet and flicked on the lights. He put on his black sweatpants, a bulletproof vest over his bare chest, and in his arms was a heavy black gun, abigone, like the kind the military carried. I didn’t know anything about guns, but it looked like one of those automatic ones that fired a ton of bullets at once.
“Okay…what the fuck is going on?”
At that moment, the alarm must have been tripped, given the sirens coming from the hallway.
I was in nothing but his t-shirt, standing there utterly useless as someone invaded our home. I hoped it was a dumb burglarwho’d just picked the wrong house, but my heart told me it wasn’t.
