Page 8 of Her Forever SEAL

“I guess you're going on another mission after all.” Her voice was quiet. Not accusatory, not broken. Just quiet and true.

He nodded. “The pinning ceremony is going to have to wait.”

He watched her face in the low light coming through the curtains. He had spent sixteen years learning to read his wife in the dark and he read her now. He saw the series of things that moved across her face in the span of a few seconds. The adjustment. The recalibration. The moment where she took what she had been expecting, which was him finally staying, and replaced it with what was actually happening, which was him leaving again. He watched her do this and it cost him something he didn't have a name for.

She had never once made him feel guilty for being what he was. Not in sixteen years. She had never stood in a doorway with her arms crossed, never let the silence between them curdle into resentment, never allowed his job to become a fault line in their marriage. That was one of the specific, particular ways Sophia loved him—by making room for all of it without complaint, without conditions.

But he had noticed something in the past two months, after his stateside command assignment. The way she moved through the house differently. The way she slept. There had been a looseness in her, a kind of ease he hadn't seen before, and it had taken him a few weeks to understand what it was. She was relaxed. Truly relaxed, in a way that told him she hadn't fully been before, even though she had never said so, not once in sixteen years.

He had filed that away. He was filing it again now.

“I know the ceremony will have to wait,” she said. She cupped his face in both hands and kissed him. He kissed her back the way he always kissed her when he was leaving, like she was the most precious thing on this earth and he knew it. That he loved her beyond life itself, and would work like hell to keep his promise to always come back to her.

When they broke apart, he rested his forehead against hers, and they looked each other in the eye.

“I love you,” they said simultaneously.

They laughed.

“Better get going, Navy Boy.”

He grinned. “You’re right.” He got off the bed and pulled on clothes. He got his go-bag from the closet. Sophia sat on the edge of the bed watching him move through the room, neither of them filling the space with unnecessary words. He zipped the bag and turned. She was standing now, and he pulled her in and held her, her face against his neck, his arms around her.

“Be smart,” she said into his collar.

“Always.” He kissed her forehead, then her mouth, then her forehead again. “Go back to sleep.”

She made a sound that meant she would try.

He moved down the hall quietly. Lisa's door was first.

He opened it without knocking because Lisa slept like she'd been sedated. Nothing short of a fire alarm reached her. She was sprawled diagonally across the bed in the particular way of a ten-year-old who treated a mattress like a wrestling opponent she had recently defeated. Her covers were on the floor.

He went in, picked up the blanket and spread it over her. She didn't move. He leaned down and kissed her forehead and said quietly, the way you said things to sleeping people, not expecting to be heard but needing to say them anyway: “Love you, baby. Be good.”

He pulled her door shut behind him.

Kayla's room was next. He could see the thin line of light underneath her door and he was not surprised by it. Kayla read late, always had, even as a little kid, even when she was supposed to be asleep hours earlier. He knocked lightly.

“Come in.” Just loud enough for him to hear. She’d known it was him.

He opened the door. She was exactly where he expected her to be, propped upright against a fortification of decorative pillows that she had arranged behind her with the architectural precision of someone who had done this many times, her nightlight casting a low warm glow, a paperback open in her hands. She looked at him over the top of it with eyes that were too alert for one in the morning.

He nodded at the book. “Why not read on your e-reader?”

She gave him the patient look of someone who had explained this before. “Nobody does that anymore. Paperbacks are back, Dad.” Then the look shifted into something quieter, and she bit her lower lip. “You've got to go again, huh?”

It wasn't a question.

“Looks like.” He crossed toward the bed. “Can an old man get a hug?”

He didn't make it to her. She scrambled out from under the covers and the fortress of pillows, crossed the room, and threw herself at him the way she had been throwing herself at him since she learned how to walk, full-speed and without reservation. He caught her, the way he always had.

“Love you, Dad.” Her arms were tight around him. “Be safe.”

“Always.”

She pulled back just enough to look at him. She was fourteen and she had her mother's blue eyes along with her mother's ability to see directly through whatever he was projecting to whatever was actually true. She gave a soft, sad laugh. “You can't promise that.”