“We’ll bring our stuff and stay the night in our new beds tonight, right?” Hallie pressed.
“Yes.” Frowning, I remembered there was something else I was supposed to do tonight—make an appearance at an engagement party for Chip Carswell, my best friend from high school.
If it was anyone else, I’d have blown it off, but I hadn’t seen Chip in several years, and he was only in town for one night. He pitched for the White Sox, and time off during the season was severely limited. I’d have to bring the girls to the party with me, but maybe that would be good because it would give me an excuse to get in and get out fast. Parties weren’t really my thing.
But I’d told Chip I’d be there, and I didn’t take my word lightly.
“Daddy?” Now it was Hallie.
“Hm.”
“I was wondering.”
The girl was always wondering. She asked more fucking questions than anyone I’d ever known and never accepted an answer she didn’t like.
“It’s too early for wondering,” I told her. “No wondering before six a.m. That’s the rule.”
“You can’t just turn off wondering, Daddy. It’s not like a TV.”
“Can I at least mute it?”
“What I was wondering about,” she went on, pretending she hadn’t heard me—a particular skill of hers, possibly learned from her mother—“was did you have to wear boots at boot camp?”
“Yes.”
“Is that why it’s called that?”
I yawned again. “Sure.”
“Was it like summer camp?”
“No. Except that it was hot.”
“What did you do there?”
“A lot of push-ups.”
“Is that how you got your muscles?”
“Some of them.”
“And you held your breath under water a long time, right?”
“That was SEAL training.”
She was quiet a moment. “When Mommy first told me you were a Navy SEAL, I pictured you in a dark blue seal costume.”
Eyes closed, I cracked a smile. “Yeah?”
“Yes. And your whiskers were light blue. And I imagined you worked somewhere like Sea World. Swimming in a tank and doing tricks for people, and they’d clap for you.”
“That would have been more fun than what I did.”
“What did you do?”
“Lots of things.” Mostly I’d just tried to keep my team alive and our gear intact. Which wasn’t that different from being a single dad, really.
“Mom says she never knew where you were or what you were doing.”
“That’s because I couldn’t always tell her.”
She lay back and settled under the covers again, turning onto her side to face me. “You were gone a long time.”
“I know.” As always, I felt torn when faced with the truth. I was proud of my career, but it had come at a price—my marriage, seeing my kids born, watching them take their first steps, hearing them say their first words. Three years ago, when I’d come home for good, Hallie hadn’t wanted to hug me—she knew I was her daddy, but I was unfamiliar to her in person. And little Luna screamed her head off when I held her. She had no idea who I was.
I knew guys in the military who could shrug that stuff off, but I wasn’t one of them. I didn’t want to be one of them.
“But you’re not going away anymore, right?” Hallie reached over and took my arm, hugging it close like a stuffed animal.
“No. I’m not going away anymore.” Thanks to gunshot wounds in my right leg that had rendered me unfit to be a SEAL, my Navy career was over. No fucking way was I going to take some boring desk job. I’d been offered a teaching position at sniper school, and I’d considered it, but Naomi had made it clear that if I took the position, she wasn’t coming with me to Indiana—that she and our daughters would remain in Michigan where we’d grown up. She wanted a familiar home, she wanted family nearby, she wanted stability, for herself and for the girls . . . and I couldn’t blame her.
I’d told the Navy I was out and moved back here, taking a job as a firefighter and trying to ease back into civilian and family life. But the marriage hadn’t survived, and I was now a single dad.
Truth be told, I liked it better this way.
And most days I thought I was doing a decent fucking job of it, although I swore too much, burned a lot of dinners, and couldn’t get Hallie’s pigtails even to save my life.
But I was here, I was trying my best, and I always put my children first—which was more than my father had done.
And despite the charred hamburgers and constant F-bombs, the girls liked being with me, and they always gave me extra long hugs when it was time for them to go back to their mom.
They often told me they loved me, and I was still getting used to hearing it—and saying it back.
On one side of me, Hallie snuggled closer and brought up her knees, which jabbed me painfully in the hip. On the other side, a sleeping Luna rolled over, slapped a hand on my chest, and kicked me. But they were still breathing, which meant I’d successfully kept two humans alive for one more day.
I called that a victory.
I woke up before my alarm went off and carefully snaked my way out of bed without waking the girls, which required tactics in stealth and breath control that rivaled what I’d learned in sniper training. But today was going to be hectic, and I wanted just one cup of coffee in the calm before the storm. With one final glance at them, I silently threw on a TCFD T-shirt and traded my sweatpants for a pair of jeans.
In the kitchen, I stuck a pod in the machine, and finished packing up a kitchen box while it brewed. My lease wasn’t up here until the end of the week, so I didn’t have to completely empty the place out, but I wanted to get as much done today as possible. My sister’s husband, Justin, who was also a firefighter on the same shift as me, was helping to move the big stuff this morning—not that there was much of it. The plan was to drop the girls off at their house and then go get the truck. Bree, my younger sister, would bring them over later.
While the girls were still asleep in my room, I stripped their twin beds and stuffed the bedding into big garbage bags. Then I lugged the mattresses aside and grabbed a screwdriver, removing the headboards from the frames. The dresser they’d used at my apartment was already empty, and each of them had a suitcase packed and ready to go. Their clothing for today was laid out on the dresser top.
I was double checking that the closet was empty when they came shuffling into the room.
“Is it time to get up now?” Luna asked hopefully, scratching her belly.
“Yes,” I said. “Get dressed and we can go for donuts on the way to Aunt Bree’s.”
“Mom doesn’t let us have donuts,” she said.
“Mom’s not fucking here,” replied Hallie.
“Hey!” I gave my older daughter a sharp stare. “No cursing.”
“But you do it all the time.”
“That’s because I’m a grouchy old man, and I earned the right.”
Hallie stuck her hands on her skinny little hips. “How come Mom says she’s still young and you say you’re old, but you’re both thirty-four?”