“And if you never had it?” It was more of a clinical question. I’d never been attached to a place or felt a sense of home. I’d never stayed anywhere long enough for that feeling to take root. Or maybe I wasn’t capable of having roots. Maybe they’d been sliced from me so often that they simply refused to grow.
“Tell you what, Gentry. You and me. Once this deployment is over, let’s take some leave, and I’ll show you around Telluride. I know you can ski, so we’ll hit the slopes, then the bars. I might even let you meet Ella, but you’ll have to get through Colt.”
Ella. We only had another couple of months on this QRF detail. Then it was goodbye to Quick Reaction Force and hello to a little downtime, which I usually despised but now felt mildly curious about. But Ella? That curiosity wasn’t mild in the least. I wanted to see her, talk to her, find out if the woman who wrote the letters really existed in a world that wasn’t paper or perfect.
“I’d like that,” I answered slowly. He’d offered countless times, but I’d never taken him up on it.
His eyebrows rose as his wide grin became almost comical. “Want to see Telluride, or Ella?”
“Both,” I answered truthfully.
He nodded as the five-minute warning came over the comms. Then he leaned in so only I could hear him, not that the others had a shot over the rotors anyway.
“You’d be good for each other. If you ever let your feet stand in one location long enough for something to grow.”
Worthless. You ruin everything.
I shoved my mother’s words out of my head and focused on now. Slipping into then was a disaster waiting to happen, so I slammed that door shut in my head.
“I’m not good for anyone,” I told Mac. Then, before he could dig any deeper, I ran a check on Havoc’s harness, making sure she was clipped in tight so I didn’t lose her on the way down.
Gravity could be a bitch.
Ella’s comments on that subject ran through my head. What would it be like to have someone ground you? Was it comforting to feel that safety? Or was it suffocating? Was it the kind of force you relied on or the type you fled?
Were there really people who stuck around long enough to be considered that dependable? If there were, I’d never met one. It was why I never bothered with relationships. Why the hell would you sign yourself up to invest in someone who would eventually say you were too flawed, too complicated, to keep around?
Even Mac—my best friend—was contractually obligated to be in the same unit I was, and even his friendship had limits, and I made sure to never test those lines. I knew in the pit of my stomach that he’d burn anyone to the ground who hurt Ella.
Ten minutes later we touched down, and that was the only gravity I had the time to think about.
Chapter Four
Ella
Letter #6
Ella,
Thank you for the cookies. And yeah, your brother stole them while I was in the shower. You think he’d be three hundred pounds by now.
I thought about what you said about gravity.
I’ve never really had that—anything tethering me anywhere. Maybe when I joined the army, but really that was more about my affinity for the unit than it was for anywhere or anyone. Until I met your brother, and they started pushing us through selection. Unfortunately, I am overly fond of him, as is most of our unit. It’s only unfortunate because sometimes he can be a real pain in the rear.
Why do they call me Chaos? That’s a long, unflattering story. I promise I’ll tell it to you one day. Let’s just say it involves a bar brawl, two really angry bouncers, and a misunderstanding between your brother and a woman he mistook for a prostitute. She wasn’t.
She was our new commanding officer’s wife. Whoops.
Maybe I’ll make him tell you that story instead.
You mentioned in your last letter that Maisie wasn’t feeling well. Did the docs get to the bottom of it? I can’t imagine how hard that has to be for you. How is Colt doing? Did he start those snowboarding lessons yet?
Gotta go, they’re rounding us up, and I want to make sure I get this in the mail.
Catch you later,
~ Chaos
…
The only sounds in the hospital room were the thoughts screaming inside my head, begging to be let free. They demanded answers, shouted to find every doctor in this hospital and make them listen. Knowing Telluride wasn’t going to look any deeper, I’d brought her an hour and a half away to the bigger hospital in Montrose.
It was almost midnight. We’d been here since just after noon, and both the kids were fast asleep. Maisie was curled in on herself, dwarfed by the size of the hospital bed, a few leads sending her vitals to the monitors. Thank God they’d turned off the incessant beeping. Just seeing the beautiful rhythm of her heart was enough for me.
Colt was stretched out on the couch, his head in my lap, his breathing deep and even. Although Ada had offered to take him home, he’d refused, especially while Maisie had a death grip on his hand. They never could stand to be separated for long. I ran my fingers over his blond hair, the same nearly white shade as Maisie’s. How similar their features looked. How different their little souls were.
A soft click sounded as the door opened only enough for a doctor to poke his head in.
“Mrs. MacKenzie?”
I put up one finger, and the doctor nodded, backing away and closing the door softly.
As quietly as I could, I moved Colt off my lap, replacing my warmth with a pillow and my jacket over his little body.
“Is it time to go?” he asked, snuggling deeper into the couch.
“No, bud. I need to talk to the doctor. You stay here and watch over Maisie, okay?”
Slowly, glazed-over blue eyes opened to meet mine. He was still more than half asleep.
“I’ve got this.”
“I know you do.” I grazed his temple with my fingers.
With sure steps and very unsure fingers, I got the door open and shut behind me without waking Maisie.
“Mrs. MacKenzie?”
I scanned the guy’s badge. Doctor Taylor.
“Actually, I’m not married.”
He blinked rapidly and then nodded. “Right. Of course. My apologies.”
“What do you know?” I pulled the sides of my sweater together, like the wool could function as some kind of armor.
“Let’s go down the hall. The nurses are right here, so the kids are fine,” he assured me, already leading me to a glass-walled area that looked to serve as a conference room.
There were two other doctors waiting.
Doctor Taylor pointed me to a seat, and I took it. The men in the room looked serious, their smiles not reaching their eyes, and the guy on the right couldn’t seem to stop clicking his pen.
“So, Ms. MacKenzie,” Doctor Taylor began. “We ran some blood tests on Margaret, as well as drained some fluid from her hip earlier, where we found infection.”
I shifted in my seat. Infection…that was easy.
“So antibiotics?”
“Not exactly.” Doctor Taylor’s eyes shot up toward the door, and I glanced over to see a woman in her midforties leaning against the doorframe. She was classically beautiful, her dark skin as flawless as her French twist updo. I was suddenly very aware of my state of dishevelment but managed to keep my hands off my no-longer-cute messy bun.
“Dr. Hughes?”
“Just observing. I saw the girl’s chart when I came on shift.”
Dr. Taylor nodded, took a deep breath, and turned his attention back to me.
“Okay, if she has an infection in her hip, that would explain the leg pain and the fever, right?” I folded my arms across my stomach.
“It could, yes. But we’ve found an anomaly in her blood work. Her white counts are alarmingly elevated.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, this is Dr. Branson, and he’s from ortho. He’ll help us with Margaret’s hip. And this…” Dr. Taylor swallowed. “This is Dr. Anderson. He’s from oncology.”
Oncology?
My gaze swung to meet the aging doctor’s, but my mouth wouldn’t open. Not until he said the words his specialty had been called in for.
“Ms. MacKenzie, your daughter’s tests indicate that she may have leukemia…”
His mouth continued to move. I saw it take shape, watched the animations of his facial features, but I didn’t hear anything. It was like he’d turned into Charlie Brown’s teacher and everything was coming through a filter of a million gallons of water.
And I was drowning.