She’d looked around as they’d left, but she hadn’t complicated things by asking about her cat.
Always sensible, even when she didn’t want to be, Sophie’d made the choice not to distract anyone by looking for Tesseract. Not when Haydn needed immediate help.
If he had to, Forte would go out and look for Tesseract as soon as he knew for sure what the outcome would be for Haydn. It didn’t matter what the surgery would cost. The dog had taken a bullet for Sophie. They’d take care of him first and worry about the financial logistics later.
Of course, Forte was going to be up to his eyeballs in debt paying off the damage to the cabin, but hopefully they had enough information from the four attackers captured on site to split the costs into something reasonable. Those men were going to jail, so it wasn’t as if they’d need those wages in the meantime.
Cold comfort and not any sort of line of thought to cheer him up.
Sophie had seen a part of him she hadn’t understood tonight. Oh, intellectually, she’d known he’d deployed and had acknowledged he’d been through things. She was aware of the definition of post-traumatic stress disorder, and she’d seen it manifest in various ways for different people. Her intelligence and incredible empathy had taken her a long way in understanding not only him but Rojas and Cruz better than anyone in the community around Hope’s Crossing Kennels.
But until tonight, she hadn’t met the cold stranger he’d turned into when he’d gone overseas. He’d told her about the compartmentalization he’d done with his personality. He’d done it to protect himself. The process of going through boot camp and technical training, of the various programs in the military, wasn’t just to provide him with skills and technique. The training had had the dual purpose of educating and unmaking an individual’s personality. He’d been rebuilt into someone much more capable of surviving life as a soldier during his deployments, and he didn’t regret it at all. But he’d learned to take the piece of him that’d grown up in middle-class suburbia and tuck that boy away to protect him from the reshaping that’d been required.
Through those deployments, running mission after mission, he’d become further detached from his old personality. It had to happen. For some, they turned so completely away from who they used to be, they never did go back to civilian life. And that wasn’t a bad thing.
He’d simply had a single person in his life he’d wanted to get back to.
She stirred in the chair, her feet slipping out from under her as she turned. Amazingly, she managed to shift her position before she fell out of the seat completely. He kept expecting her to end up like one of those hamster videos online where the fuzzy thing fell asleep and sort of…rolled off its perch.
He was going to hell for waiting to see if it would happen instead of moving to secure her position. He’d have lunged to catch her before she hit the hard floor, though.
Ah, Sophie. He’d wanted to hide the truth of himself from her, shelter her from the monstrous part of him he’d developed while he’d been away. He couldn’t call it anything else, because what else could any person become when it was safer to excise the humanity and tuck it away?
She hadn’t been afraid of him. And she hadn’t fought him, not really. She’d snapped out of fear and she’d gotten stubborn out of concern for an individual she’d cared about. She’d come through it, and held her shit together through it for the most part.
There were a lot of people, men and women both, who’d broken under similar circumstances. Even with training, a person didn’t really know what they could survive until they were forced into the real circumstances.
His Sophie was a survivor.
And she’d been a match for him. She’d looked into his eyes and faced the truth he’d hidden since he’d come back to establish Hope’s Crossing Kennels. She’d taken a look at every demon he had inside him. And here she was, sleeping in his presence, like she hadn’t figured he might have killed someone not a few feet away from her.
It’d been her acceptance he’d come home for, he thought. But he’d been too much of a coward to try to show her in the years since he’d started the kennels. He couldn’t find the right time, the right place, and didn’t know how to bring his demons out for her to see.
He’d come close to asking her to come with him to therapy sessions so maybe she could get a glimpse there. But she disliked psychologists almost as much as he did. So he’d held off on that last resort.
There was no way he’d have ever wanted the events of the last week or so to have happened to her, but the result wasn’t something he was going to regret. She’d seen the person he could become in life-threatening situations.