“He’s not just doing this for himself,” Dakota pointed out. “He’s doing this for all of us. Even her.”
“I know.”
“So you’ve gotta trust him. You’ve gotta let him do his thing.”
Our friend’s ‘thing’ was incredibly dangerous, always was. Yet no matter how much we’d been through together, all four of us? Briggs had never once let us down.
“Alright?” Dakota was asking.
“Okay fine,” I sighed. It wasn’t like I had a choice, really. “When’s he due back?”
“He’s not sure,” Dakota replied. “But it’ll be sooner rather than later.”
“He said that?”
“Yup.”
That made me feel a little better. There were a certain number of things Briggs wasn’t ever wrong about. When it came to the end of his deployment, he always knew.
We exited the truck, and for the rest of our conversation our voices went low. The path leading up to the building’s big metal door was clean and smooth and immaculately swept. Silently I wondered how many more times I’d be taking it.
“Now,” said Dakota, “let’s talk about the real question here.”
“What?’
He stopped walking. So did I.
“What do we tell the Commander?” he practically whispered.
I glanced forward, looking at the small, squat building with the reinforced door. It sat there staring back at us like an armored tank. Like an obtuse metal box amongst the cluster of sleek, low-slung quonset huts.
“Follow my lead,” I said, suddenly walking again. “And obviously, don’t say anything about what actually happened…”
Thirty-Seven
SAMMARA
Time passed. The seasons changed. The weeks spun out into months… and all of them were glorious.
I’d fully moved in by the end of summer. Fall turned the leaves yellow and orange, and a cold snap ended the constant heat, ushering in my favorite time of the year.
Melissa helped me sublet my apartment for the remainder of my lease. I told her everything — every dripping detail of what had happened — and as I suspected she was the one person truly thrilled for me when she heard the big news.
As a friend, she was totally without equal. Always happy for others. She loved me for who I was no matter what I did, and apparently, no matter how many guys I dated at once. Laughingly she told me she didn’t actually envy my predicament; I’d have four times the fights, four times the drama, four times the birthdays to remember.
“You do know I’ll also have four times the fun?” I reminded her. “Four times the love and adoration?” I smiled and winked at her. “Four times the sexual attention?”
She’d punched me in the arm after that and turned red. “Okay, fine,” she’d told me. “Four times the foot rubs too,” she swore. “Shit. Maybe I am a little jealous…”
The renovation went famously, with the exterior of the house getting wrapped up first. It was amazing how quickly things went when you had an unlimited budget, and my little black credit card never failed to deliver. Edward was more careful about who he hired, and even took my input on several of the new subs. We splurged on the best woodworkers, the best plasterers, the best painters and restoration experts. Each had his or her own task by way of bringing the house back to its original splendor, and together we kept a careful eye on them as they did their thing.
As for Dawn, she never really got over the move. She’d constantly drop passive-aggressive comments about me spending too much time at the house, and not enough in the office. It made little sense really, because business was incredibly slow and the house project was now paying most of our bills. If anything I was hungry for work rather than burdened with it, but somehow Dawn always seemed busy and constantly flustered.
For the most part I ignored her. It was sad the way our relationship had devolved; what had originated as a beautiful partnership and even a friendship had soured into an unwanted daily chore. Even increasing our advertising budget failed to bring in that many new clients, and it started to feel like we were just spinning our wheels.
“You know you don’t really have to work,” Kyle had once told me. “Right?”
I chuckled softly as we lay sprawled on the couch, nestled against one another. “Oh no?”