Without warning, Tia went white. He started forward, concerned she was about to faint, then checked himself as she stared him down. But it was the sheer misery on her face that really got to him.
‘You’ve been here?’ she breathed. ‘For the past three years? When I read the article in the paper, it never mentioned how long you’d been here.’
‘Westlake lifeboats offered me a position as coxswain when they heard I’d left the military,’ he ground out, realising too late that he might have given himself away by his unintentional admission. ‘I needed the job.’
‘You said you would never come back here. Ever. You swore it. I read that article in the paper but I never dreamed you’d been here that long.’
‘My God, Tia, I was a twenty-year-old kid when I made that stupid vow.’
She didn’t need to know that the first thing he’d done when he’d straightened his life back out had been to return to Westlake—the place he’d abhorred as a kid—in the hope that Tia might also return home.
‘Does it really surprise you that I’m not that broken, damaged, defeated, shadow of a man you thought I was?’
He ignored the part of him that wondered if she’d been entirely wrong in that conclusion. The part of him that wondered if he would ever get over the guilt he felt that he was still alive when members of his squad—his best buddies—were gone.
Was it something he would ever get used to?
‘No, it’s just. I didn’t know. I never imagined...’ She shook her head. ‘The point is, I didn’t come here to revisit old history.’
‘Well, you didn’t come back just to make amends with your father,’ he carried on grimly, as if it could distract her. ‘Up until five years ago we were still a happily married couple and I know that in a decade of marriage you never once took up his olive branches.’
He couldn’t be exactly sure what it was that he’d said, but suddenly her face grew harder. More determined. Another spark of the feisty Tia.
‘Is this the game we’re playing, then, Zeke? You’re rewriting history? Claiming that we were a happily married couple?’
Her voice swirled around the room, around him. Shaky, low yet unexpectedly dangerous.
‘Weren’t we?’
‘Constant deployments meant that we rarely spent longer than a week together at a time. So it always felt as though it was fresh, and thrilling, and new. But we weren’t a couple as most people would consider that to be. We didn’t really share things, at least not our fears, or our flaws.’
‘Do many couples?’
‘The strongest do.’ She shrugged. ‘You and I were two kids running away from our pasts, if for different reasons. And whilst I never thought that that IED defeated you, if we’re being fair you were damaged long before then.’
‘Say again.’ Less of a question, more of a challenge.
But to her credit, Tia didn’t back down.
‘The fact that you never let your childhood, that...monster who called himself your father, break you was one of the qualities which made you the kind of loyal, dedicated marine who everyone wanted on their squad.’
It was sad how much he actually ached to believe her.
He nearly did.
Instead, he began a long, slow clap.
‘Impressive. Have you been preparing that little show for a while, Tia? You almost had me convinced.’
‘But, of course, I didn’t,’ she threw back without missing a beat. So fiery, so steadfast—the girl he had fallen in love with. ‘Because you won’t believe me no matter what I say. You never would. You decided what was true for yourself, and anyone else’s opinion be damned.’
‘I trusted you, too. Once,’ he countered pointedly.
‘No.’ She shook her head. ‘You didn’t. You were so used to having to rely on yourself, knowing that no one else out there would look out for you, that you found it difficult to let me in.’
‘But I did let you in.’
‘No, you never did. Because when that last mission went wrong...’ She faltered, then regrouped. ‘When you ended up losing part of your leg, I was the last person you wanted. You pushed me away. Not just once, Zeke, but again and again.’