Sacrifice (Heart of a Wounded Hero)

She comes back and grabs some plates and silverware before setting them out. I go over and sit down, and she sits next to me. “I love spaghetti,” I tell her, inhaling the garlic and tomato scent.

She starts to dish out the food. “That's probably a good thing because there's not a lot I know how to make.”

I hold her plate up next for her to put food on it. "That's okay. I don't expect you to wait on me while you're here. I can cook for the both of us."

She seems surprised, but she doesn't say anything. I dig into the food, and we eat for a few minutes. "This is probably the best I've eaten."

She looks at me knowingly. "Yeah. Well, you've been eating hospital food for a month. And before that, who knows what you were eating?"

I point my fork at her. "You're definitely right about that. MREs don't have anything on this." We are both quiet as we eat our meal. But I still feel guilty. "I'm seeing a therapist. They're supposed to be helping me with the nightmares."

She nods. "I guess they started after the accident?" When I don’t immediately answer, she holds her hands up. "You don't have to talk about it if you don't want to."

Crazily enough, I actually do want to talk about it with her, but I'm not about to question why. "Yeah. Well, uh, Noah, he was my best friend. We actually joined up together. He was killed in the bombing."

She gasps and wraps her hand around mine. "Oh my gosh, Logan. I'm so sorry."

I turn my hand over so I can hold on to hers. "Thanks. I think that's the first time I've said it out loud to someone.”

She sets her fork down and leans toward me. "Tell me about him."

Instead of looking at her, I stare out the window. Max is sitting on his window seat watching the bird in the bird feeder. I start to ramble and am surprised how easy it is to talk to Ella. "Noah was a good guy, the best, actually. He was always looking out for me and everyone else. He saved me that day."

She doesn't say anything, and I turn my head to look at her. She looks so sad, and there's one tear that overfills in her eye and trails down her cheek. I use my thumb and wipe it off as she smiles at me. "If he was here right now, what would he say to you? What would he want you to know?"

I think about it for just a minute, but it doesn't take me long to figure it out. "First of all, he would make sure to say, 'I told you so about Harper.' He never did like her, and he warned me that she was with me for the wrong reasons. He was definitely right about that."

I think about it some more. "The second thing that he would get on to me about is the nightmares. He would hate that I'm reliving that night over and over. He would tell me I'm being ridiculous, probably call me a pussy and say that it's time for me to move on."

She nods her head. "He sounds like a heck of a guy." She gets an excited look on her face and pulls her hand from mine. "I have an idea."

I watch as she gets up and walks across the room, grabbing a notepad and pencil before coming back and sitting down. She moves her plate to the middle of the table and then lays the pad down in front of her. "What are you doing?" I ask her.

She starts writing. "I'm making a list."

I take another bite of the spaghetti and chew as she continues to write. "A list about what?"

She wraps her hand around the pencil and lays it down in front of her. "I know you, Logan, and you're not going to let the guilt go. One thing I think might help is if you make a list of things that you would want to do for him or maybe even things that he thinks that you should be doing. He saved you, so there's a reason you're still here. And now you just have to make the most of it."

She makes it sound so easy, and she starts to write again.

"All right, what are you writing down?"

She looks at what she just wrote and then puts her hand over it. "Maybe that's too soon."

Curious, I pull her hands off the paper and look at it. She drew a heart at the top and wrote Logan's To-Do List.

The first thing on the list was Drop the fiancée. I can't help but laugh out loud. "You can mark that off."

And she takes the pencil and strikes through it.