The Hero I Need

Guess it’s just different knowing it’s a blue-eyed angel with sinful wine lips and a body I’d like to turn my inner Viking loose on.

Damn.

Yeah, it’s different, and I’m an idiot for letting it be.

Knowing my daughters have already made friends with the tiger thief doesn’t sit well.

In fact, it’s pretty damn disconcerting.

Unleashing a slow sigh, I brace for the avalanche of shit pouring through my head.

The girls were so young when Brittany died.

They don’t remember how her illness stole her memories, her mind, her soul...

They don’t remember how she didn’t know who they were, how the disease took that from her, or how she didn’t know who I was, either.

The disease obliterated our love.

Neurological conditions are no fucking joke. Hers hollowed her out, left her little more than a brittle shell of a person when she finally passed.

I say finally because it was a long, grueling road for her.

For us.

A road lined with hell and the sickest emotional torture known to man.

It left me alone with a husk of the woman I pledged my life to—every last bit of her gone—devoured from the inside out by an invisible demon no one in their right minds would ever summon.

She barely weighed ninety pounds when she died. Hadn’t been able to eat for weeks. Her body couldn’t function in so many ways.

In hindsight, I blame myself for keeping her alive longer.

I was the jackass who insisted on the feeding tube, still praying for a miracle, not fucking ready to lose her.

If I hadn’t been so selfish, if I’d just let her go, she might have died with an ounce of dignity.

Instead, thanks to me, she’d withered until there was nothing.

I’ve saved dozens of lives overseas, faced down foreign enemies in Iraq and domestic criminals back home, and survived a slug in my shoulder that nearly killed me on a sweltering street in Baghdad.

I got used to hearing the word miracle in the service more times than I can count. I started to believe in them and that’s what set me up for a fall.

But the one thing I couldn’t survive, couldn’t accomplish, was save my wife.

Brittany hadn’t gotten out of bed for over two months before the end came.

The memories still break my heart all over again like a jackhammer.

She was so alive, once upon a time.

So charming and beautiful and fun.

The day she stepped out of the bathroom screaming with the positive pregnancy test in her hand, waving her arms, she’d leaped on the bed and jumped up and down like a five-year-old.

We did it!

We made ourselves a baby, times two.

Two endlessly gorgeous, talented, whip-smart little girls.

I think the smile I wore after I heard the news lasted for months.

Several years later, she didn’t even know who Sawyer and Avery were.

Didn’t remember how she’d changed her mind a hundred times before choosing those two names, because they had to be a thousand percent perfect.

We wanted to give them names they could be proud of, gifts from a loving mom and dad that’d always remind them how special, how precious their lives are.

She didn’t remember my name, either.

Or even her own name by the killing end.

The last words she said to me, a month before she’d died, were simply, “Thank you, doctor.”

They came out so faint and so slurred it was hard to comprehend, but I’d understood them, all right.

I understood she didn’t know me enough to love me anymore, didn’t know where she was, who she was, but in her own, sweet way, she still found the energy to say thank you for helping her.

Thank you and goodbye.

Unfair doesn’t begin to describe it.

Unfair is what happens when you just miss the jackpot in Vegas, or when you’re passed up for a promotion because you didn’t kiss enough ass.

This was a fucking murder.

Of her. Of us. Of the future we should’ve had.

All I have left now are memories, and I’ll protect them with everything I have. Keep them front and center, sealed up behind a mile of treacherous barbed wire in my heart.

I’ll hold them tight and cherish them because losing Brittany broke me for love.

Losing her meant losing my heart forever.

The memories strike closer to home the next morning when Hank arrives to pick up the girls.

At one time, he was one of my best friends. He was Brittany’s older brother—her only brother—and the greatest uncle in the world to Sawyer and Avery. Not like my own brother who moved out of state years ago and left Weston here.

Hank adores them, too.

No surprise.

He was a strapping human rock for them in good times and bad, ready to help out at the drop of a hat since the second they were born.

Do I appreciate it?

Hell yes.

I appreciate him.

Good family is the only thing that’s harder to find than good help.

It’s just that I struggle to look him in the eyes.