Snow Leopard's Lady (Veteran Shifters 1)

And suddenly she was faced with a choice—the chair catty-corner to the couch, or the cushion next to Wilson.

She chose the cushion. Immediately, she could feel the warmth of his body heat radiating out towards her. She resisted the urge to scoot closer.

“So,” he said quietly. “You were telling me about your daughter.”

Mavis was struck suddenly by how much of a rock he seemed, a quiet, immutable foundation.

This was a man who’d been in violent combat and kept his head. Who’d come back alive, and brought others back with him. Who’d commanded men for his entire adult life.

Someone who would never fly off the handle in a crisis. Who would carefully assess a situation. Who wouldn’t scream or yell, or make a split-second decision and stick to it like glue, no matter what anyone said to him.

Someone nothing like Daryl.

Mavis drew in a breath. “Daryl threw Nina out of the house, and I stood by and said nothing. I didn’t know what to do—I didn’t know what had just happened to my daughter. Daryl was insisting that she was possessed, that she was some kind of devil-creature, and I’d just seen her turn into an animal...but that’s no excuse at all. She was my daughter. I shouldn’t have let him. I should have gone with her.”

There was a short space of quiet, and then Wilson said, “Sometimes you make the wrong decision. And the consequences—well, the consequences can be irrevocable. And there’s nothing you can do to go back. I’ve—” He stopped.

“What?” Mavis whispered.

“I’ve done the same thing,” he said in a low voice.

“When?” Her voice was airless. She was desperate to hear, to feel that someone else understood how it felt to be caught endlessly in one moment of a horrific mistake.

“Once...once in Iraq, I gave an order to investigate a town. I sent good men out to it, thinking it was just another village.” He exhaled heavily. “It was an enemy hideout.”

Mavis drew in her breath.

“If I’d kept the men back, ordered more caution, it would have been different. But I didn’t consider all the options, and men died because of that error.”

She clenched her fists, feeling her fingernails prick her palms as she thought about the horror he must have felt when it all went wrong.

“I spent a long time living inside of that moment,” he said. “I still feel that pain, that regret. But if I let it consume me, I wouldn’t be able to make any amends. I wouldn’t be able to do better the next time, because all of my judgment, my experience, would be lost inside of one event, and there would be no way to bring my full self to the next thing. And that would be dishonoring those men’s memory, more than anything else.”

He took Mavis’ hand. His palm was warm, and big enough to engulf hers. “Do you see? No one is served by that much guilt. Not me, not you. Not Nina.”

Mavis stared down at their joined hands. “I try,” she said. “I try to keep all of the guilt I feel, the shame, away from Nina. It’s not going to help her, if I’m beating myself up all the time. She doesn’t need to constantly reassure me that it’s all right, or try to calm me down when I’m upset. That’s not my job, as her mother. I need to be the best mother I can be for her, now, rather than living—like you said—living inside of that moment when I was at my worst.”

Wilson twined their fingers together, and she shivered at the closeness, the intimacy of the moment. “That’s all we can ever do,” he said softly. “The best that we can. And if we fail, well, we have to get up and keep going and try for a better best.”

Mavis blinked tears back. “Nina was gone for seven years,” she said in a rush, and Wilson’s hand tightened on hers as he sucked in a breath. “She went out that door and she never came back. I looked for her. I called shelters, I called hospitals, I put up posters, I searched on the Internet. I asked everyone she knew, all of her friends. But she left town, and I didn’t know where to find her.”

“I can’t even imagine,” Wilson said. “Seven years of your daughter missing...it must have been the worst hell imaginable.”

Mavis nodded. “It was.”

Wilson frowned, his thumb stroking up and down her hand. “You said your divorce was only just being finalized now. Did you marry again, after that?”

Mavis shook her head. “No. I stayed with Daryl. Because I knew that if I left him, he’d fight tooth and nail to keep the house. If I was going to leave, I’d have to leave. And Nina would have no way of finding me.”

Understanding dawned in Wilson’s eyes, and his hand tightened on hers. “So you stayed, so she’d have her mother to come home to.”

Mavis nodded. “I couldn’t let her come home to a house with only Daryl in it. And I couldn’t take any risk that she might come back, and I wouldn’t know about it. I had to stay.”

“For seven years,” Wilson breathed. “With a man like that.” He shook his head. “You have a strength matching any Marine I’ve ever known. I’m amazed that you came out of that experience so...”

“So what?” Mavis dared to ask. Fishing for compliments, maybe, but she desperately wanted to hear what he thought of her.

“So kind,” he said. “So caring, so able to pay attention to all these people whose businesses you help. And so calm and poised. I think that most people, in a situation like that, would be on-edge for the rest of their lives. What you said about keeping your guilt away from your daughter, managing it yourself so that the burden of it isn’t on her...after that experience, it would be hard to even conceive of that, let alone put it into practice.” He lifted her hand and pressed a kiss to the back of it, slow and heartfelt. “You have an astonishing strength of character, Mavis.”