I took one slow step closer.
That was all I dared. The men behind me had already granted more mercy than I had any business expecting, and mercy in a place like that was skittish as a half-broke mare. Push it too hard and it kicked. So I planted my boots careful on that blacktop, let the wind move over my face, and kept my whole soul fixed on the woman waiting inside that blue sedan.
Hannah sat under the blinking red light like time itself had pulled over to catch its breath.
For a second, my knees near forgot their job. I locked them hard so I would not fold right there in the road in front of God, the Army, and every ghost I had dragged to that crossing. My grip on the TRG tightened till my knuckles ached white against the frame. A year of memory had not prepared me for motion—for the small living shifts of her shoulders, the quiet blink of her eyes, the way her breath moved in her chest like the Lord still had His hand on her. I had told myself all along that I only wanted one more look, but the second she was truly there, alive before me and not laid out cold in my mind, every lie I had used to survive the year went down like rotten fence posts in a flood.
In my mind, I praised the Lord Almighty for this blasted device because it was showing me the woman who had stolen my heart all those years ago, and who had never fully given up her hold on it.
I knew when this was all over that Masters would arrest me. Whatever was left of my sorry excuse for a life was about to be over. But it had been so damn worth it.
The TRG gave me every little thing with a cruelty so fine-tuned it might as well have been art. I could see the faint rise and fall of her shoulders. I could see the dashboard glow laid soft across her cheekbones and caught in the gold of her hair. I could see the way her fingers moved against the steering wheel without really gripping it, like they were carrying the restless energy of a thought she could not settle. The machine did not just show me her face. It showed me the burden in it.
I looked past how beautiful she was then to see somethin’ I hadn’t figured I would see.
She looked tired.
Not the bone-deep tired I had been carrying the last two days from runnin’ myself ragged, nor the haggard kinda tired that comes from running on too little sleep and too much fear. This was a heart-sick tired. The sort a body wears when it has cried private tears, argued private arguments, and hit the same sore place inside itself so many times it has gone tender all over. Hannah had always been strong. Stronger than me in all the ways that count. She could be stubborn as a gate hinge rusted shut, but she was not cold. Looking at her then, I didn’t see anger or indifference. I saw strain. I saw sorrow. I saw a woman trying to bring herself to a hard thing.
My mind started putting the pieces together before I wanted it to.
What in the world is she doin’ stopped here at this hour, looking like she was wrestlin’ in her mind with the Devil himself?
Now, I knew this intersection better than my own neighborhood on account of what transpired here. Knew it in the plain old lawman way of a man who had driven every backroad in the county enough times to map them in his sleep. If Hannah rolled straight through Sparkwood and 21 and kept on toward Twin Rivers, she would have reached my house just before 4:00 AM.
Oh, man. That was it.
She would have arrived around the time I would have been stepping outside in uniform, tugging my hat on, locking the front door behind me, and heading off to the sheriff’s office like I always had. Same hour. Same little slice of morning routine. Same fool man thinking there would be one more day to fix what he had broken.
That realization hit me so hard I near forgot to breathe. The screen of the goggles started to distort from the waterworks leaking out of my eyes.
God, could it be true?
She hadn’t been on some plain old errand.
She had been on her way to me.
The truth of it stood there in front of me plain as a courthouse clock and mean as a branding iron. Hannah had not stopped at that light because she was lost. She had not frozen there because she lacked gas money, nerve, or direction. She had been sitting there gathering herself for the drive to my house. For me. For us. For one last try, maybe. For a conversation pride had delayed too long and pain had made dangerous.
I felt the whole thing tilt inside me.
Every bitter thought I had fed for a year went stumbling around loose in the dark all of a sudden. All those nights I had told myself she was done with me. That she had left, shut the door, signed the papers in her heart before she ever set them in my drawer. That whatever softness had once lived between us had dried up and blown off like topsoil in a bad wind. I had worn those thoughts like sackcloth. Punishment fit for a man too slow to love well. But watching her there, I could no longer make them square with what I saw.
No sir.
That was not the face of a woman hardened into finality.
That was the face of a woman on the edge of mercy.
Hannah lowered one hand from the wheel and reached toward the center console. Slow. Hesitant. Her fingertips searched a moment and came back with her phone. She held it in both hands, staring at the screen without moving, thumbs still and useless while the red light blinked over the hood and painted the inside of the car in pulses.
I leaned forward a fraction, afraid the machine might somehow lose focus if I breathed wrong.
The screen cast pale light up into her face. It softened the strain around her mouth and made the wet shine in her eyes more visible. She swallowed. Her right thumb moved once. Then again. She was typing.
Lord help me, I watched like a starving man watches bread.
I took another step closer, just enough that I could make it out. Her phone sat angled in her hands, and the words appeared one by one beneath her thumbs.
I am sorry. Let’s talk.
For a second, the whole world narrowed down to that sentence glowing in Hannah’s hands.
I am sorry.
I looked up at who she was sending the message to and sure enough, it was me. There in plain English were the words of the nickname she called me.
Hubby.
Maybe she forgot to change it, or maybe a part of her didn’t want to. But all the same, I was in her phone as “Hubby.”
The words split me open clean down the middle. Because there it was at last, plain and unadorned. She had been coming to me with softness in her hands while I had spent the past year building altars to regret out of things I did not fully know. She had been driving toward my front porch to say the very thing my own stiff-necked pride had refused to say first. Maybe she had hoped I would say it too. Maybe she had prayed it. Maybe she had rehearsed it all the way down that road with one hand on the wheel and the other wiping tears before they could fall.
I couldn’t know all of that for certain.
But I knew enough.
And enough was wrecking me.
“Hannah,” I breathed, though she was a year away and sealed behind glass and time and all the punishment heaven allows a stubborn man.
The words on the phone stayed there glowing up at her.
I am sorry. Let’s talk.
She stared at them without pressing send.
That was its own kind of agony.
Her thumbs hovered. The right one twitched near the screen, then stopped. She drew in a breath so deep her shoulders lifted and held. Her chin trembled once. Just once. Not enough most folks would notice. But I noticed. Lord, I noticed everything. A sheriff who has loved a woman since high school knows the language of her face better than he knows the lawbooks on his shelf.
The blinking red light above the intersection kept time over all of it.
Outside the past-bound car, the road lay empty and still. Outside my goggles, the present held its breath too. I knew Masters and Mari and every rifle behind me were still there. Knew the wind was still moving over the real intersection and the Army was still waiting for me to finish my one last theft from time. But they had all gone dim now. Not gone. Just dim. The only living thing in the world was the choice trembling in Hannah’s hands.
She looked up from the phone and out through the driver’s-side window. And for a second, it seemed like she was looking right at me. My legs quivered at the sight of her eyes locking on mine. But then, just as soon as they did, her eyes rolled back down to the screen. Her lips parted as if she might say the words aloud and hear how they sounded before sending them into the world.
I am sorry. Let’s talk.
My chest hurt so bad it felt like somebody had hooked a fence stretcher to my ribs and started cranking.
Because I knew what waited at the other end of that road.
I wanted so badly to call to her. To pull her out of that car and take her home with me.
I knew what waited if I didn’t.
And still, like an impotent fool, I stood there praying with every ruined inch of me that she would hit send. That she would put the words into motion. That somehow the mercy already blazing on that little screen might outrun death itself by one minute. One road. One heartbeat.
But Hannah did not send it.
She just sat there beneath the red light with that message glowing in her hands, thinking.
Tune in next week for Chapter 8 – Part B. Take Advantage of this limited offer from Creation Press. The first 100 free subscribers will automatically be upgraded to a paid account for one year.