year of college.” My insides jumped with a flare of green ugliness hearing him say her name, and I had to put myself in check. None of that, girl. He went on. “She went to a different college and was there visiting a friend. We were wasted, blah-blah-blah. Hit it off. Ended up having a long-distance relationship across the state for a year until we graduated.”
Half of his drink disappeared. I nodded for him to go on.
“She knew I was going into the Marines. I knew she was close with her family and was going to be a paralegal. But we didn’t really talk much about what the future looked like. When it was time for me to join and move, I brought up getting engaged, but she wasn’t in a hurry. She wanted to have some career time under her belt. I tried to respect that. So, we kept doing the long-distanced thing for over a year until…”
My eyebrows went up as our eyes met.
He let out a caustic laugh. “She got knocked up.”
“Oh, shit,” I breathed. My stomach collapsed. Oh, my fucking gosh. I had to set my drink down. He was watching me closely.
“Yeah.” He pulled out his phone, clicked around, and held it up. “Five-year-old son. Bennett.”
My nerves were trembling as I stared at the little boy with Shawn’s light hair and blue eyes. Shawn looked at the picture and his face softened as he stared down. He was a daddy.
Run, run, run.
I cleared my throat. “He’s precious.”
“Thanks.” Shawn grinned one last time at his son’s picture before putting his phone away. “He’s my everything.”
I nodded, feeling emotional, because something told me Shawn’s story was about to get a lot more complicated.
“I told her we should get married, because in my mind we needed to live together on base so she’d be covered under my insurance for the pregnancy, but she didn’t want the baby to be the reason for us getting married.”
“Was she working?” I asked. “What did she do for insurance?”
“No, she hadn’t found a job there yet. She got private insurance with money she saved.” When I raised my eyebrows, he said, “I know. I thought it was crazy, too, but I couldn’t force her.”
He took another drink and kept going. “So, she lived with me at Fort Lejune, but when she was seven months along I had to go into combat.” He shook his head, his focus fading as he remembered. “That’s my job, you know? It fucking sucks. Men and women have to miss important things at home all the time. It’s the sacrifice we make. But I think she still holds it against me to this day that I wasn’t there. Both of our sets of parents came down to be there when B was born, but when it was time for her mom to leave, she freaked out.”
I cringed. That had to be so hard for her, having an infant and being in a place where she didn’t know anyone. “What did she do?”
“She went back with her mom to Charlotte for the last three months of my deployment, then came back to Lejune. When I got there, I tried to propose again but she said no. We lived together and things were strained. I think she was depressed, to be honest. Maybe even post-partum. She was just mad at me all the time. And I tried so hard. B was a good baby, though. Sometimes Nat wouldn’t even wake at night when he cried—again, I think because of the depression—so I’d get up and feed him and all that. I took care of him a lot. The bathing and night routine. I’d put that damn snuggie thing on and take him on walks and to the grocery store to give her breaks.” My heart squeezed imagining it.
When he paused, we both drank.
“After about a year she started to feel better. We started being able to laugh again. But when it was time for me to deploy, she said she wanted to take B to her parents’. I was like, do what you need to do, you know? Her parents have this big ass guest suite, so I knew they’d be fine.”
He sighed and ran a hand up and down the back of his head again. “That was a long deployment. Almost a year. It was terrible. I got fucking shot at. Lost men. Couldn’t talk about any of that because I didn’t want to stress her out. And