Page 53 of Until Joy

She was quiet a long time. I could tell she understood what I was saying.

“Tell me what happened, Graham.”

“It’s classified.”

“I’m not going to tell anyone, and you need to tell someone. It’s just you and me and the stars. Tell me, baby.”

“We were dealing with the Boko-Haram. We had a CIA operative who was acting as an attaché to the consulate in Nigeria. We had the layout of the compound. It really wasn’t much of a compound. A two-story house, with two outbuildings. Some goats. We watched it for twelve hours. Men came; men went. In the end, we counted nine. We didn’t see a heat signature of someone who was locked up, so we were worried, but we had to find out.”

Joy nuzzled my chest. The heat of her breath kept me anchored to the here and now. “We knew exactly how to approach. Three of my team took out the men on the first floor. No gunshots fired. Kent and I took out the four men in the outbuildings. It was as my men were heading to the second floor that we found out there was a tunnel underneath the house, and terrorists flooded in. I could still hear the static in my comms, the way my men’s voices cut out when the shots were fired.”

Joy’s nails dug into my chest, and she whimpered. When I looked down, I saw two tears sliding down her cheeks, but when I looked into her eyes, I didn’t see pity, but actual pain for what I’d been through. She wasn’t trying to tell me everything was going to be okay, or some such shit. She just held me tighter.

I continued.

“I heard each of my men die. Kent was a sniper. As the terrorists left the house, Kent and I did our best to kill each and every one of them. As we went into the house to see if our men had survived, Kent was shot by one of the terrorists who was still alive. I still remember the coppery smell of blood in the dirt, the way Kent gasped when the bullet hit him. At the same time, I shot the fucker who’d shot Kent.”

“Kent was the only one who had survived. The rest of my team, and the hostage, were dead.”

“I had to get Kent to the extraction point as soon as possible. I got one of the vehicles running and was able to meet the helicopter on time.”

“Do you talk to him anymore?”

“Kent? Not since he got out of rehab,” I admitted.

“Did he hold you accountable for what happened?”

“I never asked.”

“But if you had to guess,” Joy persisted. “Did Kent hold you responsible for how the mission went down.”

“No,” I whispered. “He blamed it on the bad intel.”

“So why are you still blaming yourself?”

I didn’t answer.

“Graham, I’ve never been in your situation. I can’t even come close to imagining the horror. But there is one thing I can tell you. Do you feel like listening?”

“You’re kind of on my lap. Do I have a choice?”

She giggled softly. “You do and you don’t. But I’m going for it. I’ll share my story on another day. I had to go to counseling to stop blaming myself for something that was totally out of my control. The self-blame was killing me.”

I stiffened and pulled her closer. “What happened?” I asked sharply.

“Today is your story day,” she quietly admonished. “This is what I learned, and I just want you to think about it, okay?”

“Is it going to be psycho-mumbo-jumbo?”

“Absolutely,” she giggled.

“Fine. Spit it out.”

“I found out that I desperately needed to blame myself for what happened in London, even though it wasn't really my fault.”

“Why would you need to do that?”

“Because…” She was quiet for a long moment, her fingers tracing patterns on my chest. “Because if it was my fault, that meant I could have stopped it. And if I could have stopped it, then I could make sure nothing like that ever happened to me again.”