Page 35 of Boomer (SEAL Team Tier 1, #7)

Ansel didn’t smile back. He turned pages carefully, showing respect for his idol. “That one’s from the Laurentian Library vestibule. He carved it in his later years. Look at the legs. They’re too long. Deliberately.”

Boomer looked down, letting the kid guide the page. “Yeah?”

“It was meant to be seen from below. The angle mattered.” Ansel looked up, his eyes solemn and old-souled. “Beauty’s kinda like math, you know? My eyes just see it that way. The shapes, and the lines…like secrets hiding in everything. That’s where the good stuff comes from.”

Boomer’s chest constricted.

This kid wasn’t talking like a kid. He was talking like an adult.

Like a boy raised in the quiet corners of too many adult rooms, one who saw the world in form and weight, in tension and structure. He felt it like wire strung between his ribs and those concepts resonated with him.

“You draw?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

The boy nodded. “I sculpt mostly. But I draw when I’m sad.”

Boomer nodded slowly, something catching in his throat. “That’s a good thing to do with sadness.”

The boy stared at him for a long moment, then pointed to the wound on Boomer’s arm. “You’ve been hurt.”

Boomer followed his gaze. “Yeah. I have.”

Ansel tilted his head. “But you’re not really broken. You’re just…scraped on the inside.”

That stopped him cold.

The words landed with weight. Real, heavy weight. He had no answer for them, just a quiet nod, too thick in the throat for anything more.

Then, as if needing to change the subject, the boy turned another page. Boomer shifted as he settled in beside the boy.

“You wanna know what else?” Ansel asked, thumbing to a different page.

“Absolutely,” Boomer said, smiling softly.

The kid launched into a deep, impassioned explanation of David's proportions and how Michelangelo believed in the tension between potential and action, how the statue wasn’t of the battle, but of the moment before.

Boomer listened, soaking it in. Not just the facts, but the way the boy’s voice shifted with each insight, the way his hands moved as he explained. The way his passion came alive like a fuse.

It was the same way Mike used to talk about ideas. The way Taylor got when she was breaking down mission strategy or German procedural law. The way Emil must have been, before the world broke his rhythm.

Boomer leaned back, arms loose over his knees, letting the words wash over him.

For the first time in what felt like forever, he didn’t feel like a man on the edge of a breach.

He felt…invested.

From the kitchen came the sharp cadence of voices, Taylor and her mother still at it. He felt the boy flinch at the verbal sparring match that Boomer had no doubt would end with at least one heart bruised. He glanced back toward the archway, instincts flaring but stayed put.

Ansel had gone quiet. He was tracing a line of text with one finger. His voice came soft.

“My dad used to tell me art was as important as law or anything in the sciences,” Ansel said, his voice soft but certain. “I like science. But I love art.”

Boomer let the weight of those words settle between them. He turned the page of the book, slow and careful, to a rendering of the Dying Slave, one of those sculptures where motion still lived in the stone, tension and surrender frozen forever.

He didn’t look at Ansel when he answered.

“Your dad was right,” he said, voice low, gravel edged with something softer. “Law might tell us what we can do. Science tells us how. But art?” He tapped the page gently, just once. “Art tells us why. ”

Ansel blinked up at him.

Boomer continued, still watching the statue.

“It’s the only thing we make that isn’t about survival.

It’s about meaning. About feeling. About holding onto something when everything else breaks loose.

Art…it’s proof that we were here, and that we saw the world as more than just a fight to win or a task to finish.

” He glanced down at the boy. “You make something, draw, sculpt, paint, and you’re telling the world this mattered. Even if no one else understands it.”

Ansel didn’t answer right away. Just reached out and ran a small hand over the thick page.

Boomer swallowed.

He wasn’t trying to be profound. He just knew what it meant to need something beautiful to hold on to when everything inside you had gone dark.

He’d lived in a world where the only art was the sharp geometry of ruined buildings, the flare of tracer rounds, the still-life of a teammate’s boots pointing the wrong direction in the dust.

But this? This moment, this kid, this book? It reminded him why people like Taylor, people like Emil, fought so hard to protect the quiet places. Sometimes art was the only way to say something that couldn't survive any other kind of language.

Boomer sat there, heart pounding slow and deep in his chest, and knew with absolute clarity. Every potshot from Gretchen. Every hour Taylor had spent rebuilding her heart. Every scar he still carried from Mike, from Lila, from the roads in between had been worth it.

All of it.

He was sitting on a sun porch in Lisbon, holding the beginnings of something he’d never thought he’d deserve. The chance at life…

Boomer didn’t hear her footsteps. Didn’t sense her approach. He only felt a shift in the room, like warmth rolling in through a cracked window, like the air remembered how to breathe.

He looked up.

Taylor stood just inside the archway, framed in soft light, her hands loose at her sides, eyes locked on him like she couldn’t quite move.

Her lips parted, barely. That sharp, stunning blue dragged across his face, then down to where he sat cross-legged on the floor beside Ansel.

Something in her gaze faltered, melted, and what replaced it made his throat tighten.

She was looking at him like he mattered.

Like she saw everything and still wanted more.

Behind her, Gretchen appeared, still in command, still severe but not untouched.

Her gaze flicked to Ansel, sitting close to Boomer, relaxed, focused, unworried.

Then her eyes shifted back to Boomer. Narrowed.

Her mouth tightened. Something coiled there, a warning, a softening quickly shored up maybe.

So…not completely cold after all. Some part of what she’d just seen had penetrated that ice shield. A man who hadn’t barked orders or cajoled or demanded. Just sat . Listened. Met the boy where he was. That was what turned her pause into something just long enough to notice.

Then Taylor spoke, her voice soft and intimate. “Lunch is ready.” But her eyes said something entirely different. They said, I see you. I need you. I want you.

His chest burned. Not with desire, though every inch of him ached for her, but with that quiet, gut-deep thing that came when a man realized he’d been chosen. For who he was in a moment that didn’t demand anything but presence.

He nodded, rising slowly, careful not to jostle the book or the boy still tracing the statue’s lines. “Thanks for sharing your book with me,” he said, voice thick. “It helped more than you know.”

Ansel gave a small smile. “Most people don’t listen that long.”

Boomer ruffled the kid’s curls gently. “Guess I’m not most people.”

Taylor’s breath hitched just enough for him to hear it. He turned toward her, and their eyes met again. The hunger was there. Yes. But so was everything else. Hope. Trust. A reckless kind of awe.

His body cried out for her, desperately, but it was that look he held onto. In her eyes, he saw something he hadn’t dared believe for a long time. That maybe this, them, wasn’t just a firestorm waiting to burn out. Maybe it was the beginning of something worth surviving for.

The dining room was drenched in late-afternoon sun, the kind that turned linen pale gold and made even the stemware look like it was lit from within. The table was elegant but not showy, white porcelain, deep green glassware, silver so polished it glinted like a dare. Everything was in its place.

He was sure this was just like Gretchen Hoffman liked it.

Boomer sat near the end, across from Taylor, close enough to feel her presence like a gravitational pull, but far enough to mind his manners. Ansel was perched beside him, napkin square in his lap, his fork aligned perfectly next to the plate.

Boomer heard the footfalls before he saw him, soft, even, deliberate. The kind of walk that didn’t rush, didn’t demand. Just was .

Taylor’s father stepped into the room like someone who'd long since learned how to read a space before speaking into it. He was tall, lean, with a quiet frame that looked more like a professor than a patriarch. His sweater was charcoal, sleeves pushed neatly to the elbows, and he wore soft brown house shoes, not loafers or boots, like he wasn’t trying to impress anybody and never had.

His silver hair was combed back neatly, not perfectly, and he wore a watch that looked older than Boomer’s Navy career. He didn’t say much at first. Just paused in the doorway, observing the table, the guests, and then his daughter, his girl , with a small, unreadable smile.

“Sorry for my absence, but I was on a call in the study.”

Boomer stood, instinctively. Not out of formality, but because something about the man’s presence felt…grounded. The kind of quiet a storm respected. He offered a hand.

“Carter Finley. Boomer, to most.”

The man’s grip was warm, unhurried. “Dr. Alaric Hoffman,” he said. His voice was low and dry, almost worn smooth by time. “Taylor’s father.”

Boomer gave a nod. “It’s an honor, sir.”

“Let’s not overdo it,” Alaric replied mildly, a smile ghosting across his mouth but his eyes were sharp. Pale gray. Watchful. Not skeptical. Just...quietly aware.

He looked at Boomer like a man who saw everything he needed to see in the first thirty seconds and then made you prove the rest.

Boomer respected that.