Page 124 of Severed Heart

A car door sounds, and our eyes snap toward the door and then back to each other as the clock ticks out.

“Promise me, Tyler.If you truly love me as you say you do, promise me you will never come back to this house with that look in your eyes for me.” Her eyes implore mine, desperation seeping from her every pore. “Please, Soldier, promise me.”

“It never happened,” I hear myself say while wishing wholeheartedly it was the truth. Not if this is the payoff of giving so much of yourself to another human being. Of loving them to the point their wants overshadow your own—of loving another more than yourself. Ripping my eyes away, within my next breath, I’m closing the sliding door just as Tobias enters through the front. I catch their muffled greetings before I jump the fence and start at a dead run. As my feet start to pound the asphalt, I feel the silence in my chest pumping while my mind tries to temper the implosion happening throughout the rest of me, forcing my thinking into a one-eighty. Into thinking I don’t need a single thing that I thought I couldn’t live without mere seconds ago—my mind’s way of protecting me as I embrace the lifeline.

Delphine once told me the true genius of a strategist lies within the surprise, and hers was far too damning and honest to be completely contrived.

She chose Tobias and Dom when I never even knew I had that competition, that there would be a choice to make between us. I’m not her decision and will never be. My legs fuel me as the roar in my chest intensifies, a lot of that ache feeling like betrayal and broken faith.

The same faith and trust I had in my father. It’s then I realize I foolishly fused it and projected it all into Delphine. I had given her all I had left, and she destroyed me in the same heartless goddamned way. Made me her world like my father had for a time, just to discard as easily.

Cast out.

Not enough.

For either of them.

A mistake. A mistake. A mistake. The word alone holds more power than almost any other she spoke, and it’s no mystery why. I’ve been paying for mistakesdearlyfor years, ironically so few of them my own.

Agony races on my heels, threatening to catch up as I pound the asphalt, my empty heartbeat pulsing in my ears. Even as it happens, I begin to shed the weight of their mistakes, brick by brick. A wall made up of the load I’ve been carrying for people who’ve never shown up to do the same for me, for too fucking long.

Weight created by their selfishness and missteps. My every attempt to help them with their burdens thwarted or overlooked. So, as I shed their collective sins, their burdens, I materialize a wall between myself and their fucking decisions, becoming lighter with every step.

Resigned to let their burdens be their own. To let them lie in their beds, weighed down as they battle their own fucking demons, haunts, and the consequences of their missteps.

Faults I can’t camouflage or fix, and I am losing all desire to with every step that distances me from them, growing lighter and lighter as I go.

As I shed the final brick on one side and lay it on the other, I press through the pain, intent on becoming the man I envisioned—my mission the same.

My mission the only thing within my sights. The only thing that matters.

Now, a homeless soldier, but a soldier just the same.

A soldier with a purpose.

Just after I fix my sight, a mental clarity kicks in before a tunnel envelops me, surrounding my view until I’m hyper-focused. Racing toward a pinprick I can so clearly see. It’s then I reach the precipice I’ve been close to reaching for months and finally press past it, finding my freedom with the slow sweep of my eyes.

BLINK.BLACK.

An hour later, I’m a Marine.

PART 2

“HE WHO MAKESa beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

—Samuel Johnson

Chapter Thirty-Two

TYLER

US PRESIDENT: BARACK OBAMA | 2009–2017

SPRING 2010

Camp Lejeune, North Carolina

Four years later