Page 92 of Holding Out

“You can tell me,” Becca said, between sobs.She buried her face against her sister’s shoulder.“But I might not believe it for a long time.”

Alia squeezed her tighter and Becca cried until she ran out of tears.

Her friends wereboisterous at dinner, cracking jokes, giving each other a hard time.Becca thought it was mainly to cheer her up, but it didn’t work.No matter how much noise they made, no matter how many jokes they told, there was a big empty space at the table where Griff was not.It hurt her, that empty chair.

She wasn’t sure she ever wanted to be at Friday Night Dinner again.Not without Griff.

Even Alia and Nate’s amazing Middle Eastern feast tasted as bland as sawdust.

Midway through dinner, Robbie got fussy.

“He doesn’t need to eat any time soon, does he?”Becca asked.

“No,” Alia said.“I was hoping he was going to fall asleep and sleep through dinner, but he’s overstimulated and overtired now and I think I’m out of luck.”

“I’ll take him for a walk.”

Nate slowly unwrapped the kicking, drooling baby and handed him over.Becca wrapped him to her chest, facing in, and he protested at the loss of his view, fussing and trying to free his bound limbs.

“Shh,” she told him.“You and me, dude, we’re going to take a nice, long walk.”

She left her friends behind, and stepped out into the night.Robbie was still fussing, his unhappy sounds starting to escalate.

“Shh,” she said.“Shh, shh, hey, baby, shh,” she said, and started to cry again.

Robbie caught the thread of her misery and wailed.She added a bounce to her step, hopelessly out of sync with how she felt, which was like lead.After another block, the motion started to get to him and his sobs subsided to hiccups and then to loud breaths which lengthened as he relaxed against her, warm and pliable.

She walked for a long time, until she was sure they’d be done eating back at the house, done with their roses and thorns and teasing and affection.

The whole time, her tears fell, occasionally landing on Robbie’s sleeping head, leaving long wet tracks in the pale fluff of his baby hair.

44

It was not a good day for Griff to be in charge of the mental health of ten other men.He’d gotten very, very drunk the night before with liquor snuck into his room, the first time he could remember drinking alone since those lost days right after Marina had left.Now he was hungover and sluggish and unhappy.Everything filled him with regret—the sight of his belongings crowding his small room, the fact that he was pretty sure he could still catch a whiff of Becca’s scent on his sheets, even the view of the lake with mist rising off it, because it reminded him of the simple delight of flirting outrageously with her.

But he’d come this far, and he’d come this far because of her, and he wasn’t going to crawl back into a hole.

“Hey,” he told the circle.“Most of you know how this works, but there are a couple of new guys here today ...”

He gave the rest of Jake’s intro spiel, then said, “I’ll start.I’m Griff....”

It didn’t take him as long as he’d thought to tell his story, even though he started at the beginning, at the moment when he’d first noted the absence of the children, and even though he told it all the way through to the end, when morning came and they assessed their losses.

“I felt like, God gave me this huge responsibility.And I blew it.I fucking blew it, and six men died.And then I came home and my wife was gone and there was just a note, and I felt like—”

Oh,shit.He was going to break down.At his very first support group, he was supposed to be in charge, and he was going to cry.

He looked up and from across the circle he saw CJ watching him and nodding.And Griff thought,Fuck it.In for a penny, in for a pound.

“I felt like it was what I deserved,” he said, and his voice broke, and the wall in his chest broke, and everything fucking broke, and he was, in fact, crying.

He didn’t sob or anything.He pulled it back together and looked around the circle, his gaze challenging them to give him shit about it, but they were all pretty much just nodding and meeting his eyes, theirs full of sympathy and understanding.

“So,” he said.“I am just going to try to work on feeling like I didn’t deserve to be punished and like I deserve to be happy.And if anyone wants to work on that with me, we can set some goals around that together.”

There was a moment of surprised silence—Jake had never really said anything much like that—but then the men started shifting in their seats and raising their hands and calling out.Just two or three, but it was enough, and they said they’d come back next week having tried to notice all the times in a week they told themselves they deserved to feel like shit.

Afterward, as the men were filing out, Jake came in.

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