Two A.M. in Dress Blues
Chapter 11 - Two A.M. in Dress Blues
Emily hadn't worn her dress uniform since the wedding, and she almost didn't understand why she pulled it out of the closet at two in the morning three nights later, until she was standing in front of the mirror in it, medals catching the lamp light, and understood exactly why.
*This is who I am when nobody's deciding anything for me.*
Daniel found her there, awake beside an empty side of the bed, and didn't ask questions, just came and stood behind her in the mirror's reflection.
"Can't sleep," he said. Not a question.
"I keep thinking about the photograph," Emily said. "The caption. Our girls deserve everything. They wrote that while I was lying in a hospital bed being told my own parents needed time to think about five thousand dollars."
"You don't have to be okay with any of this," Daniel said. "Not yet. Maybe not ever."
"I know," Emily said. "That's not what's keeping me up."
She sat down on the edge of the bed, uniform jacket still on, medals still catching light.
"I keep wondering if I would have found out at all, if I hadn't ended up on crutches at my own wedding," she said. "If the leg had healed clean, if there'd been no blood soaking through the bandage, would I have just stood on that dock, let them fawn over me for the cameras, and never once thought to ask where the yacht money came from."
"You would have asked eventually," Daniel said. "You're not the kind of person who lets things go quiet just because they're inconvenient."
"Sometimes I think I am," Emily said. "I let eleven months go by without confronting them directly. I told myself I was healing. Really I was just scared of what I'd find if I looked too hard."
Daniel sat beside her, careful of the fresh scar tissue on her leg even through the uniform pants.
"For what it's worth," he said, "you looked. That's the part that matters. A lot of people never do, because looking means you have to actually deal with what's underneath."
Emily thought of Nia, three days after the surgery, sitting on the edge of a hospital bed saying you don't have to forgive them to heal, those are two different jobs.
"I'm not ready to forgive them," she said. "I don't know if I ever will be."
"Nobody's asking you to be," Daniel said.
"Madison keeps looking at me like she wants me to say it's okay," Emily said. "That we're fine now, that finding the trust records together fixed something. I don't think it fixed anything. I think it just made the crack visible."
"Then let it stay visible," Daniel said. "For as long as it needs to."
May you like
Emily leaned into him, uniform jacket creasing between them, and let herself be exactly as unresolved as she actually felt, no performance required, no guests watching, no dock to walk across with a smile plastered on for people who'd forget by next season anyway.
At two in the morning, in dress blues nobody had asked her to wear, she finally let herself cry, quiet and unwitnessed, for the first time since Germany.
