To Have and to Hold by Serena Bell Page A

sad.
    “You know I’m right, don’t you?” Trina asked her. “That if he knows he asked me to move in, he’ll feel like he has to go through with it, and—”
    “But what if—what if he remembers?”
    “If he remembers, that’s different, right?”
    “And you’d—you’d come back?”
    “If he asked me to.”
    But she realized that the possibility had already receded in her mind, that she hadn’t made space for it in her planning. She didn’t actually believe it would happen.
    And, if her expression was any indication, neither did Linda. The older woman bit her lip and closed her eyes for a second.
    “I’d hoped— You know, he’s my only child. And Clara is my only grandchild…”
    She didn’t have to say the rest. What she’d hoped for. A new daughter and a new granddaughter. A bigger family for her only son.
    It was strange to realize that she and Linda were connected in a new way, by this loss of what they’d both independently come to expect—and by being the only two people in the world who knew that it had ever been a possibility.
    Trina clasped Linda’s hands in her own. “You raised a good man.”
    Linda squeezed back, tight. “Thing is, Trina, when I did it, when I taught him right from wrong, when I taught him how to be a good man, I thought, ‘I’m doing this so when he meets a woman he really loves, he can treat her right and hold onto her.’ I’ve never seen him as happy as he was last summer. It made my heart absolutely soar. And this is—this is breaking it.”
    Trina let herself be drawn into Linda’s soft hug one last time, let herself take what comfort she could in their shared pain, and whispered, so quietly she wasn’t even sure Linda heard:
    “It’s breaking mine, too.”

Chapter 6
    Trina woke in the dark, heart pounding, jolting her upright before she was fully awake.
    There was a sound from upstairs. One of the girls, crying.
    She turned on her bedside lamp and went to the door, pushing it open farther. She always slept with it slightly ajar so she’d hear the girls call out if they needed her. In a whole year, they never had, but she liked to know she’d hear them just in case.
    She crept past the foldout couch where Linda slept—snoring like the Amazon she was—and up the steps. It seemed crazy to imagine that Clara, who hadn’t wept once when her father had left for Afghanistan last summer, might be going to pieces now over the thought of a surrogate mother’s departure. But Clara had been even more upset than Phoebe when she’d learned that Trina was leaving, and not at all ready to embrace a few extra days as a consolation prize.
    And someone had called out in the night.
    It came again, another cry, and she hurried upstairs and into the hallway. She pushed the girls’ door open and peeked in. The nightlight in the hallway cast enough of a glow into the room that she could see that both slept soundly, not moving.
    Maybe she’d imagined it. Or dreamt it. She’d woken from a deep sleep before, certain she’d heard a sound, only to be unable to trace its source.
    She closed their door quietly behind her and started back toward the stairs.
    She heard it again.
    A groan. A sound like a broken half
no
.
    Hunter.
    He was alone in there. Asleep, dreaming.
    She knew soldiers back from deployment often had terrible nightmares, even the ones who hadn’t suffered physical trauma.
    She also knew she should continue toward the stairs. She had no right. No right to intrude into his bedroom, into his sleep, into his dreams.
    But his voice came again, strained, like something not quite human, utterly ground down, and the sound of him suffering mattered to her more than the fact that he couldn’t remember her or that he’d pushed her away. It was more primitive and more important than her pride.
    She turned his doorknob slowly and went in.
    He’d gone to sleep naked, or mostly naked—she thought he might be wearing underwear, but she couldn’t tell because he’d