She didn’t know if he was kidding or not. “I just . . . yeah, maybe.” She looked out the window.

His hand touched hers. “Hey. I was serious. It’s clearly in your DNA.”

She frowned.

“Your dad. Navy doctor?”

Huh. He remembered. “Yeah. I guess. He was a doctor before he joined the Navy, but after 9/11, after he sat at the hospital, waiting for survivors that never came . . . it changed him. He signed up a few weeks later and was deployed shortly after that.”

He nodded.

“It wasn’t so much that he left but that I felt somehow selfish for wanting him to stay.”

“That’s a normal feeling.”

“I didn’t want to be brave or sacrificial or even patriotic. I just wanted my dad to be home.” She wrapped the cardigan around her. Despite being June, the air still nipped as they climbed into the Cascade mountains. Around them the forest began to thicken, lush green, a tangle of mystery. Or maybe protection.

“And then when he died, I felt cheated. The Navy stayed silent—and I get that. He was probably doing something, I don’t know, brave. Dangerous. But we never had any closure.”

“I’m sorry. That’s the military for you.”

“Yeah, it’s just . . . I felt so helpless. I finally had to resign myself to never knowing. But . . .”

“You sometimes find yourself in the ocean, underwater.”

She glanced at him. “What’s your recurring nightmare?”

He drew in a breath. They were climbing a hill, her four-cylinder car fighting to the top behind a hefty Silverado. “Who says I have one?”

“Please. I was there.”

He was silent, maybe thinking of the times he’d woken to his own sweaty screams.

Finally, “Mine aren’t dreams. They’re memories.”

They’d reached the apex of the mountain, and it opened for a moment. The view of the faraway peaks, a few still snow covered, at once brutal and breathtaking. The road fell below them, winding around passes, deeper into the wild.

“About three years ago, I was a part of a rescue operation of a journalist who’d been taken by the Abu Nidal Organization, a jihadist group in Sudan. We’d gotten human and drone intel that he was there, and we managed to roll up one of their soldiers. After some nudging, he gave us the location of the journalist, and we launched a strike to retrieve him.”

Colt touched the brakes to avoid running up the backside of the truck. “We walked into an ambush. Four men on our twelve-man team were killed. Two were taken and tortured.”

“Oh, Colt.”

“Yeah. I’d been in on the interrogation . . .” His hands whitened on the steering wheel. “I can still hear Vader in my coms, the last thing he said to me. Shouting at me that we’d been ambushed.”

She drew in a breath, hating the edge in his voice. “What happened?”