Shattered by Joann Ross

got transferred to Afghanistan, and I was sent to Heidelberg, and, well, I don’t know about you, but I convinced myself that it was better if we didn’t try to muck up what we’d had with emotions, and maybe I’d been wrong, anyway. About our feelings.”
    “If there’d been anything there, we would’ve made it work,” he said gently. “It wouldn’t have just faded away because of distance.”
    That was precisely what she’d told herself. But it had become more and more difficult to believe. It was true, she’d discovered. You regretted most in life those things you didn’t do. Much more than the things you did.
    “Are you sure?”
    “Dead sure.”
    She hated the finality in his voice. Wondered how many times he’d given the same “Hey, babe, it’s been good, but it’s over because I have to go fight the bad guys, and doing the wife and rug rats thing would get in the way of me saving the world” speech to other women.
    Always having prided herself on her tenacity, Kirby wasn’t prepared to throw in the towel quite yet.
    “Landstuhl looks like a really nice town,” she said.
    “Since I was unconscious when I arrived, I haven’t seen the place,” he said. “But I’ll take your word for it.”
    He couldn’t have been any farther away if he’d suddenly been beamed to a base on Antarctica.
    “It’s really nice,” she repeated. “Quaint. And picturesque. At least, what I saw of it driving over here from Ramstein. The bus driver told me there’s a large American community living in town. Plus, a lot of the people working here at the hospital are civilians, so I was thinking—”
    “No.”
    “Well, that certainly sounds definitive,” she managed to say past the lump that had risen in her throat.
    It took a major effort, but because he really did look as if he’d been through the wringer, she managed, just barely, to keep from pointing out that Captain Shane Garrett was not the boss of her and that now that she was out of the Army, she could work wherever the hell she pleased. Including Landstuhl Regional Medical Center.
    He sighed again and looked at her with what actually appeared to be regret, or even pity, which Kirby found more hurtful than his earlier distance.
    “What we had in Badghad was great, sweetheart,” he said. “Better than great. It was one of the best times in my life, which is kinda weird when you factor in that I was also having bad guys trying to blow me out of the sky on a regular basis. But I enjoyed the hell out of it. And I liked and admired and respected you a whole lot—”
    “You also screwed me six ways to Sunday,” she reminded him.
    “That was part of what made it so great.” His grin was forced. “But it was more than that. I cared about you, Kirby. A whole lot.”
    “Me, too. About you.”
    “I know.”
    His gaze softened.
    Oh, God. That definitely looked like pity.
    “But we were living in our own insane sandbox universe,” he said. “What we had in Iraq would never hold up in the real world.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    Kirby had never begged for anything in her life. But she was willing to beg now, if that’s what it took, for him to at least open up to the possibility that they might have a future together.
    “Yeah.” That distant look returned to his eyes, which drifted to the door, as if suggesting she might just want to take this opportunity to walk away. “I do.”
    “Well.” Kirby was an intelligent woman. She had, after all, graduated in the top ten percent of her medical school class at USUHS. There was also the little fact that he couldn’t have made himself more clear if he’d started waving semaphores in her face. Go. Away. Now. “So . . . I guess that’s that.”
    “I really am sorry.” He glanced up at the TV, which was broadcasting some stupid baseball game from the States.
    Boston was losing to the Yankees in the eighth inning.
    And she was losing him.
    Again.
    This time, Kirby realized, forever.
    She blinked to