No Man Left Behind: A Veteran Inspired Charity Anthology by Elizabeth Knox (black authors fiction TXT) 📕

girl who sits at home and waits for you to come back, or for the call that you’re dead. I have plans. My own dreams . . . and I can’t stand by while you’re hundreds, if not thousands of miles away,” Charlee murmurs, tears spilling down her cheeks.

“Charlee,” I mutter her name in protest. Ready to tell her we can work it out, that I don’t want her to sit at home, how I want her to follow her dreams. I’d make it work for her. Fuck, I’d do anything for this woman.

“No, Kaden, don’t say anything. It’s done. We can’t do this. I know what’ll happen. We’ll smooth things over like we always do and I’ll slowly begin to resent you . . . and god, I don’t want that, Kaden. I don’t want to resent you . . . I’d rather miss you every day and know you’re off living your life and I’m living mine,” Charlee declares as she pulls away from my arms.

“Charlee, look at me,” I demand, feeling her words circle in my head on repeat.

Shaking her head, Charlee continues to step backward.

“This is a mistake, babycakes. If you do this, there’s no turning back,” I stress to her, wishing she would meet my gaze.

She shakes her head back and forth, wiping away the tears streaming over her cheeks. “I . . . It’s done, Kaden. I’m not going to change my mind. I can’t. I’m so sorry, but I can’t . . . I love you so much, but I can’t do this, and I hope one day you can forgive me.” Charlee turns on her heel and rushes back to her car.

Closing my eyes, I lower my head as I ball my hands into fists, clenching them at my side. She’ll regret this decision and when she does, it’ll be like I said, no turning back.

I won’t risk what she’s done to me. Not ever again.

“Time to go, Kelly,” my recruiter calls out.

Nodding, I open my eyes and turn toward him and the rest of the guys all loading up. “Yeah, time to go,” I mutter.

Time to focus on what I have going for me. For my future even if it’s one without Charlee. She’s made her bed. It’s her burden to bear. Not mine.

Chapter One

Charlee

Present Day . . .

“Mom, how long are we going to be here?” Vivi, my eleven-year-old daughter, asks. It’s more of a whine and I can’t blame her in the least bit for being upset. I’ve just ripped her, no. I ripped us from our home in upstate New York. I took her away from her friends, her school, her soccer team, and the man she knew as her father. In all actuality he was her stepfather, and he was a shitty one at that. I think Marc might’ve shown up to one of her school plays, and maybe he took her to one daddy-daughter dance. It was never a shock considering he was too busy working to really make time for either of us. Well, working and ramming his cock into Jessica, his personal assistant.

Now I’m back here taking care of my mother after she just had a double hip replacement yesterday. Fortunately for us we have a home health nurse coming in a few times a day to assist, and honestly, I wouldn’t be able to take care of her by myself. I still have to work remotely from my laptop, and these eight hours of work have to be crammed in somehow. Ugh, imagine the horror running through my veins after I had to explain to my boss why I needed to go remote. She wasn’t going to grant remote access to me, said there was a few people ahead of me, how everyone wants to be working from home, blah, blah, blah. But when I told her the reality was that I either went remote or handed in my resignation that day because I was leaving my sleazebag of a husband and moving across the country, well, she gave me the access.

Hell, it would’ve been so dumb of her to not give it to me. I’m one of her best marketing analysts, if not the best.

“Mom?” Vivi whines again, pulling me out of my own head.

“Sweetie, it’s like I said. We’ll be living with Nana for a while. She’s going to need our help until her hip heals and . . .” how do I break it to an eleven-year-old that we’re not going back to the home she knew? Fuck. This is the worst part about being a parent, letting your kid down. “You never know, we might like it out here.” I plaster on a big smile, not having the courage to tell her I filed for divorce from Marc yesterday.

Vivi nods once and goes back into her new bedroom, equipped with almost everything I could fill in another suitcase. Most of our belongings are back in New York and I doubt Marc will let us get them, or even ship them out. He’s a dick like that.

When Vivi was five, she came to me in our apartment and asked me why she didn’t have a daddy like the other girls in her class. At five-years-old she tore my heart in half, stomped on it, lit it on fire, and then threw it down a garbage disposal. I didn’t have time to date. I’d just finished college, had an internship at a marketing firm, and was working as a waitress on the weekends. I barely had time to breathe so when in the fucking world was I supposed to date?

Then I met him—Marc.

He was my supervisor, because of course every story starts off like this. He charmed me at my internship, made me laugh, shared a few short conversations with me in the hallway. Eventually, I was offered a job at the firm and here I am seven years later, still working for the same company. But