Chapter 466
[ 495 words ]
Chapter 466:
Caroline fell silent. She replayed the scene in the mess tent in her mind: the fury in his eyes, the violent way he slammed the tray down, his choked question, “Don’t you have anything to say?” It was starting to make a terrible, illogical kind of sense. But her own logic still rebelled against it.
“So,” she asked, her voice laced with disbelief, “I’m supposed to apologize for trusting him too much?”
Evelyn patted her shoulder gently. “You don’t apologize for the trust. You go to him and explain the feeling behind it. You tell him what you were thinking. Go find him. Yell at him, cry, throw something. Anything is better than the silence you gave him.”
Caroline stood frozen, a war raging inside her. Evelyn’s analysis felt true, but it also felt fundamentally wrong. She shouldn’t have to perform jealousy to prove her love.
But she also couldn’t bear the thought of this cold, angry silence stretching between them. She couldn’t stand the look of hurt she’d seen in his eyes before the anger covered it up. And before she went to him, she needed to settle one thing first. She turned to Evelyn. “Evelyn, the man who was with me in the rubble, Sterling Hendon. Do you know what happened to him? Is he here in the field hospital?”
Evelyn’s expression flickered with recognition at the name. “Hendon? I heard the name on the casualty roster. Private security extraction, I think. He was airlifted out yesterday to a civilian hospital. Critical but stable, last I heard.” She studied Caroline’s face. “Why? Was he a friend?”
Caroline exhaled, a weight she hadn’t realized she’d been carrying lifting slightly. Stable. Alive. That was enough for now, enough to let her focus on what was in front of her. “He saved my life,” she said simply. “I needed to know.”
In the end, it wasn’t a contest. Her need to reconnect with Jarrod was stronger than her need to be right.
а𝖼𝘁𝗂𝘷e cо𝗆𝗆unі𝘁𝘆 𝘰𝘯 𝗀al𝘯𝘰𝘃𝗲𝘭𝗌.с𝗈m
She took a deep, steadying breath. “Thank you, Evelyn,” she said, her voice clear and firm. “I know what I have to do.”
She turned and began walking, her steps purposeful. She headed away from the medical center, toward the cluster of larger tents at the heart of the military operation.
She was going to find her proud, difficult, and impossibly stubborn husband. And she was going to have a conversation about jealousy.
Less than twenty minutes after the mess tent, Caroline crossed the gravel toward the command tent with the taste of untouched stew still sitting at the back of her throat.
The camp had not gone quiet. It never did. Generators rattled. Medics called for supplies. Somewhere beyond the temporary fencing, an aircraft engine wound down. Sterling Hendon had already been airlifted out with the other critical patients, and Evelyn had told her before lunch that he was critical but stable, finally out of immediate danger. Caroline had held on to that small, solid fact because everything else felt unstable.
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