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I was wrong about the distance. It hadn't made things easier. Instead of just not knowing where my wife disappeared to, now I was thousands of miles away. Helpless to make us okay if she did come back. I'd made a mess of us. If I could pinpoint our downfall it would have to be that night on the road. We'd been fucking around as I drove and Aquata couldn't keep her hands off of me. Not that I blamed her. If I thought about it now, which I hated doing but had too much time to think these days, she was probably high. So I'd failed her even before that. I missed the signs that she was using again, blinded by my love for her I didn't pick up on it. I wanted to believe she was always happy for no other reason than that we were together. Starting our life. She made it easy to believe.
After we hit that hunter and left him on the side of the road, never knowing his fate, our already shaky foundation cracked open. She withdrew from me. Going out at all hours, claiming to be doing this with one sister or that with another. What happened to that man probably weighed as heavy on her mind as it did on mine. Always wondering. It had swallowed us both. I wasn't okay with letting her go out all the time, but control was never my style. It got harder and harder for us to face each other without thinking about what happened. It was burying us alive. And I knew Aquata too well. Hell Triton knew her too. The minute you told Aquata no she did her damndest to do it anyway. That's why she'd gone and become a stripper. Shit that's how she'd ended up married to me. But that fire that I loved inside of her ended up burning us both.
If the rumors that floated through the Vendetti house before I'd left were true, I wondered who had gotten her into rehab. What had made her realize that her world was crashing down around her? Whatever happened between us, I'd thank them regardless for doing what I couldn't. Maybe if she got clean, we could try again. I knew I still loved her. She was my heart.
When I wasn't helping Adrina and Flotsam set up the Brazil operation, I found solace being so close to the ocean. I'd swim along the coast for hours exhausting my body so I could sleep, not think. I'd lie there on the ocean floor letting the water rush around me until I couldn't any longer, then I'd crash out on the sand. Trying to breathe again. Sometimes it'd work and it'd drag my ass back to my jeep then the compound. I couldn't stop myself from texting Aquata every night before I slept or didn't. It started with the, "I'm sorry's". I knew she couldn't reply but it didn't matter. Certain nights I hoped to remind her that "I am all yours." Other nights I begged, "Please be all mine." She'd get out of rehab and think that I lost it when her phone was full of texts from me. Some nights when the dark thoughts got the best of me, usually after trying to drown my sorrows at the cantina with Flot, the texts hit creeper status. "Did I murder our love?" And still I couldn't be sorry for sending them. Pathetic? Yes. But sorry? Never. Mostly I just let her know that "I am not fine." Because I wanted her to know that she wasn't alone if she felt that way too.
I'd been in Brazil about six weeks, just getting home from doing some surveillance when a ring tone I hadn't heard in months dinged. I looked down at the screen swallowing past a sudden lump in my throat. If my heart had skipped when I'd first heard the tone, it was now pounding out of my chest seeing a text with her name on it. Aquata had always been my Earthquake because she shook me to the core. With two words, "me neither" and a little blue heart, my chest nearly exploded as hope bloomed inside. If she'd let me, I'd clean up the mess and my wife would be mine again.