Page 106 of What We Break
Wrong place. Wrong time. That's all it ever is.
"IED." My voice comes out flat. Somebody else's voice. "He was leading a patrol, checking a route they'd used dozens of times before. It just…wasn’t his day.."
Nausea hits like a wall. I swallow hard, jaw locked, throat burning with bile I refuse to let up.
"I wasn't there. My unit was supporting an action hundreds of clicks away." I stop. Breathe. "My CO pulled me out of the tent that night. And I knew. Before he said anything, I knew it would be bad."
My fingers have gone still. Everything has gone still.
"And for a minute — just a minute — I hoped he was going to tell me bad news about Blake." The words come out barely above a whisper. "As much as I loved Blake, Jared was my blood. I needed him to be okay."
Another swallow. Another breath that doesn't quite fill my lungs.
"And every time I look at Blake, I can't help remember that for a second, I wished he were the dead one."
Laine pulls my hand into her lap, holding it between both of hers.
"Baby. Does he know? I don't know him well, but I don't think he would blame you for that."
My laugh is twisted and wrong. "That's the fucked up thing. I think Blake wishes it were him, too."
She sighs, heavy and low. "God, you guys have been through so much."
"Sometimes it feels like it all happened yesterday. And sometimes it feels like a lifetime." I look at her. "Does that make sense?"
"Perfect sense. Grief isn't linear."
No. It's not linear. It's a twisty, rolling snake that jumps up to bite you at the weirdest fucking time. "After we got home, even after Blake and I bought our place, we were lost for a while. Didn't know how to be a family of two instead of three. We barely talked for months."
"What changed?"
"Time. And realizing Jared would kick both our asses if he could see us wallowing." I almost smile. "Blake came home one day with plans to renovate the kitchen. Said if we were going to live like hermits, we might as well have a decent place to cook."
"And that helped?"
"It gave us something to do with our hands. Something to build instead of just..." I gesture vaguely. "Existing."
Laine's silent, processing. "Is that why tonight was so hard? Because Marcus reminded you of Jared?"
"Not exactly." I stare at the ceiling. The plaster has a hairline crack running from the light fixture to the corner.
"Marcus reminded me of what it looks like when someone doesn't make it back. Not physically—he's alive, he's breathing, his vitals were stable the whole ride. But the rest of him..." I swallow. "Jared never got the chance to not make it back that way. He just didn't make it back."
My hands are in my lap and I'm picking at the callus on my right palm. The one that never goes away because of how I grip the stretcher rail.
"There's this thing that happens on bad calls. You compartmentalize. Shove everything into a box, tape it shut, deal with it later. Except 'later' never comes because there's always another call, another shift, another reason to keep moving." I glance at her. "Tonight the box opened."
Laine pulls her knees up, resting her chin on them. She doesn't rush me. Doesn't fill the silence with reassurance or platitudes. Just waits. And something about the way she waits—patient, steady, like she's got nowhere else to be—makes me want to keep talking. Which is dangerous. Because I'm the guy who talksaroundthings, notthroughthem.
"Marcus is lying on my stretcher, crying because hedidn'tdie, and I'm thinking—" My voice catches. I clench my jaw, wait for it to pass. "I'm thinking about my brother in that last second before the IED. Whether he was scared. Whether he was pissed. Whether he thought about me and Blake in that last minute."
The crack in the ceiling blurs. I blink hard.
"Seven years, and I still don't know what he felt. I'll never know. And tonight I'm looking at this kid who got the thing Jared didn't—more time—and he's treating it like a curse." My throat is tight. Uncomfortably tight, like trying to breathe through a straw. "I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and tell him he has no idea what a gift that is. That my brother would've given anything for another shitty, painful, fucked-up day on this planet."
I didn't, though. Because that's not what you do. You stabilize, you transport, you hand them off. You don't dump your dead brother's ghost on a kid who just tried to swallow a bottle of Klonopin.
"But I couldn't say any of that. I just held his hand and told him he was going to be okay." I exhale, slow and controlled, the way I breathe on scene when things go sideways. "And the whole time, this voice in my head—Jared's voice, or what I remember of it—is sayingyou should've been faster, you should've been there, you should've?—"
