“Seeing it happen?” Nick slammed down his mug and shot to his feet. “Don’t you understand? I killed them!”
The ugly words seemed to echo through the room, but even as they did, she knew they couldn’t be accurate. Nick, her Nick, was incapable of hurting, much less killing, anybody.
Lissa stood up. Nick had gone to one of the windows; his hands were pressed to the sill, his forehead to the glass. She reached out her hand, then drew it back.
“Nick,” she said softly.
He didn’t answer.
“Nicholas. Please. Talk to me.”
“I just did.” His voice was low; she had to strain to hear him. “I told you that I’m the reason three men died.”
“You said you killed them. And I know that you didn’t.”
He swung toward her. “You weren’t there.”
“No. I wasn’t. But I know you. You’d never knowingly hurt a soul.”
This far from the fireplace, the flames on the hearth limned his face in gold. She saw a muscle flexing in his jaw, saw the set of his lips, the darkness in his eyes. She said his name and put her hand on his arm again.
Progress.
He flinched, but he didn’t jerk away.
“Please,” she said softly. “Tell me what happened.”
She waited while seconds became minutes. Just when she’d almost given up hope, Nick went back to the love seat and sat down.
“We were in India,” he said. “On location in the foothills of the Himalayas, shooting a movie about an infantry unit that gets pinned down in a firefight outside Kabul.” He paused, leaned forward, his elbows on his thighs, his hands knotted, and stared into the fire. “The guy who wrote the script had been a Ranger. He still had buddies in the service. A couple of them were stationed in Afghanistan. We were halfway through shooting when he said he’d been in touch with this one old friend and how much it would mean to all the guys in his unit if we paid them a visit.”
“A visit? In the middle of a war?”
Nick shook his head. “The war part was over. That was the official word, anyway. We’d go in by chopper, no announcements ahead of time, no fuss, get dropped at a small base camp, I’d shake some hands, that kind of thing. Others had done it. Comics. Actors. Some with fanfare, some without.” He rose again, began to pace. “The director liked the idea. The producer didn’t. They joked about it, said I had the winning vote. And I voted to go.”
Lissa felt a coldness seep into her bones.
“Nick. You had no way of knowing things would go bad.”
“We got the necessary clearance, picked a day, a time, helicoptered in.” He looked at her. “There’s no way to explain what it felt like to meet those men. Some of them were on their fourth or fifth deployment. Just seeing a face from home that had nothing to do with the fucking war… You’d have thought I was Santa Claus.”
“A famous face,” Lissa said softly, “somebody running a risk for them the way they’d been running a risk for all of us.”
“One guy said as much. I tried to explain that what we’d done that day was zero compared to what they’d been doing, what they were still doing. They said it was too bad we hadn’t come in sooner. They’d gone out on patrol and I could have gone with them. And then one of them said, hey, what about going out again? What about me going with them?”
She knew it all now. She could see the awful predictability unfolding ahead of her like a road leading straight to hell.
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“And I said…” He choked. “I said that sounded great. All they needed was their CO’s approval and it turned out he was just heading over to meet me. They told him their idea and he said, hell, he was my biggest fan and he only wished he didn’t have a meeting or he’d go with us. So we climbed into the same goddamn Humvee they just driven and headed down the same goddamn dirt road through the same goddamn field toward the same goddamn burnt-out village…”
“Nick. Don’t. Please. You don’t have to—”
“I don’t even remember it happening. Just a lot of laughter and music blaring, and then this huge WHAM and a spear of flame and then—and then, they were gone. Two boys and a guy with a wife and kids waiting back home.”
Blind instinct took her to where he stood. If he tried to push her away, she wouldn’t let him. He needed her now, and she needed him.
But he didn’t push her away.