Chương 2
“You what?”
“It happened at home.”
“Six months?”
“I was fourteen weeks.”
“You told me you were tired.”
“I was.”
“You sent me a message about repainting the nursery.”
“I couldn’t tell you while you were on that convoy.”
“I wasn’t on a convoy for six months.”
“No, but every time I tried, you were leaving for somewhere, or somebody was standing behind you, or the connection dropped, or you said you had five minutes and you sounded so relieved to see me that I—”
“You let me think my child was alive.”
Claire’s chin trembled once. She steadied it.
“Yes.”
The answer was so plain that Ethan almost wished she had defended herself.
He looked at the ultrasound on the shelf again. The photograph remained where it had always been, framed in white wood beneath a ceramic bird Claire’s mother had given them.
Nora’s fingers emerged from the blanket.
They opened and closed near Ethan’s uniform.
Claire crouched slowly and picked up the dog tag. Ethan did not stop her. She set it on top of the blanket, perhaps intending only to keep it out of the way.
Nora’s hand closed around the lower edge.
The diagonal cut rested beneath her curled fingers.
Ethan’s breath stopped.
He saw Daniel at sixteen, leaning over the garage workbench with metal filings in his hair. Daniel at twenty-two, drunk after airborne graduation and trying to convince strangers they could switch places without anyone noticing. Daniel at twenty-eight, standing beside Ethan at their father’s funeral, both of them pretending the other was crying first.
Daniel in a flag-draped transfer case.
Daniel’s name on a folded certificate.
Daniel’s tag in a velvet box Claire had watched Ethan bury beneath an empty coffin because the remains were too damaged for viewing.
His eyes lifted toward his wife.
“How did my dead brother’s tag get inside her blanket?”
Claire drew one careful breath.
“Because six months ago, a man wearing Daniel’s face knocked on this door.”
The tag stopped moving in Nora’s fist.
Neither of them spoke for several seconds.
A lawn mower droned somewhere beyond the closed windows. A delivery truck rolled past the house, its engine fading toward the corner. The ordinary neighborhood continued around them.
Ethan looked down at Nora.
“Take her.”
Claire accepted the baby immediately.
He stepped away so quickly his boot struck the duffel. He bent, grabbed the handle, and dragged the bag clear of the doorway. The practical movement gave his hands something to do. He stood it upright near the wall, then changed his mind and lowered it gently.
“When?”
“The night I miscarried.”
“You were alone?”
“At first.”
“Where was I?”
“You know where you were.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
“You were in Germany waiting to fly east.”
He remembered the hotel. A narrow bed, yellow curtains, a radiator that clicked every nine minutes. Claire had called while he was checking equipment. She had said she felt strange but probably needed water. He had asked whether she wanted him to stay on the phone. She had laughed softly and told him to sleep.
The next morning she had sent a heart and written, Better today.
Ethan rubbed his mouth.
“What happened?”
“I started bleeding after we hung up. I drove myself to the emergency room because I couldn’t get Mrs. Alvarez to answer, and I didn’t want to call an ambulance.”
“You drove?”
“I know.”
“You could barely drive when you had the flu.”
“I wasn’t thinking.”
“What did the doctor say?”
“That there was no heartbeat.”
Nora breathed against Claire’s collarbone.
Ethan turned toward the window. His reflection floated faintly over the front yard: camouflage uniform, shaved hair, shoulders too rigid. Claire behind him with a child. From outside, the room might still have looked like a homecoming.
“I came back around three in the morning,” she continued. “There was blood on my jeans. I had a paper bag from the hospital with medication and instructions I couldn’t read. I sat in the car for—I don’t know. Maybe twenty minutes.”
“And Daniel was here.”
“A man was sitting on the front step.”
“You recognized him?”
“I thought you had come home.”
Ethan faced her.
“It was dark,” she said. “He had your face. Thinner. A beard. His hair was longer. For half a second, I thought you had found some way to surprise me. Then he stood up, and I knew.”
“How?”
“The way he leaned to the left. Daniel always favored that knee when he was tired.”
Daniel had damaged the knee in a jump years earlier. Ethan had forgotten the limp because Daniel had spent so much effort hiding it.
“He said my name,” Claire went on. “He asked whether the baby was all right.”
Ethan stared at her.
“He knew you were pregnant?”
“He said he’d been watching the house for two days.”
“And you let him inside.”
“I thought I was seeing a dead man.”
“That doesn’t answer me.”
“He was shaking. There was dried blood on his sleeve. He had a woman in a car parked down the street.”
“Leah?”
“You know her name?”
“No. I’m guessing.”
Claire adjusted Nora’s blanket.
“Her name was Leah Mercer. She was pregnant. Thirteen weeks, almost the same as I had been.”
Had been.
Ethan looked at the floor.
“What did Daniel say happened?”
“He said the body they buried wasn’t his.”
“They identified him.”
“By DNA from the remains and comparison samples from your father.”
“We’re identical twins. That wouldn’t prove which one of us it was.”
The sentence came out automatically. He had learned it during the casualty inquiry, when an officer explained why Ethan’s blood sample had been requested. The laboratory had used multiple sources, he had been told. Personal effects. Location. Daniel’s tag. Tissue comparison. Circumstantial confirmation.
Ethan had accepted the result because everyone else had.
May you like
He had needed a body even when there was not enough of one to see.
“Did he explain whose remains they were?” Ethan asked.
