The sky in Iraq was the bluest blue I’d ever seen. It had a flat depth, as if thin layers of glass, each a slightly different shade, were stacked together. Sometimes I’d dream about that sky. Either I’d be floating in it, blue everywhere, above and below, at each side and pressure point, squeezing the breath out of me, or I’d be falling from it, from blue into blue, no Earth barreling into greater and greater detail. Just a single direction in the never-ending cerulean sky.

Caden and I had been separated by an ocean and a war for ten months. We’d married while I was on leave and spoke when our schedules matched and the wind blew the wi-fi signal in the right direction. I thought I hadn’t known him long enough to miss him, but I did.

Painfully. Tenderly. Thoroughly. Our separation stretched the bond between us to a thin, translucent strand, but did not break it.

Caden’s eyes had the color and layered depth of the Iraqi sky.

When I missed him, I looked up. When I wrapped his T-shirt around my neck, my dreams of the blue sky lost their nightmarish edge, and the bond became a little less taut.

Jenn and I flew to New York in our uniforms. She remained on active duty and had a job waiting at the VA Hospital in Newark. I had a husband and no job.

“You want to put on some makeup or something?” she asked.

“Why? You afraid they’re all looking at me?”

The crew had moved us to first class. I craned my neck to see a jowly businessman sleeping with his mouth open. A mid-level rap star with cornrows and a name I couldn’t recall was reading a book to his daughter, and two middle-aged women chatted in the row across. No one was giving my lashes the side-eye.

“Hell, no. But maybe you want to look nice for your husband?” She rooted around a quilted pink bag and found a black stick. “Here. Lip gloss.”

“It’s only going to wind up on his dick.”

She burst out laughing and replaced the lip gloss with mascara. “Here. Doll it up just a little. You’re a civilian now.”

I took the mascara, and she handed me a compact with a mirror. I flipped it open and looked at myself in circular sections.

I was a civilian now.

I had no idea how to be that.

---

As the only girl in a military family, enlisting wasn’t encouraged. It wasn’t unexpected either. It made them proud. And disappointed. And worried. A mixed bag of emotions that probably had nothing to do with either parent and everything with how I felt at every time I wondered what they thought.

I would have stayed in the army my entire life, but Caden happened, and he saw the army as his duty to the country. A debt to pay, not a way of life.

At the gate, a little girl of about six ran up and gave Jenn and me flowers. “Thank you for your service,” she said.

This wasn’t uncommon. I’d learned people were in awe of my career choice and the risks it involved.

I kneeled and took the flowers. “Thank you for the flowers. And thank you for appreciating us. That means a lot.”

Suddenly shy, she curtsied and ran away to her mother, who waved at me. I gave her a thumbs-up.

“Is it wrong to wish she was a single, six foot-tall black man with a nice bank account?” Jenn asked quietly, sniffing the flowers.

“Her mother might be a little surprised.”

Jenn chuckled and pointed at the sign above. “Baggage claim, this way.”

We didn’t get two steps before I saw Caden waiting for me. He had flowers tied with stars and stripes printed on the ribbon, a grey suit, and smile that told me he saw me the way I saw him—with a certain amount of surprise at the easy familiarity, and another bit of gratitude at the fulfilled expectations. It was as if we were seeing each other for the first time, and coming back to something very familiar.

I dropped my bag and ran into his arms. We clung to each other, connected in a kiss that held nothing back. Cocooned, shielded by love and commitment, the airport terminal fell behind the wall of our attention to the kiss.

He jerked me away with a sucking sound and a drawn breath, but kept his nose astride mine. “Welcome to New York, Major.”

That was when I heard the applause.

“Are we making a spectacle of ourselves?” I let my body relax away from his.

“I fucking love you so much, I don’t even care.”

I looked at the people surrounding us. I was in camo and he had a flag ribbon on the flowers. We were indeed making a spectacle of ourselves.

Jenn dropped my bag at my feet. “That was so sweet I almost clapped.”

Caden took it before I could. “Thank you for not.”

The crowd dispersed, and we headed out of baggage claim without further incident.

---

“What do you want to see first?” Caden asked after we dropped Jenn off at her parents’ brownstone in Fort Greene. His wrist was draped over the steering wheel of his Mercedes. The band of his expensive watch caught glints of the sun. The seats were soft black leather. There was no dust or sand on the carpets, and none of the upholstery was torn.

“The inside of my eyelids.”

“Come on, Major. Push on.” He squeezed my knee and kissed me at the red light. “You’ll sleep when you’re dead.”

I put my hand over his, and he stroked my thumb. “Were your eyes always this blue?”

“Probably.”

They looked bluer against the New York sky, which was fluffed with late summer clouds. I sat back and looked out the window. Maybe tomorrow I’d see the color I’d fall through.

“What are my choices?” I asked.

“The house, your new office, or any restaurant in the city.”

That was more choices than I was used to, and none involved getting sand in the crack of my ass or telling a man it was okay to kill people.

“Can we eat in?”

“Yep.”

The seams in the bridge’s surface went puh-puh-puh under the tires and the web of cables holding it up blurred in my peripheral vision. Manhattan stretched ahead of me like a dense construction of grey bricks. I didn’t know where people fit into such compactness.

“Okay,” I finally said. “The house.”

---

Caden put the car in a garage a block away. Apparently he’d bought the spot years ago. It required a mortgage and operating fees. Where I grew up, you parked in a lot someone else owned, your own driveway, or on the street.

This was my new normal.

On the walk along Columbus Avenue, I felt as if I were wearing a camo clown suit. Caden put his arm around me and kissed my temple as we waited at the light. The crowd crossed before the light changed to green, but I followed my husband.

“We’re on 87th between Columbus and Amsterdam,” he said. “Avenues run north-south, streets run east-west.”

“Got it.” We turned onto a narrow, tree-lined street. “This is a nice block.”

“It is.”

The houses were stone and connected to each other on the sides. Some were slightly set back from the street to accommodate a stoop and a few steps down to a garden apartment.

He stopped by one such house and held his hand out while the other took my duffel off his shoulder. “Here we are.”

I looked up. Garden apartment. Three stories. An attic with stone carvings around the leaded windows. “Is it all yours?”

He threw the duffel up the steps. It made it halfway. “It’s all ours.”

He picked me up in his arms before carrying me up the stoop. I squeaked in surprise. We laughed as he tried to unlock the door without dropping me, and when he managed to do it, I cheered.

He retrieved my bag and dropped it in the foyer. We were at the base of a flight of stairs. Everything was polished dark wood carved at the corners. A beveled mirror was set into a frame with three brass hooks under it. I took off my cap and let my hair fall.

I was fully overwhelmed. He took my cap and put it on a hook before taking my face in his hands and kissing me.

“I have your back,” he whispered. “Okay?” I nodded, and he kissed me again. “Say it for me.”

“You have my back.”

“And your front.”

I smiled into his kiss. “You have my front.”

“I can take you to the bedroom if you insist or on the stairs right now.”

“Will you give me a minute to shower?”

“You have rank.”

“That’s an order then.”

He got his hips under me and his hands under my ass, hitching me up until I could get my legs around his waist. He carried me to our room. I didn’t see anything but his face on the way up. I only knew there were wood floors and windows. Two flights. A tower with me on top.

---

He sat me on a bench in the bathroom and turned the water on in the white claw-foot tub. He kneeled in front of me to unlace my boots. I couldn’t stop looking at him in his fancy suit, kneeling on the bathroom floor to service me.

“I hate that they make us wear this shit on the way home,” he said. “It’s total PR.”

“Yeah, well, the military is nothing without its symbols, and that’s what I am.”

“Were.” He pulled off the boot. “Now you are Dr. Greyson Frazier, MD, with a psychiatric practice in Manhattan.” He peeled off my socks. “And my wife. Stand up.”

Still on his knees, he undid my buckle and fly and pulled my pants down, letting his palms spread out over the skin of my thighs. I stepped out of them and he tossed the pants aside.

“Ah, I missed this.” He lifted my shirt and kissed the silver scar over my heart. He kissed my belly and the triangle below. I put my fingers in his hair, and he reached up under my clothes until he found my hardened nipples.

“Caden,” I groaned. “Bath.”

With a gentle suck on my belly, he stood. I started unbuttoning from the top and he unbuttoned from the bottom. We met in the middle and got all my clothes off until I wasn’t wearing anything but the dog tags that hung between my breasts.

He laid them in his palm and looked at them, letting one clink against the other.

“Take them off,” I said.

He closed his fist around them and pulled them over my head. The chain slid against my long, straight hair, and I was free.

Caden coiled the chain on the vanity. I shut off the water and tested it.

Scalding hot.

No one in the world knew me the way he did.

---

He’d taken his jacket off, rolled up his sleeves, and bathed me, touching every part of my body. His hands knew exactly how to tease me. They were accurate and subtle, driving my desire forward without letting me come.

He tossed the towel away and threw me on the bed, soaking wet.

He didn’t even undress to fuck me. Not right away. He just spread my legs and slid his fingers inside me, then took out his monster of a cock and fucked me as if we hadn’t seen each other in four months.

The sheets were white.

The furniture was honey, and the lamps were Tiffany.

Day turned into evening, but the street didn’t quiet.

That was all I noticed between orgasms.

In the darkness, we curled under the covers. He stroked my arm with his thumb, appreciating every inch of skin.

“I haven’t shown you the house,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you going to show me all your childhood secret hiding places?”

“The speakeasy in the basement? Yes.”

He’d told me about the Prohibition-era space the first owners had dug out of the basement. How it had false walls, a mosaic tile floor, a mahogany bar, and secret places to hide customers and almost a century later, small children.

“It’s a really nice house,” I said. “Is this a good neighborhood, as neighborhoods go in New York?”

“This block is unattainable.”

“What’s that mean?”

“This house is priceless. I could name a number and get it.”

“Your dad was smart to buy it when he did.”

“He wanted to be near enough to the hospital, but not that close. He had a space for a practice in the garden apartment, which is soon to be…” He waited for me to finish.

“My practice.”

“Bingo.”

“I’m nervous.”

“I know.”

“What if I—”

He put his finger on my lips before I could utter my litany of doubts. “You’re going to do fine. And if it takes longer than you think it should, we can survive on a heart surgeon’s salary for a while.”

Of course we could. There was nothing to be nervous about. He had my back and my front.

“Can I see the office?”

“Yes.”

---

We wiggled into pajamas and went down the back stairs, which led to a short carpeted hall with an old wooden door at each end.

“The door at the back leads to a shared kind of alley thing out the front, so patients won’t bump into each other on the way in and out,” Caden said as he turned the skeleton key that stuck out of the office’s keyhole. It clacked deeply before the door swung open. He flicked on the lights.

The office defied every expectation.

I expected cold fluorescents and a dropped ceiling.

What I got was a pristine white ceiling and warm lamps.

I expected an empty space.

What I got was a 1950s era desk and chairs, tufted couch, end tables, a clock where I could see it but the patient couldn’t, and a deep blue carpet to muffle the distracting scrape of chairs and footsteps. Behind the desk, a horizontal filing cabinet had framed pictures leaning on the top. Family. Friends. Caden and me on the rooftop of the hotel in Amman, with the sunset behind us. I picked up our wedding photo. My parents had set up the backyard in flowers and tables, doing the best they could when they heard we were getting hitched on two-day leave. Caden and me outside the combat hospital in Balad, dressed in dull green and smiles.

“I read up on what you’d need. They said family pictures humanized you to patients.”

“That’s right.”

He opened the door on the far end of the room. The waiting room was bathed in the same warm lamplight. It was small. Two chairs and a love seat. A coffee table. A Wasily Kandinski print. Everything matched the interior office.

“I had speakers put in.” He pointed up. Small wood-grain boxes hung in the corners where the ceiling met the walls. “I hear music soothes the savage breast.”

Caden, a psychiatrist’s husband, had hang-ups about mental illness that had revealed themselves after I accepted his proposal.

“I won’t be working with savages,” I said with a raised eyebrow. I was going to have to patiently whittle away this particular neurosis.

“They won’t all have breasts either.” He put his arm around me. “So you like it?”

“I love it. Madly, deeply. I love it.” I put my arms around his shoulders, and his snaked around my waist. “Thank you so much.”

“There’s so much we’re going to do together.” He kissed my neck. “We’re going to build an entire life out of a war.”

“That would be a miracle.”

“First of many. You and me. We’re a miracle.” He pulled back so he could see my face. “You know what I see when I look at you?”

“Your wife?”

“The worst decisions I’ve ever made, I made for a reason. You. You rose out of the destruction. Our life together will be built into the best from what survived the worst.”

“That’s very poetic.”

He smiled. “I’ve been thinking about what to say for days. I wanted to explain how magnificent we’re going to be.”

“Magnificent?”

“I don’t think I quite nailed it.” He took me back into the hall and to an unremarkable door under the stairs. “Basement.”

He opened the door, and flicked on the light. Wooden stairs led to a dirt floor in a four-by-five room. Caden reached around me and put his hands on a vase sitting on a set-in shelf. He yanked it, and the wall slid to the side, revealing a mosaic floral floor and dark wood bar stacked high with cardboard boxes.

“Chez Columbus,” he said, smiling. “1925-1933.”

Amazing. An actual speakeasy with a stairway to the hidden alley on the side of the house, hidden rooms, and lastly, behind the laundry room, a big wall safe. He opened it, then pushed away the wall behind it to yet another room with cylindrical holes in the concrete.

“The bottle room,” he said. “This was where I hid when… you know.”

“When you were scared.”

“When I should have been stopping him from beating her.”

“I’m going to get you out of the habit of blaming yourself.”

“Good luck.” He held out his hand, moving the subject away from the abuse of his mother as he always did. “Come on. It’s cold in here.”

The steps to the bedroom seemed like an eternal climb, but we wound up racing to the top. It didn’t matter who won. We both landed on the bed.

We held each other tight, and I felt safe starting a new life with him.

---

That night, with the whoosh of cars outside and a police siren whining far away, he woke with a grunt and a command. “Stop!”

I reached for my revolver, but it was locked away in a strange closet, in the strange bedroom, in a city that was a sea of stone.

But he was there, the street light blue on his cheek, and all was well as long as he was next to me.

“Caden? Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” He rolled over to face me. “Sorry.”

“What was it?”

“Dream. Nothing.”

PTSD was as real as the war itself, and I had to know if he was reliving it in his sleep. “Caden. Can you tell me?”

“Pieces of me were breaking off.”

“Were you in Iraq? In the dream?”

“No.” His denial was barely a whisper.

I took it for a normal nightmare and joined him in sleep.