“—if you were doing okay.”

I catch the tail end of the sentence, like it’s coming at me underwater, the sound waves distorted and strange. My head breaks the surface and instead of clean, fresh air, instead of the deep, cleansing breaths of childhood summers in Michigan, it’s the recycled air of my cubicle at Visionary Response. Greg hovers near the door. He’s watching me, and I’ve been—

I don’t know what I’ve been doing.

When I sat down forty-five minutes ago, I had every intention of preparing a summary of the rebuild of the client project in the suburbs. I was right about it—it wasn’t stripping out one thing and substituting another, it was a complete rebuild.

I had it under control until I walked away from Whitney a week ago.

A long, agonizing week ago.

Greg is expecting an answer.

“Yep. Yeah.” I turn around in my chair, hoping to look casual and probably fucking failing. “Everything’s good. I’m working on a summary now. On your desk this afternoon.”

He considers me. “I hope you know that all these changes are client-side, Wes. It seems like it’s weighing on you, and I don’t want you to get the wrong idea.”

“No, no. I got it. It’s good. It’s—” I’m about to say something to focus on but that would be a stupid thing to tell my boss, that I need something to focus on. I let myself sink into this project like a drowning man because Whitney is like the sun. Even though she’s not mine anymore, I can’t ignore her. She shines through the windows in the morning and sets in my heart at night. It’s fucking terrible. “It’s good to see things from another perspective.” It sounds lame and untrue and feels that way on my tongue.

Greg just nods. “You were in early this morning.”

“Yeah. I’ll have this to you any time—”

“Did you eat breakfast?”

I blink at him. “Uh, no.”

“It’s almost twelve-thirty. Get some lunch. Come back fresh.”

I want to ask him what it is, exactly, that’s making him think I’m not up to the job. I hadn’t planned on lunch out—I planned on working straight through and leaving early. And I know, I know, that if I push hard enough, he’ll leave me alone.

But he’s my boss, and I’m fucking tired. I’m tired of everything. I’m tired of the cheap hotel I’m staying at, two blocks away. I’m tired of missing Whitney.

I’m tired of fighting.

The last thing on earth I want to do is eat lunch with Greg, so I stand up as if he’s released me from a sentence involving putting together this summary, and pat my pocket for my wallet. “You, uh—”

He raises both hands. “I already ate. You go on.”

Outside on the sidewalk, with the afternoon sun beating down on my face, I can’t stand it.

It’s so fucking abrasive, the way Whitney always yanks me out of my plans, the way she’s always trying to stir things up, to make life unpredictable. It’s abrasive and dangerous. But right now, I wish she’d appear on the corner and drag me to some ridiculous, shady hole-in-the-wall and talk my ears off about the mayhem that is an Off-Broadway show. I don’t know how those people ever get anything done, and deep down, I don’t care, but if I could just see her lips move around those words—bright lipstick, dark hair, eyes dancing—she could talk about anything.

God, I’m so fucking pathetic.

There’s only one other person who knows how pathetic I feel.

I pull my phone out of my pocket.

“Wes?”

I haven’t even dialed Dayton’s number.

I blink into the sun.

It’s not Dayton.

It’s fucking Ben Powell.

“Is there anywhere on earth you won’t follow me, you fucking stalker?”

He cracks a smile and hitches that damn backpack up on his shoulder. “You’re right about one thing. I was looking for you.”

“We have nothing to talk about, man.” The bristles rise on the back of my neck.

“That’s not what it looks like. You look like you just got kicked to the curb. Are you fired?”

“What are you doing here?”

“I told you. Looking for you.”

“I never told you where I work.”

“Well, you signed up for fucking LinkedIn. Don’t act like we’re in the nineteenth century, bro.”

Jesus, he’s annoying.

“So, is it still current? You look pretty forlorn out here.”

I rub at that knot in the back of my neck. “I didn’t get fired.”

“Then she left.”

I stare at him. “How the hell are you so sure of yourself? You disappear for months, and now you want to be my fucking therapist?”

He laughs, like everything in the world is fine. “I do not want to be your therapist. I wanted to give you something.”

“Let’s not. Let’s not do a gift exchange outside my office.”

“That would be a shitty exchange, because I’m sure you don’t have anything for me. Look.” He reaches around and unzips his backpack. I fight the urge to sprint in the other direction. I can’t see what’s in the damn backpack and every nerve screams a warning. I’m on edge like I’ve never been on edge, and it’s Powell—I should be able to trust him with my life. I don’t even trust the breeze.

“Powell—”

“Shut it, Sullivan, and look.”

He withdraws his hand.

There, resting against his palm, is a jagged piece of metal. It’s twisted and torn, maybe four inches long. The sight of it turns the heat of the summer breeze into a desert wind and the hum of distant traffic into the treads of our Humvee against that gravel.

“What the fuck is that?”

“It’s the answer.” There’s wonder in Powell’s voice. He sounds like Afghanistan was a grand adventure, some kind of epic fucking fairy tale, where we were honorable knights and all of us came home in one piece, with nothing but a few scratches in the armor.

“The answer to what?” Blood thrums in my ears, competing with the sound of the traffic, and a bead of sweat drips down my back underneath my shirt. I’ve got to get off the sidewalk.

“To why.” He lets his hand hover in the air for a few more moments, then closes his fist around the strip of metal. The instant it’s out of sight, my lungs release and I take a deep breath, my vision clearing.

“I don’t believe it.” I take one step to the side. I’m going to shove past the bastard, call Dayton from the corner, and tell him to meet me at the bar. I need a fucking drink. Or several.

Powell’s hand is a solid stop sign in the center of my chest. “You haven’t let me convince you.”

“I don’t need convincing. I’m not going to believe it.”

He moves back in front of me, and I hate with a violent fury how level his gaze his, how self-confident he is. “Why’d your girl leave you, Sullivan?”

I clench my teeth.

We face off on the sidewalk.

“You’re a piece of shit.”

Powell claps me on the shoulder. “You pick the place. I’ll buy the first round.”

Macmillan’s is the easiest place to go. Where the hell else am I going to pick? I’m fuming and trying to hide it.

“Yeah.” Powell leans back in the booth like he’s been here a thousand times. “You do need a beer.”

“No shit.” I rub both hands over my face and snatch up the list of beers on tap. They all blur together. Powell doesn’t give me the chance to agonize over it. He orders two Sam Adams from the waitress who buzzes by, her ponytail bouncing in the afternoon sunlight coming through the front window, then thinks better of himself. He catches her on the way to the bar and stabs a thumb back over his shoulder at me. She blushes. She blushes red. I throw the drink menu back onto the table and press my palms into the cool surface.

He comes back to the booth and slides in, looking every bit as relaxed as when we first came in. Nothing bothers this guy. I hate him. And then—I don’t. We spent a lot of hours together on two separate deployments, and there’s something steadying about his attitude. I wouldn’t call him easygoing, exactly, but not a lot rattles him. It’s also infuriating. I’m fucking rattled, and it’s been rolling to a boil since last week.

“You want to talk about it?”

I glare at him.

“Not until the beers come,” he says. “Got it.”

“Not ever.”

He spreads both hands open in front of him. “Low risk, buddy. Why’d she leave? I’m assuming she left, by how sad puppy you looked out in front of that office.”

“You really didn’t have to come here. I’m not looking for any answers.”

Powell smiles and it looks easy. “That’s the thing about answers. Sometimes they find you.”

“Stop being a cryptic asshole.”

“Fine. I’ll go first.” He looks out the front window of the bar—arranging his thoughts? I don’t know—and turns back to me. “I’m sorry for heading off the grid there for a while, man. That was a shitty thing to do.”

“I’m all grown up, Powell. You don’t have to chase me to New York City every time you get a guilty conscience.”

“I left to find out more about that incident.”

“I—”

He lifts one hand and I bite back the rest of the words on the tip of my tongue. “It didn’t seem right, you know? We spent weeks waiting around for final orders. Even Day was in on the planning. He’d have never driven us right into a known IED.”

“Lots of IEDs are unknown. That’s the fucking point of them.”

“But this one shouldn’t have been.” Powell’s eyes focus on a spot in the distance, then come back to meet mine. “It shouldn’t have been. You remember that outpost.”

I’ll never fucking forget that little village, tucked up next to the mountains like a kid tucked under his mother’s arm. They’d been completely fucked over by an insurgent group there, and the people were in an impossible situation. Get too buddy-buddy with the Americans, and the insurgents would make them pay for it. Trade help for their lives, and they’d pay for it. We were going to flush out the last of the insurgents. They were supposed to be the last.

“Get to the point.” I taste the grit in my mouth and wish the beers would hurry up and get here.

“They were focused on minimizing casualties. That’s what made the whole thing ring false to me.”

“What does it matter, Powell?” My head throbs. “What the fuck does it matter if it rang false? It happened.” It happened, and I can still hear Dayton screaming, right now.

The waitress thunks down a beer in front of me and I grab it like a life preserver. One swig doesn’t clear the grit from my teeth, but the second one does.

Powell watches me, waiting, maddeningly patient. “Doesn’t it feel like a ring around your neck?”

As if in answer, the knot at the base of my skull throbs. “What about it? It was four seconds in the course of four deployments—”

“There’s nobody else here, Sullivan. Cut the bullshit.”

I don’t want to admit it to him, but I’m a husk of a man. My skin offers no protection from the elements. My heart aches. “Fine. It does.”

“You were driving. Your best friend planned the mission. It could have gone worse. God knows that. I’ve lain awake enough nights because of how close it came.” He looks into his beer. “The heat of it.”

I can feel it scorching my skin, even now. “I know all of this, Powell. The point. The point.”

“I had to know what was at the heart of it.” He breathes in through his nose and I swear to God, everyone in Macmillan’s is looking at us. “There’s some stuff that’s random, and some that’s avoidable. I wanted to know which one it was.”

“Are you always this fucking irritating?” I take another drink of my beer. “Seriously, Powell, I’d rather eat alone if you’re going to string me along like this.”

“It wasn’t avoidable, but it also wasn’t random.”

I stare him down. The man digs into his backpack again, pulling out the shrapnel. My throat closes.

“It was a different group of insurgents. You’ve heard about them on TV, yeah?”

I don’t watch the news much anymore, but this is a semantic difference, so I nod. Of course I’ve seen about the new groups rising in the Middle East. We couldn’t even stamp out the one we went there for. It’s like a hydra. Unlimited heads.

“This was a new one of theirs. Slimmer tech, and they planted it after the scouts came and went.”

I close my eyes and search the memory. “Couldn’t have. There were no marks. Not that I—”

“There were no marks because it was smaller than the other shit. It was thinner. They didn’t dig up the ground to bury it—they cut a layer off the top of the earth and put it right back down where it was. You didn’t miss it, man. And neither did Day, or the guys on the team that assessed the area. You were driving blind.”

I can’t speak, so I drink my beer instead.

Powell drops the shrapnel back into his bag and closes it with a practiced finality. “That’s what I came here to tell you. I wanted to show it to you before we parted ways.”

I clear my throat. It’s fucking difficult. “How’d you—” Powell raises his eyebrows, a little gleeful. “You’re not supposed to have that. That’s—”

“I spent some time asking questions. I spent some time looking. Effort. Results. All that.”

“Can I see it again?”

He doesn’t hesitate. He opens his bag, pulls it out, and drops it into my palm.

It’s surprisingly light, for a piece of the thing that almost killed me.

All this time, I thought I was the one who pulled it out of the earth, who set the thing in motion that took Dayton’s leg and my sanity, and Powell’s ability to stay grounded in a fucking city like an adult. It was the same, in my mind, as putting it there in the first place.

“You had nothing to do with that,” Powell says, and leans back to let the waitress deliver our burgers.

I hand it back to him in silence.

“You can hold the wheel as tight as you want.” He adds ketchup and stacks on the pickles from the bed of lettuce and tomatoes on the side of his plate. “Sometimes, you still get blown up.”