Those words echoed through her.
He survived.
Just as he had done in the military. He had survived then.
It sounded so heavy.
It felt so heavy.
“I don’t know what to say,” she said.
“No. It’s fine.”
“Except it’s not.” She turned over to face him, and he kept his arms around her. She touched his face. She couldn’t see him, not in the shadow of the lean-to, but she could feel his gaze on her. “No one should ever have to go through such a terrible thing. Let alone a child.”
“But it happened.”
Those simple words gave her insight into how he had lived every day since then.
It had happened. There was nothing that could change it. He just had to live with it.
And oh, how he had lived with it. All of the darkness, all of the heaviness that she sensed in him, it all made sense now.Everything in him that seemed just a little bit lost made sense now.
The way that he kept people at a distance because of course, he did.
What he hadn’t been saying this whole time was that he wasn’t mean, he was just…
“Yeah,” he said. “It happened. It made the military feel like a parade. But I…you know I can sleep outside like this, I can sleep in a place that might get bombed out by an enemy. In my own house alone I can’t even turn the light off in my room. Because sometimes I forget which room I’m in. When it is. Sometimes I think I’m awake in the house and it’s empty and everyone is gone.”
She held onto his arm, clung to him like it would help them both get through this. The reality of his loss. “Where did you go after?—?”
“I think that’s probably enough for now.”
He wasn’t being mean. There was a real exhaustion in his voice.
“Okay,” she said, her chest sore, her lungs feeling tight. She was exhausted just from hearing the story, and he had lived it.
It made her feel ashamed. Ashamed at her lack of strength in the face of his.
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m probably gonna give you nightmares.”
Her chest felt like something crumbled inside of it. The worst thing was, it was probably true. The thing that he had lived through would give her literal nightmares.
And he had no choice but to figure out how to live with that reality. To go on, even though he had experienced all that. To lose them was one thing, to be the one that found them…
He had just been a little boy. A thirteen-year-old boy.
She had been grieving the loss of her own childhood all this time, her own carefree life, but what had he had?
He had lost everybody.
She leaned her head forward and rested it against his chest, and his own breathing began to match hers.
This was their secret, laid bare in the wilderness, witnessed by nothing other than the stars that winked through the evergreen cover of the shelter.
She had a feeling they wouldn’t speak of this again. Not outside of this place.
But she would always know.
