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“What can I do to make you feel comfortable here?” he asks.
The question seems to come out of left field, and I don’t understand it. I don’t have any idea how to react to this version of him. The one that seems to care. It only makes it hurt worse because I know I can’t keep him.
“I can’t give you what you want,” I murmur. “So maybe you should just turn me in now.”
He shoves his chair back and stalks into the kitchen, pouring his shot down the sink. His frustration is getting the best of him, but he’s trying not to show it.
“Madden—"
“No.” He shoots me a dark look, his words final. “I’m not letting you go.”
Chapter 44
Madden
—PAST—
The thing nobody ever tells you about war is it doesn’t matter how much you train for it because when you’re in it, it’s fate who stacks the deck at the end of the day. Every time you step outside the wire, that knowledge settles over you like a black cloud. Yesterday, it was a guy you ate dinner with. The day before that, it was innocent civilians. But today, that bullet might have your name on it. You could be the guy standing two feet in the wrong direction. And chances are, you won’t feel like you did anything heroic while you’re in the thick of it, gasping on your last breath.
Once you accept those odds, you find calm in the chaos. There’s routine in the daily grind. A lot of downtime. So much that it would be easy to get complacent. But just when you think you might, that long steady beat is interrupted by intervals of adrenaline surges. You find yourself trapped in a firefight, narrowly dodging landmines, bullets, grenades, and rockets. You see the undeniable evidence before you that it’s real. Women and children dead in the street. Horrors even Hollywood can’t replicate. You’re tired but wired, all the time. You play every scenario over in your mind. You listen to every sound. All the while, you lie to yourself that it will all work out when you’re balls deep in it. And over time, the horrible fucking truth is you find a way to stop feeling. Because this is the new normal, and numbness is how you survive.
My training taught me to react from muscle memory rather than emotion. I performed the necessary sequence for survival so many times before I deployed, I didn’t think twice the first time I actually shot someone. It was life or death, them or us, and there was no moral dilemma hanging over my head in that split-second decision. I reacted, and then I reacted again a minute later when I had to do it again.
A year in, I couldn’t tell you what my body count might be, and I don’t want to know either. Their faces blur together, and the only thing I remember clearly is the silence in the moment. The beat of my heart in my chest. The pause before my breath leaves my lips, and I know I’ve lived another day. Those moments are fueled by instinct, but at night, when I lay my head on the pillow and try to sleep, it’s that first haunting image that comes back to me.
A little girl’s shoes lying in the street. I recognized them because she had been at the market with her mother only minutes before. And in the middle of the firefight that broke out, those shoes reminded me that humanity still existed. That memory is the one I keep close. I cling to it, a silent vow that I won’t forget every decision matters. Because pulling the trigger might be a reflex, but forgetting humans are on the other side of my weapon shouldn’t be. And at the end of the day, I never want to be the one who makes a decision I won’t be able to live with.
When the barrage ended, I tried to convince myself she was a doll. An inanimate object. Something left behind when the civilians fled. But then I saw her face, and it became all too real. I vomited up the meager contents of my stomach while two men beside me did the same. O’Brien said a prayer for the departed, and we carried her to the crews waiting to transport the bodies. It was the only thing we could do for her. The next day, we got up, put on our boots, and got to work.
Back at the base, I tried to find ways to keep myself occupied. I fell into a steady pattern of seeing the same guys in and out. After a while, you get to talking and learn things about them you don’t want to know. Things that make them human. Things that make them real. And when you inevitably see one of them die, that numbness fades away, and the emotions creep back in until you find a way to lock them down. Shut them off. Live for right now and tell yourself you’ll deal with it another day.
