Page 99 of The Hometown Legend

Rory stopped and picked a leaf off a branch, then twisted up and tore a piece off. Then another. “A couple of times I’ve seen a look on your face, and I feel like I know who the soldier is.” She tore another chunk out of the leaf. “The man who went out on deployment. You were different. Different than when you left.”

She let the leaf fall to the ground.

“Yeah,” he said.

He had never talked about this, not to anybody.

Cassidy hadn’t wanted to hear about the military, and his father-in-law had told him very seriously that one of the most important things he could do was protect his wife from the reality of what happened overseas. It was what he had done, protected his wife and his children from the gritty truth of war.

It was the job of a soldier to keep civilians separated from the horrors of the big bad world.

You had to do it most of all for your own family.

Gideon had taken that very seriously.

Rory had said something about noticing a difference. Noticing a change. No one else ever commented on it, and he wanted to know more. What she saw.

This change he’d brought back with him overseas, no matter how hard he’d tried not to.

“What did you want to know?”

“Was it different than you thought?”

“Yeah. I thought it would be like a football game. I mean I knew that it was life or death, on some level, but I didn’t think that it would be that for me. You can get badly injured playing football, and I never did. I felt like I was golden. And you know, years in different combat scenarios, and it was true. I was always lucky. But I also learned some hard truths. That it wasn’t because I was special. Because I watched good, special,solidmen and women lose their lives out there. I saw death in a profound way that I never had before. And as I rose up the ranks, they were my men. And I felt responsible for every single death. I felt destroyed by it. It’s not romantic. It’s not about playing hero. And so many men went out there, and they were still playing Army man, you know? They laughed when they took out an enemy, but at a certain point, all I could see was that they were all boys. For the most part. Doing what they thought they had to for the thing they believed most in.

“I could never feel better anymore. And I couldn’t think of why we were there sometimes. Just killing. And being killed. And it started to wear at me.”

He stopped for a moment and stared off the edge of the trail. He’d come close to this truth before, but he’d never let himself say it out loud. He’d never even let himself verbalize it in his own mind. Because it hinted at a truth that sat uncomfortably in his gut.

That he might have ended up here even if he’d never been injured.

That something had gone awry inside him before his brain injury.

That he’d started to realize the world wasn’t golden, after all.

“I think I was broken before that bomb went off. I shoved all my doubts aside, and I forced myself to carry on. To keep with the mission. It was important. The most important thing. And if nothing else, I felt like I was protecting my family, because even though it was impossible for me to not humanize the people we were fighting, I did know that they presented a real threat if left unchecked. I don’t know. But it wasn’t a game to me, that much I can tell you. And then... That day, we were all doing a pretty routine patrol. But there were some high-ranking officials from the US who had come to visit a village. That was a dangerous situation, but we had been in it many times before. Me and a few other men decided to go offer protection. We were there without weapons, but it was routine like I said. I still had one earbud in my ear. With my music playing loud. We were keeping an eye on the horizon for insurgents. We didn’t expect there to be a bomb in the middle of everyone.”

He started walking again, feeling like a heavy boulder that had been sitting on his chest had shifted. The pristine surroundings were at odds with the words that were coming out of his mouth.

“It wasn’t the first time I was adjacent to an explosion, or to all the damage that it could cause. Ten years in the military, five deployments, and I had been gone more often than I was home. I had seen all those things. But not that close. Not where it could’ve easily been me. And it was luck, fate or a divine joke. Just the noise rattles your brain around. Gives you a concussion. But there was the impact as well. I had some burns. Some physical injuries. A good friend of mine lost his arm and two legs. We were lucky. I don’t know why. I still can’t figure out why. I went home and I just wanted to be myself again, and I wasn’t. I couldn’t findme. I was in pain, and I couldn’t make the healing go any faster. I tried... I tried to just be okay. My father-in-law was okay. After the Gulf War and... He was okay. I don’t know why I couldn’t fuckingbe okay.”

Rory didn’t say anything. Instead, she came alongside him on the trail and touched his wrist, then slowly moved her hand around so that her palm was touching his, before she wove her fingers between his own. She said nothing; she just held his hand. And they kept on walking.

It burned there. Where she was touching him. But not in a bad way. He’d been burned in a bad way. This was different.

They didn’t speak. But it was like the wilderness around them had all the words they didn’t have between them.

The birds were chirping, and the wind blowing through the pines made a distinct comforting sound.

It was music, and not the kind that triggered flashbacks.

And more than anything, it was an out-of-body experience to have somebody simply walk with him. Not ask anything of him. Not trail behind, not run ahead. Just walk with him.

“This is the easy part,” he said, talking about the trail, but felt like it could mean something more. Even though he hadn’t meant to infuse it with a double meaning. They were holding hands. They were getting a little bit too close.

“I know. It gets pretty rough up ahead.”

“Yes. It does.”

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