Page 1 of What I Should Have Known

Chapter 1

BERNIE

Aforlorn tune.

This wasn’t the first time I’d heard TAPS. It wasn’t even the first time I’d been at a funeral where TAPS was played. But something about this specific time, something about this specific moment, rolled as heavy as the dark clouds in the sky.

Everything melded together. Time constraints no longer existed as my right hand remained raised during the 21-gun salute. Each booming crack shot through me as if I had been the one to take the bullet to the head. As I stiffly swallowed, Duncan’s mother’s sobs fused with the grief running as cold as the breeze.

She should not be receiving a folded American flag.

She should not be saying her final goodbye.

None of us should be.

I’d always believed it was cliché to have rain pour during a funeral service in a movie, but it no longer felt that way as the first drop fell.

Drowning. We were drowning in a misery that shouldn’t exist. Lines blurred behind the torrential downfall of tears the sky shed for the death of Duncan Murdock. The only thing I could focus on was the three words his family had picked for the personalized inscription.

Friend.

Brother.

Son.

As our dress blues soaked beneath the downpour, the chill seeped into my bones, yet I felt none of it. A hundred times before I’d tried to imagine this moment. But not a single one compared to the anguish that ripped through my soul now.

Griffin, his face unusually clean-shaven, approached Mrs. Murdock, but his words were lost behind the pattering of rain against the tent stretched over seating next to the gravesite. A white tombstone sat at the head of the casket waiting to be lowered into the ground. The Anchor and Eagle pin from my uniform, from each of my teammates’ uniforms, were all lined in a row on the top of the blue oak wood.

I stared at the metal. Eachpingfrom a raindrop reverberated as loudly as the lasting echo from the gunshot that took his life. A simple, dullthwunk.

A damn joke. A laugh.

I’d laughed.

A bullet had ripped through his skull as I’d laughed.

My body remained frozen, drenched in a world of grief. And I wasn’t the only one who dared not move. Even as Duncan’s mom trudged slowly our way, my hand remained in a salute, eyes trained on the coffin.

Her palm sang through the air, delivering a sharp stinging slap against Dom’s cheek, who stood beside me. But he didn’t flinch. Not an emotion flashed across his features. And then she threw herself around his shoulders.

Dom buried his face into her neck as she sobbed. His arms wrapped tightly around her small frame that shook. Momentarily pulled from the grief that held me frozen, I lowered my hand and took a step backward. My gaze slid across the gray sky and the horizon spotted with uniform tombstones.

I’d meet Duncan here someday.

Maybe that someday wasn’t too far away.

Karim al-Jabari being dead, Reyes being dead, didn’t feel like enough justice. But that was all we were left with.

Tipping my head forward, the rain sloshed off the edge of my cover and slid across the back of my neck. I turned away and took a couple of strides forward, putting distance between Duncan’s grave and myself, and paused.

Three armored SUVs drove by, pulling off to the side of the narrow road in the distance. Someone else was here. Someone else with a broken heart.

Doors opened, and men in black suits emerged. The Secret Service. I inhaled deeply as the Secretary of Defense stepped out of his vehicle, a black umbrella held above his head by an agent as he carried a bottle of whiskey.

“What’s he doing here?” Scottie whispered to Mikey.

They both stood a few feet to my right, watching the same procession as I was. A mirror of where we would be in a month. A year. Two years. For the rest of our lives, we’d only find Duncan in memories and at a gravesite.

---