Page 44 of A Soldier's Return

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. I was only curious. You don’t have to tell me.”

He turned his attention to briskly cutting the peppers. Any smaller and they would disappear in the omelet. After a moment, she took them from him and added them along with her chopped onions to the sizzling oil in the omelet pan.

The smells made her mouth water even as her attention remained focused on him.

“I told you about Justine the other day.”

“Your doctor friend who died in the suicide bombing. Or was she more than a friend?”

“I’m not sure what we were,” he admitted, confirming her suspicion. “We had dated a few times, if you can call it dating when you’re in a war zone, surrounded by people facing starvation and violence.”

“You said she was there with Doctors without Borders. What was your role? Can you talk about it?”

He hesitated for a moment, and she wondered if she had overstepped, then he spoke. “For the last twelve months, I’ve been deployed to the Middle East, providing medical care in various refugee camps and setting up clinics in small struggling villages trying to recover from decades of unrest.”

“Not an easy task.”

“I’ve been deployed most of the last five years. After the first tour, I asked to go back. It had its challenges but there were many rewards. These are courageous people who have already lost so much, facing truly horrible circumstances.”

Every time she heard about people living in rough conditions like Eli was talking about, Melissa regretted her propensity to feel sorry that her life hadn’t turned out the way she’d planned. She had so many amazing things in her world. She had a job she loved, good friends, a great apartment next to one of the most beautiful beaches in the world. No, things weren’t perfect, but on the whole, her life was extraordinary.

“We were trying to improve conditions,” Eli said. “I like to think we were making progress. Justine was absolutely dedicated to the cause and was a real inspiration to everyone.”

Features pensive, Eli pulled Max onto his lap and scratched the schnauzer beneath his chin. “As you can imagine, the camp had more than its share of orphaned children.”

“How sad.” She didn’t like thinking about children who had no one to love them.

“There was one in particular who always wanted to help the aid workers. She used to ask to sweep the floor of the medical clinic.”

“Miri.”

“Yes. She was about seven or eight, the sweetest girl, with a huge smile.”

He let out a soft, tortured sigh. “Everyone in the camp watched over her, but she and Justine had a special bond. Miri used to bring her little bouquets of flowery weeds or pretty rocks she’d found. Justine wanted to adopt her, take her back to France with her, and was trying to put the wheels in motion.”

She wanted to say how wonderful that such sweetness could survive the horrors of war, but she sensed she didn’t want to hear what was coming next. She could see by the tension in his shoulders and the way he gripped his hands tightly together that the rest of the story wasn’t as tender.

“What happened?”

She flipped the omelet, wishing she hadn’t asked any questions and started them down this grim road.

“One day, Justine asked me to go with her to a village about five or six kilometers away from the camp to help with a clinic for pregnant women and children. A routine trip, we both thought, something we’d done a dozen times in other villages. It was well within my mission as part of a PRT, Provincial Reconstruction Team, trying to help these war-torn areas rebuild.” He paused. “She thought it would be fun to take Miri with us. The girl was very good at putting villagers at ease and convincing them to trust us.”

He was silent, his eyes haunted by memories she couldn’t begin to guess at.

“I didn’t want to, but it made both of them happy so I relented. I liked to see them smile. Miri had started doing it more and more, especially when all three of us were together.”

“What happened?”

“It was market day and the area was busy. We didn’t stop working all morning and saw maybe twenty women, but then things began to slow down a little. I... Miri and Justine decided to walk to the market square to grab some lunch for us and look at some of the local goods on sale. I should have said no, that we should stick together. I’d been uneasy all day, feeling a weird energy.”

“Would Justine have stayed behind simply because you asked her to?”

He made a face. “Probably not. She was fiercely independent. If I had told her I had a weird feeling, she would have laughed at me and called meMonsieur Poule Mouillée.”

“Mr. Wet Hen,” she said, smiling at his quite excellent French accent. Hers wasn’t great, but she understood better than she could speak from studying it in school.

“I told myself I was imagining things. There was no potential threat. Why would there be? We were aid workers. I stayed behind at the clinic and didn’t go with them because I was too busy showering all my knowledge on the village’s young, inexperienced midwife. I had just about run out of things to yammer on about when we heard the blast.”

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