There was a long, hollow pause. Her gaze lifted to his, chest strained with the heaviness that still darkened his expression.
“I was different back then.”
Her gaze moved back to the photo, taking in each of the faces one by one. Sunlit, close together, squinting in the brightness. They looked tired and proud, like men who had lived ten years in a day.
“Different how?”
“Lighter, I guess.”
There was a weight to the way he said it, like the word didn’t quite fit but it was the closest he could get. His voice had softened, just slightly, shrouded now only in a heavy sort of exhaustion, like something frayed had come loose and couldn’t be tucked away again.
“You know,” he went on, thumb drifting across the frame again. “Some of us trained together from day one. Zach, Griff, Danny. And the others came later. Transfers from different units, strays, guys who didn’t have anywhere else to land. But we stuck.”
He sucked in a long breath that stretched the silence.
“We lived in each other’s pockets for years. You don’t get through something like that without becoming something more than just friends. The bond was… different. Permanent.”
Hazel’s throat ached. She didn’t know these men, had never met them, but somehow, through his voice— through the quiet reverence threaded through each of his words— she could feel the loss settle deep. She could feel the shape of it inside him, how it probably curled around his ribs and lived there, constant. Not unlike her own, for other people and other lives that had faded, leaving only the ache of them behind as a reminder of what had been.
She looked at the photo again and her eyes landed on the man beside Beck. He was slightly shorter than Beck and grinning wide with a thread of mischief that all but spilled out of the frame. He was different than the rest, somehow. She could tell. Perhaps it was his closeness to Beck, or the way the rest of the men in the image were almost angled towards him.
“And who’s he?” she asked, unable to help herself.
Beck let out a faint, breathy laugh, but there was no humour in it, just memory. “That’s James. James Griffin. He’d smack anyone who called him that, though. He went by Griff.”
There was a pause, then, as Beck’s gaze seemed to fade from the picture in his hands, drawn instead to something else— memories, maybe. Things that had happened long ago but had gotten lost along the way.
“He was the reason I made it through basic training, and the first year after that, too. He could pull the worst day into something survivable just by cracking some stupid, nonsense joke.”
Hazel’s chest ached, her eyes beginning to sting with a threat of emotion she refused to give in to. “Is he…” she whispered, the words drying up at the back of her throat.
Beck didn’t look up. “No,” he offered, after a pause, with the shake of his head. “He didn’t make it back.”
His grip on the photo tightened, knuckles paling. His other hand stayed buried in his pocket. “None of them did.”
Hazel stood still beside him, feeling the storm outside mirrored within her. There was something devastating in the way he said it— not raw, not bleeding, but quiet. Settled. Like the grief had long since stopped screaming and started whispering instead. And she realized, slowly, achingly, that she was beginning to see him not just in the way he showed up, but in all the places where he’d been left behind before, too.
In all the people he’d carried back in memory, but never in body.
She swallowed, the ache rising in her throat like a tide. And still, she said nothing. She just stayed beside him, as he had for her, many times before.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, eventually, when the sharpest of the pains had begun to dull. “I didn’t mean to—“
“It’s okay.” Beck’s voice was quiet, almost too quiet. His eyes still hadn’t left the frame. “It’s… nice, sometimes, to think of them. To remember what it felt like before.”
He held the photo there for a moment longer, one thumb brushing absently over the edge of the glass. Then he stepped forward and returned it to its place on the nightstand facing outward, like it had been before she’d reached for it.
“If you need anything,” Beck said, his voice ragged, like he was hardly holding himself together. “I’ll be in the living room.”
He turned before she could answer, but paused at the door.
“Try to get some sleep,” he added, one hand wrapped around the frame of the door. The skin of his knuckles was pulled tight over the bone, flushed white with the effort. “Your body needs the rest.”
And then, carefully, he pulled the door closed behind him.
Leaving her in the center of the room.Hisroom. Inhissweatshirt.
With her heart beating loud enough to drown out the rest of the storm.
