She pointed again to the photo of Hunter with his arm slung around the giant shoulders of a man with a shiny, bald head and skin the color of polished mahogany. “I want to know why he looks like he wants to eat you.”
Laughter rumbled out of him at her apt description. His fresh-faced, eighteen-year-old self wore a thin-lipped smile in the photo, but Trayvon Cooper? Well, Coop wore his patented I-eat-Johnny-Raws-like-you-for-breakfast frown.
He sobered when he saw Grace blinking at him myopically. “What?” he asked. “Why are you looking at me like I suddenly sprouted a third ear from my forehead?”
“That’s the first time I’ve heard you laugh.”
“That can’t be right.” He dismissed her observation with a wave of his hand.
“It is.” Her nod was insistent. “I’ve heard you chuckle once or twice. And you’ve snorted with amusement on occasion. But I’ve never heard you laugh. Not like that.”
His teammates accused him of being a sourpuss, but he’d assumed that was because he didn’t participate in their asshattery as often as they’d like. Now he was forced to admit maybe hedidbrood too much.
“Coop always looks like he suffers from a bad case of asshole-itis. But he’s the furthest thing you’ll find.” He had to swallow before admitting this next part. “He took me under his wing the first day I set foot in basic training. I’m not sure why. Maybe because, as a dad to five rug rats, he knew when he was looking at a kid in desperate need of a father figure.”
He absently turned the knob on his watch, thinking back with a sense of horror and happiness on the hell that’d been basic under Coop’s eagle eye and exacting standards. “Which isn’t to say he wasn’t tough on me,” he was quick to tell her. “By the time bootcamp was over, I didn’t know whether I loved Coop or hated him. But he saw something special in me. He’s the one who encouraged me to pursue a career in spec-ops.”
“You loved him,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Yeah,” he admitted a little sheepishly, rubbing his hand over the back of his neck. “I guess so.”
“Do you keep in touch?”
“Mmm.” He nodded. “We call each other on the major holidays. And I try to get out to see him in California a couple times a year. He’s retired now. Spends most of his time fixing up the old Victorian he and his wife bought.”
“Sounds nice,” she murmured.
“Isnice,” he assured her.
“And her?” She pointed to the middle photo of a dark-eyed woman wearing a hijab.
Looking at the picture always made his stomach tighten. But he couldn’t bring himself to take the photo down.
Jah deserved better than that. She deserved for him to be reminded of her courage and care, her dry sense of humor and her unassailable sense of right and wrong.
“She’s very beautiful,” Grace mused. “Who is she?”
“Jah.” His voice came out rusty sounding. “Jahedah, actually. She was part translator and part den-mother to my unit during my third tour in Afghanistan. She would bring in lavash and ashak dumplings. She made sure we all washed our uniforms and oiled our gear. She was the first one in the field when we needed to speak to the village women, and the last one to leave the base at night, always waiting until the soldiers she considered her adopted sons were back inside the wire.”
Tears burned the back of his eyes as he stared at Jah’s pretty face. “I fought tooth and nail to have her and her family brought here before the U.S. pulled out. But my phone calls, emails, and letters to every ranking official I knew fell on deaf ears.”
The anguish in Grace’s eyes matched the grief in his heart. “She didn’t make it out before the country fell to the Taliban?”
He shook his head.
For a while after that, neither of them spoke. They both knew how things had gone down after the American withdrawal. The video footage of people desperately clinging to the last planes leaving Kabul Airport and then falling to their deaths was burned into the collective psyches of anyone who’d watched the humanitarian crisis unfold.
Hunter had certainly been watching.
He’d scoured news footage for hours searching for a glimpse of Jahedah. Futilely hoping to see her boarding a plane for the U.S. or being escorted into a Humvee and driven to a refugee camp.
But there’d been nothing. And in the weeks and months that’d followed, all his inquiries into her whereabouts had been met with shrugs and a litany ofwe don’t knows.
There was little hope Jahedah was still alive. The Taliban had gone door-to-door torturing and killing anyone who’d helped the NATO forces during the occupation. And it was a damned travesty more hadn’t been done to safeguard the Afghans who’d done so much to forward America’s cause in their country.
It meant Hunter had a complicated relationship with his job working directly for the head of the government that’d left those good people to their fate. Granted, it hadn’t been Madam President’s decision alone and there was no way she could have known the Afghan security forces would buckle so easily under the Taliban’s advance.I mean, for fuck’s sake, the last flights hadn’t even left the airport before the Afghanis were throwing down their weapons and surrendering.And granted, the withdrawal had been negotiated by the previous administration against the recommendations of the former president’s military advisors. But even despiteallof that, Hunter’s boss, the one who oversaw his missions and cut his paychecks, was indirectly responsible for Jah’s fate.
It was something he continued to struggle with.
