Dominic inclined his head to the right.
“Even so.”
He moved toward the door.
“Rest,” he said to both of us.
When he left, the room closed quietly around us again. Thiago watched the door for a moment. “He notices everything.”
“Yes.”
“That must be exhausting.”
“It is occasionally inconvenient.”
He leaned back into the pillows and looked at the ceiling. I stood and moved to the side of the bed.
I traced the edge of the bandage where the dressing met his skin at the shoulder. The tape sat flat and clean. The bruising below it was deepest at the deltoid. His skin was warm.
“It’s clean,” he said.
“I know. I’ve read the discharge paperwork for tomorrow twice.”
I adjusted the tape along one edge and straightened it .
“Tell me more about what happened after Afghanistan.”
He was quiet for a moment, choosing the starting point.
“There was a long administrative process,” he said finally. “Designed to make something complicated look procedural. And then private security work.”
“Did it take long to find?”
“I took whatever was available. For a while, that meant a pharmaceutical warehouse in New Jersey. Night shifts. A loading dock. Watching trucks instead of people.”
I thought about the man I had watched move through Dominic’s house for twelve days, staring at trucks. Eight months of checking shipping manifests and monitoring security cameras covering a loading bay at two in the morning.
“Eight months,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Before Eamon found you.”
Thiago nodded. “He told you.”
“When you were in surgery. In the way he tells things.”
“Which is.”
“Three sentences. No editorializing.”
“He walked into the loading bay one morning,” Thiago said. “Looked around as if he were taking inventory of everything wrong with the picture and then asked me one question.”
I waited.
“What’s the job of protection?”
“And you said.”
