Rhys’s face falls, and he looks away, brown eyes brooding.
“There are things in his records that never added up. Stories he told me, my parents that never made sense. I’ve halfwondered,” I say with a strained laugh, “I’ve half wondered if he was something else entirely.”
Rhys stills. No emotion.
That’s it… his tell. No reaction. Nothing.
“Makes me wonder if he was put on your team for different reasons.”
He grimaces, running a hand through his hair.
“Because there was a point where everything changed with him,” I continue. “Where he became a different man. Different morals. Different priorities. Different drives. Honestly… the last time I saw him… it scared me.”
He still won’t meet my eyes, his forehead creasing.
“Rhys?”
“Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.”
Our eyes meet.
“Do you know anything about this? Was this part of what you don’t want to tell me about?”
“I want to let those men rest with the honor they deserve. Not split hairs, dig into the weeds until it all looks bad… wrong.”
“But right now,youlook wrong. That’s the official story.”
“That’s where it stays,” he says, jaw tightening.
“I can’t do that. Not without answers.”
He shrugs, turning away and pacing. “Well, you’re going to have to.”
“You’ve lived all this time carrying what happened to that team. But there had to be more to it than the official narrative.”
“Think what you want,” Rhys says, stepping closer, eyes searching mine. “But I’m done with this. Done talking to you.”
He slides past me, and I feel the storm leave with him.
He disappears with the roar of an ATV engine, and I take a seat on the cot, holding the book and staring at the photo. The coordinates have to do with Afghanistan. Where the ambush took place.
My cell has no signal. Nothing.
I could use the sat phone. Call my parents. Call friends to look it up for me.
But some part of me still needs it from him.
I press the book to my cheek, memories of Phoenix washing back over me.Blond hair in the sunlight, running through fields of buttery dandelions barefoot and narrowly missing bees.
My mom and dad called us the two terrors. Rambunctious, loud nature lovers.
I’ll never forget the day he sat us down. Told us he’d enlisted in the Marines.
Mom cried. Dad clapped a hand to his shoulder, saying how proud he was. And I started devising ways to follow him. Because that’s what we did.
But after that, everything slowly changed. He started speaking and acting differently. By his last deployment, he was a different man, though with the same team—First Recon.
I couldn’t follow him anymore, yet I refused to admit it back then. Just like I can’t follow him now.
