“Okay, color me impressed.” She settles onto the log near the fire pit. “I was expecting hot dogs and s’mores.”
“We’ve got those, too.” I carefully shove the foil packets into the coals. “It would be sacrilegious to go camping without s’mores.”
As we wait for dinner to cook, I pull out a bottle of wine and two plastic cups. “Here. Time to sit back and relax.”
We sip our wine and look out at the lake. After a while, Noia shifts to look at me.
“Will you tell me more about what happened to you?”
I stare into the fire, watching the flames dance, debating how much to tell her. But there’s a flicker inside that makes me want to tell her everything.
“I was on my second tour,” I begin softly. “We were part of a routine patrol outside Kandahar. Me, Kade, and four others.”
The memories instantly come flooding back—the oppressive heat, the dust, the constant awareness of danger lurking everywhere.
“Kade was my best friend. I’d known him since basic. We’d been through everything together.” I take a long swallow from my cup. “We were checking out a village that had reported Taliban activity when we got word to pull back.”
Noia’s eyes, open and patient, stay fixed on me.
“On our way out, we got ambushed. Started taking fire from three different directions.” My hands clench involuntarily. “We managed to find cover, but we were pinned down.”
I swallow hard. “I remember Kade yelling at me to run, but there was an IED buried right in our path.”
“Oh my god,” Noia whispers.
“Kade...” My throat tightens.
The fire crackles, sending sparks up into the darkening sky.
“He was running with me to the Humvee and…” I close my eyes, the image of what happened next still so horribly vivid. “The blast threw me twenty feet. I remember it sounded like the world was being ripped apart, and then… nothing.”
Noia grabs my hand and threads her fingers with mine. Her touch grounds me immediately.
“Next thing I remember was waking up three days later in a military hospital in Germany. They told me Kade didn’t make it. That he’d taken the brunt of the explosion.” My voice drops to a harsh whisper. “And that I’d almost lost my leg.”
I set my cup down on the ground and roll up my pant leg to reveal the twisted mass of scar tissue running from my ankle tojust below my knee. The skin is puckered and shiny, with deep gouges where chunks of flesh were torn away.
“Shrapnel tore through everything—muscle, tendons, even bone. The doctors wanted to amputate at first, but one surgeon was sure he could save it.” I trace the line of the scar. “Took eight surgeries and a year of physical therapy before I could walk even close to normal again.”
Our eyes lock. Noia’s eyes are filled with tears as she looks at the scar and then back at me.
“May I?”
I nod, watching as she gently traces her fingers along the path of the scar.
“The physical pain was bad, but the survivor’s guilt was even worse,” I admit, loving how soothing her fingers feel on my skin. “I kept wishing it had been me who had died. Kade had a family, a baby on the way. I had no one.”
I shove the denim down with a sigh.
“They had me on some pretty heavy painkillers,” I explain. “At first, it was just about managing the pain. Then it became about numbing everything else.”
I look up and she’s still watching me in stunned silence. “I was a mess when I got back—angry and self-destructive. The pills were the only thing that made it bearable.”
“You got addicted,” she states.
“I did.”
She squeezes my hand. “How did you get clean?”
