There was missing him, the plain ache of it.

But underneath that there was something harder that I was ashamed of: a low, coal-like anger.

Because when the phone rang after midnight in November, Ethan had been thousands of miles away, and he had stayed thousands of miles away, and while I learned the medical bills and watched the blanket rise and fall, my brother had been a stranger in a uniform on the other side of the world, and some bitter part of me had decided that he had left me alone in the wreckage.

I did not know, then, that he had been lying awake in his own bunk with his own version of the same fear.