It was Niko’s and mine, and every board in it had been paid for with his service.

He’d bought it eight years back, with money saved deployment by deployment, the hazard pay and the separation pay and the raises that came with rank he wasn’t allowed to tell anyone he held.

It had been a wreck when he got it, cheap because it was falling down, and he had loved that about it.

Between rotations — those strange compressed weeks home, when he’d arrive lean and quiet and slowly come back to himself — he rebuilt it with his own hands.

He tore out the ruined kitchen and put in a new one, cabinets he hung level with a patience I never had, counters he sealed on his knees at midnight because he couldn’t sleep on that first jet-lagged night home and might as well be useful.

He patched the drywall.