That’s the whole job.

Everything else is noise.” We had tried.

We had taken care of each other across oceans and time zones and silences that stretched for weeks, across all the things the work did to a person, and we had done the whole job right up until the world took the choice out of Niko’s hands.

And now here was Ivo again on a cold tarmac, the last of Niko in the world besides the child I carried, and he did not salute me.

He opened his arms.

He did not salute me.