Clara.

“A squadmate?” I asked. It came out barely above a whisper.

He kept his eyes closed. For a long time there was only his breathing, that slow reliable square, and I thought he would let the question go unanswered, or tell me it was none of my business, and either would have been his right.

“No,” he said at last. His voice had gone raw, scraped down to something underneath the gravel. “Not a soldier.”

He opened his eyes and looked up at the ceiling tiles, at nothing.

“It was 2004.” The words came slowly, one at a time, as if he were lifting each of them out of somewhere they had been locked for twenty years.