I’m all right. Hope the telegram didn’t upset you too much. Doc says I was lucky. I ought to be in much worse shape after having a blast of broken glass and shrapnel in my head. Something about the angle at which I was hit. I don’t know. I don’t remember much. But I’m all right and it doesn’t hurt too bad.

Yeah, I’m lying. It hurts bad enough to make me puke sometimes, but Doc says I will be all right. So get your truth from him and the complaining from me.

The bridge of my nose is broken and they took a bunch of metal bits out of my sinus. Feels like the worst hay fever you ever had. More pieces got pulled out of my cheek and temple, including a nasty one that came close to lacerating my eyeball. That side is all bandaged up and because they don’t want infection spreading to the other eye, that’s bandaged up too and I’ll be blind for a few more days. My friend O’Hara is writing this letter. He got hit in the same blast and he’s laid up here with me. My friend Hook…

Kennet stared into the dark, his last sentence hanging in the air.

“Fish?”

My friend…

“You want to write more, bud? You tired?”

Kennet swallowed hard, tried to speak, but he was stuck. O’Hara’s fingers closed around his wrist.

“I know you want to tell him,” O’Hara said. “But it means saying it out loud. And if you don’t say it out loud, then there’s a chance it’s not real. Right?”

Kennet knew the struggle of holding back tears. He didn’t realize that when your tears were literally dammed up, they surged backward and tried to fight their way out of your body by any means possible, even if they had to kill you to do it. Gauze bandages blocked his eyes and nose, so the tears went crawling down his throat. Angry and thwarted, they tore up the whole length of his body, a marauding horde in his chest and stomach. Even his limbs ached.

Cause of death, he imagined a doctor writing on his chart, inability to weep with ensuing complications from heartbreak arising from incalculable loss following…

“Fish,” O’Hara said. “I’ll write it for you. Okay? I won’t make you say it.”

The weight on the mattress by Kennet’s leg shifted, and then came the sound of pencil scratching on paper.

“I can’t see,” Kennet whispered.

“I know.” A reassuring pat on the leg. “It’s only for a few days more. Just to keep your other eye safe.”

“Am I blind?”

“Nope. Doc promised. If he lied, he’ll answer to me.”