“Yeah,” he said. He stared down at the glow of the cigarette in his hand for a moment, drew on it, then exhaled. “I need you to understand something.”

“Okay,” I said, anxiously.

“That camp we liberated. There was a sign over the gate. One of the guys in the tanks knew a bit of German—he told me it said every man gets what he deserves. They called that camp Buchenwald.”

“Was this in April of ’45?” I asked. Henry wrote me regularly when he was in Europe, but just before the war ended, his letters abruptly stopped. He finished his cigarette and flicked the end onto my grass.

“I knew right away that this was something different from the other awful shit we’d seen already. There were cartloads of bodies stacked outside of the crematorium near the entrance and there was nothing left of those people—just skin and bones.”

“That’s awful, Henry. I’m so sorry.”

“The captain sent us to clear buildings. I was with Bobby and we’re just walking through these buildings looking for Nazis and all we’re finding is dead people and half-dead people. Sometimes their eyes were dead, even if they were still breathing. Bobby opened a storage room and it all happened so fast. In just a few seconds, the Nazi in that little room shot Bobby and I shot the Nazi and they were both dead and I was just standing over my dead best friend and this dead stranger wondering…who won just now? You know what I realized?” His voice cracked, and the anguish on his face nearly broke me. “We all lost, Lizzie. Every single man and woman and child touched by that war lost.”

This was a bad idea. For five years, Henry had been unable to speak about this. Talking about it now—stirring up all this pain—could only lead to more chaos.

“Honey, maybe you should just go to bed—”

“Every man gets what he deserves. Sometimes I see that camp like I’m still there and it makes no damned sense, except maybe if I left some part of myself behind there.”

“Is it getting better as the years pass?” I whispered.