Halloway’s breaking point came after he’d watched a sergeant step on a pressure-plate bomb, on a roadside in Fallujah. Julian had ordered his men to collect the body parts in a body bag. But when the bag ripped open on the back of their Ford F-350, and blood and organs slid out like groceries through the bottom of a wet paper bag, the human soup hit Halloway in the face. His knees buckled and he vomited so bad Julian pulled him off duty and sent him to a combat-stress trailer.

After days of no sleep and erratic behavior—Halloway mumbling he could feel the spirits of the dead—he was ordered home.

There was something about the look in Halloway’s eyes that had haunted Julian. And when he saw the same look in his own eyes as he stared into the bathroom mirror of Dominique’s apartment in Mosul, he wondered if he too was going mad.

Julian stood in the hallway of Mologne House on the grounds of Walter Reed. The servicemen and women here were the crushed and shaken. They convalesced in three-star rooms among chandeliers, and wingback chairs in this curious outpost of the war on terror. They were the lucky ones.

The thick curtains of Halloway’s room were drawn and gave it a mid-afternoon melancholia.

Halloway sat in a chair facing the darkness.

The doctor’s defeated smile let Julian know there was little help for the man he was here to see.

Julian entered the room, alone. He stood next to Halloway.

Halloway turned and looked up.

Tears flooded his eyes, and a huge smile lit his savaged face, when he saw Julian. It was recognition, not madness, because the first words Halloway said were, “I know why you’re here.”

Halloway knelt down by his bedside and pulled out his duffel. He unzipped it, dipped his hand into the bag and pulled out a ragged notebook. Sand dripped from it. He stared at the grains on his pant leg and studied them as if he were reading a map.

Julian watched.

Halloway took loose pieces of paper out of the notebook. He came back to Julian and handed him the papers.

What Julian saw scribbled out in a childlike manner in crayon were drawings of tornados of sunlight swirling in slashes of gray dots and black smoke, just like what Julian had seen in the warehouse after the explosion.

Halloway stared at Julian.

“You saw it, too?” Julian asked.

“Yes,” Halloway answered in a soft exhale of disquiet and release. It was as if he’d been holding his breath since the roadside bomb. His face and muscles relaxed as he told Julian of the swirling light and the smell of roses that happened to him that day in Fallujah.