Julian went to the bar in a corner of the den and poured himself a scotch.

“Brent Samuels wants to talk with you.”

“Not interested.”

“You don’t even know why.”

“I’d have to come from another planet to not know you want me to go into politics. And somehow you convinced him, and who knows who else, the government needs a soldier. I guess my almost getting killed improved my stock, huh?”

Ledge changed his tactic.

“Have you thought about what you want to do, then?”

Julian pressed two fingers into his temples.

“I worry about you.”

“I’m fine.”

“If you need to talk to someone—”

“I said I’m fine.”

Julian turned to leave the room.

“We didn’t try to kill you. That’s not what we tried to do.”

“I know about the ‘errant bomb.’ Shit happens.”

Julian had been steeped in the impossible knot of war. The wondrous acts of courage. The acts of evil. The strange miracles of bombs that didn’t go off. The horror of the ones that did. Bullets that missed. Those that didn’t. And he wondered if he could ever return to a life beyond that cauldron. He’d mastered the art of defense with an exquisite lethal skill that kept him alive. But a gnawing in his gut had scattered the deck of his life into corners he didn’t want to go. He saw a similar helplessness in his father’s eyes and sensed they had more in common, but shrugged off the thought.

He walked to the sideboard to pour himself another drink, popping a pill out of his pocket without even checking to see the color.

“How was your visit to Walter Reed?” Ledge asked, surprising Julian, who turned on him and said, “You spying on me?”

“I’m concerned.”

“Is there anything you don’t stick your fucking fingers in?”

Ledge moved closer to his son.

“I wasn’t there when you were young.”

Julian raised a hand, a sign to keep his father at a distance.

“I don’t need you to make up for it.”

But he did. He needed his father and mother, neither of whom had been there for him, to atone for the years of absence in his younger life. But his mother was at the bottom of another bottle in her bedroom upstairs; desperate for the innocence she’d lost. And his father struggled for forgiveness.

“We have no idea what happened to turn that drone around.”

“Yeah. Life’s full of mysteries,” Julian said, as he left the room.

But Ledge lied. He knew why the drone had turned around.

26

26

Ledge walked into his wife’s bedroom. They’d slept in separate rooms for years, and long ago stopped pretending there was any relationship here to salvage.

“Did you tell him?” she asked, standing at the window, a drink in her hand. She answered her own question. “Of course you didn’t.”

“You’re drunk.”