He was bent over at the waist, his hands on his thighs. Around others, he kept a poker face at the sight of blood, but I knew him better. We dealt with a lot of blood. Together, we’d witnessed severed limbs from mine accidents, shotgun suicides, and shredded faces that had gone through car windshields. None of that compared with the horrors Darrell had seen as a marine in Korea, too. He remained stoic through all of it, but I knew how deeply he felt things, and blood in particular seemed to give him flashbacks of his days in the service.

Given how much my own dad was away, I’d grown up thinking of Darrell as almost a second father to me. He was the most solid, serious man I knew. Religious. Faithful. Humble. He’d told me once that life was a relay race, where you take the baton from your parents and pass it along to your children, and in between, you try to run around the track with as much strength and grace as you can. I liked that philosophy.

You wouldn’t really have been impressed to look at him. He wasn’t tall, and he’d never been a pretty boy like Ajax. Even in his sixties, he kept his hair military short, jet black, not a gray strand to be found anywhere. His nose had a drooping hook, and his ears looked big and wide under his buzz cut. His cheek had a long scar where a North Korean bullet had sliced him. It would have killed him if it had been another inch to the left. That kind of good fortune made him conscious of the choices he made in living his life, and he was determined to make the right ones.

If there was one quality about Darrell that sometimes made me bite my tongue, it was that he had a black-and-white outlook on the world. Things were good, or things were bad. Things were right, or things were wrong. His own moral compass always pointed due north, so he was quick to pass judgment on people. Even at my young age, I’d figured out that the world was a lot more complicated than that.

“I’m sorry, Rebecca,” Darrell said when I joined him. He was still bent over, breathing hard.

“For what?”

“For telling Ajax to keep his hands off you. I know you hate that.”

“Don’t worry about it.” I noticed the pale cast of his face. “Are you okay? That was an ugly scene back there.”

“I’ll be fine. I’ve seen worse.”

I shoved my hands in my pockets and glanced across the white field of snow. “I know that, but you don’t have to pretend with me.”

Darrell straightened up, wiping away a little sweat that had gathered on his brow even on a cold night. “Thanks.”