Page 100 of Duty Preserved

I waited again. My hand stayed on his arm.

“Twenty-two. Fresh out of basic training. A tech geek who could go on forever about anything. He’d talk your ear off about radio frequencies or signal encryption and the best firmware for a handheld GPS. And he followed me around everywhere I went. I told him to leave me alone more times than I can count. Didn’t matter. He just kept showing up.”

He went quiet. His jaw was moving like he was chewing the next words he was about to say.

“He was a new guy, and I took him under my wing to mentor and train him. Six months, I trained him leading up to a deployment. He soaked up knowledge like a sponge.” Donovan’s hands pressed harder against his thighs. “The command asked me if he was good to go to deploy. I told them he was.”

I didn’t speak.

“I sent him out. His first mission on his own. I looked at everything he could do, and I decided he was prepared for it.”

“What happened?”

“He died.”

The two words hit hard. Like a judge’s gavel.

“I made the call,” he said. “I looked at a twenty-two-year-old kid who trusted me, and I told command he was ready. They sent him out. He didn’t come home.”

His head was still down. The faint light from the window caught the outline of his profile. His head was bowed, and his whole body was hunched forward.

“That’s why I left the Army,” he said. “I couldn’t do it anymore. I couldn’t look at another young soldier and be the one who decided whether they were good enough. Because the last time I did that, I got it wrong.”

His pulse was racing under my hand where it rested on his arm.

“And now you’re doing it again,” I said quietly.

He turned his head toward me. Even in the dark, it landed.

“Every day.” His voice was stripped bare. “Every drill I run, every scenario I walk them through. I look at Zayn. I look at Baraka. I look at all of them. And I see Owen.”

Silence held in the cabin.

I understood now. All of it. The nightmares that started when the training changed. The gaps during the day where the steadiness cracked. It was what I’d heard behind his words weeks ago.

The training had changed because the threat had changed. Obstacle courses and patrol formations had become contact drills. How to move when someone was shooting at you. How to fight and survive. And Donovan was the one teaching them. Similar work to what he’d been teaching Owen. And it had all culminated in Owen still getting killed.

I pulled my hand off his arm. He looked at me.

“I lose animals,” I said.

He was quiet.

“I lose them all the time. Animals I’ve treated for weeks. Animals I’ve put my hands on and poured everything I know into keeping alive. I do the work right. I follow every protocol. I make the best call I can with what I have, and sometimes they die anyway.”

He didn’t look away.

“When I was in school, I lost a horse. A mare with a displaced colon. I’d done the surgery twice before on other animals, and both times it worked. This one, I did everything the same. Every step. And she died on the table.”

I pulled up my knees and wrapped my arms around them.

“I called my dad that night and told him I wasn’t cut out for it. That if I couldn’t keep a horse alive doing a procedure I already knew, I had no business being a vet. And he said, Sarah, if you didn’t care, it wouldn’t hurt this much. The hurt is how you know you did everything you could.”

Donovan’s breathing had settled. He was listening.

“You trained Owen the best way you knew how. You gave him everything you had. You made a judgment call, and it was the same kind of call every person in charge of someone else has to make. That doesn’t mean you got it wrong. It means the outcome was terrible, and you’re the one who has to carry it.”

“He was twenty-two.”