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She cradled her wine glass in her hands. She didn’t drink alcohol often, and she was already swarmed by a heady sense of intoxication that had very little to do with Harry’s robust Cabernet Sauvignon. Will’s arm around her shoulder was filling her with the greatest sense of contentment she’d ever known.
“Do you think you will ever return to a warzone?”
The fire crackled in the grate. She felt Will’s heavy contemplation of the question. “I don’t know,” he said finally. “A month ago I would never have wanted to hang up my post as a war correspondent. It’s a dangerous job. But I relished that danger. I enjoyed being able to post stories from the heart of battles that most Americans could only imagine.”
“It is an honourable profession.”
He laughed. “You try telling my father that.”
She snuggled closer to his side. “People will always form their own opinions of you. Often such opinions have very little to do with the truth. If your father cannot see the valour in your work then perhaps he never would have. No matter what you did.”
Will tilted his head down and placed a kiss on her head. “He’s a tough son of a bitch.”
“Harry seems proud of you.”
Will curled his fingers around her shoulder. “Harry liked you,” he said with a grin. “And he’s a tough son of a bitch himself.”
“I can’t imagine what he must have gone through.” She sipped her wine to moisten her mouth. “What you both went through.”
Will was very still. Finally, he expelled a long, slow breath. “I was young. And arrogant as hell. I never thought anything like that would happen to me. I hadn’t seen then how fragile life is.”
“No amount of experience could ever prepare you for the death of your wife.”
“No,” he agreed. “Though I know now how instantaneously light can be extinguished from a person’s being. I have seen men take their last breath without any knowledge of it being so. I have held the hands of women, children, old men, as they’ve said prayers and waited for death to claim them. I have seen the callous way in which buildings are bombed from the skies and dozens of lives, sometimes hundreds, are gone, just like that. In a flash.”
She felt his heart thumping steadily and imagined she could sense the grief in it. “Was there… was there any hope for your child?”
His lips twisted. “No.”
The fire crackled some more and Lilah thought he had ended the conversation. But then he shifted a little, bringing his other hand to rest on her knee. He traced a finger over her leg. “They tried. They cut her open. They pulled our baby out. But she didn’t breathe.” His words were clinical, yet Lilah knew the depth of his feelings. “It was strange. She was perfect. She looked like a real baby. They cleaned her up and let me hold her.” He swallowed. “She was still warm. But not breathing. Not moving. Just a doll, really.”
Tears were dancing on Lilah’s eyelids and for once she made no effort to check them. They fell down her cheeks, gliding paths of desperation towards the floor. Will saw one splash onto her leg and he chased it with his finger.
“I named her Faith. Though back then, I’d lost my own. I named her Faith, and Harry came and sat with me while I held her. Beside my dead wife’s body. There we were. Two men grieving – both having lost daughters. Both having lost everything.”
Lilah sobbed and now she needed to be closer; to comfort him. To somehow help him. She lifted up and straddled him, wrapping her arms around his neck and kissing him gently. “I wish I could take that pain away. I am so sorry you went through that.”
He tilted his head back. “I buried them both. Side by side. I used to think maybe that meant they’d be together in heaven. That Maddie would have been a mom after all.”
“I’m sure she is. I’m sure they’re together somewhere.”
“Are you?” Will grimaced. “I don’t know. Having seen what men can do to one another, having seen how we can destroy life as though it is cheap and unimportant, I find it hard to believe anything good anymore.”
Lilah shivered. He was right to feel that. His sense was natural and just. “You were robbed, and their deaths served no purpose. But Will? She died knowing that you loved her. Knowing that, had you been in the store, you would have laid down your life to save hers. Your love would have comforted her, even at the end.”
“Perhaps. All I can hope is that she died hoping that it wasn’t the end.” He studied his hands, but he was, momentarily, dipping back into the past. “Faith was so tiny, but so perfect. I held her and I wished … I wished I could give life back to her.”
Lilah also stared at his big, strong, capable hands. So powerful yet so helpless
in that moment.
“When I was little, my parents died.” She continued to watch his hands, to imagine the pain it had caused him to nurse his poor little girl. “It was very hard to comprehend. Death, then, was an unknown concept to me. It was something, I supposed, that happened to old people: softly, in the middle hours of the night. But not my mother and father.” She bit down on her lip. “Kiral used to say to me, j’alam etat. He would say it over and over. At night, when I couldn’t sleep for crying he would whisper the words and hold my hand.”
“I don’t know what they mean,” Will said after a moment, though he considered himself to be fluent in her language.
“No. Nor did I. They’re from the ancient texts that my uncle used to read to Kiral. J’alam etat means, literally, Pain will Fade. The pain has become memory and those memories are more precious than gold dust. I guard them more than I do all the jewels of our kingdom.” Her smile was wistful. “Hold onto your memories, Will.”
He closed his eyes, remembering everything about the little baby. “They’re burned into me,” he said finally.
