Evan's brow clouded over-he couldn't remember. For an awful moment, he thought he might have forever lost the real reason he'd come to see Tara today. He hadn't come to tell her he loved her. He hadn't been sure of that until he was with her. But then they'd started talking and that had come out and now he was unable to retrieve the real purpose of his trip here. "I'm trying to remember," he said. "Can you give me a couple of seconds?"
This was the first time she was seeing an effect of his injury, and he was acutely aware that this moment might change everything forever between them. He might, in her eyes, now be damaged, challenged, handicapped-somehow not as sharp as he'd been, not quite exactly the same person. Not quite her equal.
He couldn't let that happen.
Closing his eyes, concentrating, he thought,
At once, she was all the way with him again. Her expression now relaxed, she moved a few steps toward him, her arms crossed over her chest. "I can do simple factual," she said. A smile played around her mouth.
"Okay. Do you remember when you first heard about me getting hurt?"
Her quizzical look stayed on him for a long moment, as though she were surprised that he would have to ask that question at all. "Sure," she said. "I ran into your mom at the grocery store one night. I think it was a few days before Christmas. I know it was a few days before I called you."
"You mean called me at Walter Reed? When I didn't talk to you?"
"Right."
"You're sure of that? The time, I mean. Just before Christmas."
"Of course. That's when it was. When else would I have heard?"
"How about back when it happened? Say, September?"
"No way, Evan. How could I have known then?"
He shrugged. "Well, when did you start seeing Ron Nolan?"
"What does Ron have to do with that?"
"I would have thought he'd have mentioned it, that's all."
"He never knew about it, Evan. You guys all got transferred out of his base the week he got back."
Evan canted his head a bit to one side. Studying her expression, he read only sincerity, openness, perhaps a bit of confusion. But one thing was clear-she was telling him the truth as she knew it.
"We got transferred?"
"That's what Ron said."
"Where'd we get tranferred to, Tara? Did he tell you that?"
"No. I don't think he knew."
"Right. He didn't know. You know why? Because we weren't transferred. We ran our last mission out of Baghdad Airport, where we'd been with Ron all along. You can look it up."
The germ of confusion spread like a plague over her features. Mouth tightened, brow furrowed, eyes darting, seeking a place to land. "But…" The word hung in the room between them. Her arms hung down, inanimate at her side. "I don't get this."
"Ron was with us in the convoy, Tara. He was in my Humvee. He was next to me when I got hit."
"No. That can't be true."
"Why would I make it up, Tara?"
"I'm not saying you're making it up, Evan. Although I could see a reason why you might. But I don't think you'd do that."
"I wouldn't. I'm not making it up," he said. "It's what happened."
She held his gaze for a minute, and then, her voice barely audible, grabbed at the next straw. "Maybe…I mean, I'm just thinking, could it be with what happened to your head…maybe you don't remember it all exactly?"
He nodded-sober, patient, restrained. "That's a legitimate question. I have forgotten some stuff. I don't remember whole days and weeks from when I woke up. But Ron was with us in that convoy. I remember everything about that. If you still don't believe it, you can look it all up on the Web. Just Google Masbah." He spelled the name of the neighborhood in Baghdad. "It's all there. He's the reason it all went down. And that's the reason he had to get out of Iraq so fast. They were starting the investigation, and he knew it led straight to him."
The color had drained from her face. Her eyes flitted to the corners of the room as though she hoped to find some answer there. She brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. Placing her hand flat on one of the students' desktops for support, she lowered herself into the connected chair. "He told me he had no idea you'd been hurt," she said, "that he found out about it from me after I ran into your mom that night and she told me."
"Christmastime."
She nodded. "Definitely."
"And he told you he knew nothing about it before?"
"Nothing. I swear, Evan. No, he swore. He'd never heard a thing about it."
"He didn't have to hear about it, Tara," Evan said. "He was there. He fired the first shots."
