They had emailed a few times that spring, Caleb from Landstuhl and then Walter Reed and then the Richmond VA. The emails were short and full of jokes that didn't land. Caleb mentioned once that he had been to the house. He said Claire was great. He said Owen was a trip. He said he had fixed the step, because you had been talking about that step since I've known you, Sarge, and somebody had to. Daniel had read that email in the plywood hooch with a lump in his throat and written back thanking him. He told him he was welcome there anytime. He told him to look in on them, to help Claire with anything that needed a man with tools and a truck, because he worried about her alone in that house. He told him that's what family does.
The emails from Caleb stopped around June. Daniel had assumed he was busy with rehab and figuring out his medical retirement. He had assumed a lot of things.
Sitting on the floor of the garage at five-thirty in the morning, he found he could hold two things at once and neither cancelled the other. He would not have done anything differently on the ninth of March. He would pull Caleb Strand out of that cab again, today, tomorrow, a hundred times. He would put his hands under his arms and pull until something gave. And he wanted, with a whiteness that frightened him, to put those same hands around his throat.
V.