Caleb talked first. Daniel didn't look at him while he did it, and was grateful he didn't have to.
He said he had come to the house in May to bring the picture back and say what he had been told to say. That was all he meant to do. He said he had carried that picture through Landstuhl and Walter Reed and two surgeries. He had looked at it in the hospital when the pain medicine wore off at three in the morning. He had looked at Claire laughing and the kid with the shovel and the words on the back, THIS IS WHAT YOU GO HOME TO, until he believed them. Then he got home, and there was nothing to go home to. There was an apartment over a tire shop and a sister who didn't call back and a hand that wouldn't close. So he went to the house, because it was the only door he had.
He said he knew what he was. He said it a few times, in different ways. He said he was the guy everybody would tell this story about, the guy who went home and slept with his platoon sergeant's wife while the sergeant was still downrange, that it was the oldest, lowest thing a soldier could do, and that there had been a name for it in every army since the Romans. He said he wasn't going to tell Daniel it just happened, because that was a lie. It happened slowly, over weeks, and every week he knew where it was going, and he kept driving over there. He said he told himself it was okay because Daniel had told him to look in on them. He said that was the worst thing he had ever done, using Daniel's own words like that. He said he had stopped writing in June because he couldn't put Sergeant Harlan's name at the top of an email anymore.
He said Claire wasn't to blame. Daniel noticed he still said her name with care, the way you say a word in a church. He said she had been holding the whole world together by herself for seven months and was so tired she could barely see. He said he took advantage of that, whether he meant to or not. He said if Daniel was going to hate somebody, hate him, because he could take it, and he didn't have anything left for it to wreck.