Then he said the thing Daniel had not expected. He said the reason he kept going over there wasn't really Claire. He loved her, maybe, or something like it, he didn't even know anymore. But it was the kid. It was Owen sitting next to him on the driveway handing him a socket wrench, asking him why engines need oil, asking him if it hurt when his fingers came off, asking him if he was scared of the dark too. Caleb said he had never in his life felt as much like a decent person as he felt when that kid looked at him. He said he knew that wasn't his to have. He said it was Daniel's. He said he had been stealing it, a little every Saturday, and he knew it, and he couldn't stop, and he was sorry. He said he was so sorry that he had thought, more than once in the last month, about the two bottles in the medicine cabinet.
Daniel turned around then and looked at him.
Caleb was sitting in the doorway with his knees drawn up and his ruined hand cupped in his good one, the way Owen held something he was afraid of dropping. He was crying, silently, without seeming to know it, the tears running into the patchy beard. He looked very young. He looked like a boy from Coos Bay with no one waiting for him.
Daniel would try for a long time afterward to explain to himself what happened next, and never managed it in a way that satisfied him. Maybe it was seventeen years of looking after soldiers. Maybe it was the aid station, the gray shaking face on the litter, the hand that had grabbed his sleeve. Maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe you can't pull a man out of a burning truck with your own hands and then watch him walk back into the fire.