The next day he went to the hardware store and bought a sheet of foam weatherstripping, came home, and stuffed it into the duct behind the master bedroom vent. That night, and every night after, he and Claire did their talking in the truck in the driveway with the windows rolled up.
VIII.
They tried. Later, when people asked, and people did ask, the way they ask about a car accident, wanting to know whether it could have been avoided, Daniel always said that first. They tried. He wanted that on the record.
The battalion chaplain was a tall Nigerian-American major named Grace Okafor. She had a laugh you could hear down the hall and a way of being completely silent when silence was what was needed. They saw her twice in October in her small office in the chapel annex, which smelled of burnt coffee and lemon furniture polish. Then she referred them to a civilian marriage counselor through Military OneSource, a soft-spoken woman in Midlothian named Dr. Ellen Marsh. Dr. Marsh kept a box of tissues on every flat surface of her office, and a framed print of a heron standing in still water. They saw her every Thursday at four o'clock from October through January. Daniel had expected to hate it. He didn't. He hated parts of it. But he came to respect the way Dr. Marsh refused to let either of them hide. She wouldn't let Claire hide inside apology or Daniel inside duty.