X.
A year later, almost to the day, it was late afternoon on Larkspur Court again. The sweetgums were dropping their spiky seed balls on the sidewalk again, and somebody's sprinkler was ticking, and the light came in low and gold.
Daniel parked the truck at the curb in front of fourteen and sat for a moment with the engine running. He had come straight from the schoolhouse at Fort Gregg-Adams and was still in uniform, the same pattern of camouflage, the sleeves rolled. He had spent the day teaching a classroom of young staff sergeants how to plan a convoy and how to read a road for culverts. He was good at it. He had not expected to be good at it, or to like it. Some days, watching a twenty-five-year-old from Alabama or Guam or the Bronx finally see the danger in a map, he felt that he was pulling them out of ditches before they ever got into one. It wasn't master sergeant. But it was something.