"Where's Shadow?"
Marcus would glance at Jasmine over their daughter's head, a look that held the shelter and the park bench and the porch and the oak tree and the slammed door and the soft closing one. "Shadow's part of why we have each other," he would say. "It's a long story."
"Tell me," the child would insist, as children do.
And sometimes he would tell a shortened version, scrubbed for bedtime. And sometimes, when she was older, he would tell more: that love is not only what you feel when you walk through the door smiling. That love is also what you do when the door has slammed and the bowls are empty and the only way forward is through the worst thing someone you love has done. That a soldier can come home to a silence that feels like the end, and still find, in a concrete corridor that smells of disinfectant, a reason to begin again.
On those nights, after the child was asleep, Marcus would stand at the back door and look into the yard where the oak held its quiet stone, and Jasmine would come up behind him and rest her forehead between his shoulder blades, and Dusk would lean against their legs, and no one would need to say the old dialogue out loud for it to still be true in the bones of the house:
Babe, I'm home.