Chapter 11

Reese has been punched, kicked, shot, tortured in almost every way imaginable. None of them hurt in this way, this expanding hollowness in his chest, this tightening of his throat. This room, fussy with faux antiques, was already feeling claustrophobic, but now it actually hurts to breathe.

The truth is, he's afraid of her, and he's afraid to speak. As long as he doesn't speak, he doesn't have to tell her all of the things he's done. As long as he doesn't speak, he can remain at a point in time somewhere before he loses her again.

Because that, Reese is certain, is how this will end. Somehow, he's going to lose her again. She'll still be angry he left her all those years ago. She'll hate the things he's done, the person he's become. And his second chance will collapse into dust, slip through his fingers, spread roiling clouds over the expensive carpet.

But he's been wrong; he's been losing her ever since they walked through the door, losing her with silence. The last time he saw her, she criticized him for not having the courage to ask her to wait for him, and she was right. Reese has faced down any number of dangerous situations without fear because he's had nothing to lose. Now, faced with a very real, very precious thing to lose, he has no courage.

And yet, even if he lacks courage, at least he still has the fear, and the fear is enough to make him step away from the window. How can he tell her? How can he tell her that to understand where he is, you have to understand what it is to be in the middle of the ocean. Not above the surface, treading water, but truly in the middle of the ocean, below the surface, fathoms deep, alone in the nothingness and looking up, seeing the light and knowing that you want nothing more than to be in the light.

But each attempt to swim up, to escape, to go towards the light, only results in you being pulled down, farther and farther, until you are on the ocean floor, and the light is so very far away, so far that you know will never escape. And so you stay on the ocean floor, and you are very, very lucky when someone comes along and shows you that even here, you can do the only thing you ever wanted to do in the first place: protect people, save lives. You will never reach the surface, but at least this is something. Something to live for, here on the ocean floor, with the water pushing in on you.

This is not something he can explain. Not immediately, the way she wants him to. So he goes back, farther, to the things that nearly destroyed him back then, and seem so basic, so innocuous now. He takes the few steps to the couch and sits down beside her and tells her that although he'd been in combat before, it was nothing like this, choking on your own fear for days at a time, death behind every window, in every car on the streets. He tells her about the young Iraqi men wearing vests packed with C4, and the men those vests killed, and the way it feels to enter an apartment complex in Ramadi with nothing but dead soldiers and missing limbs and revenge on your mind.

And she does not flinch. She does not flinch and she asks him why he couldn't tell her about this, back when they were together, back when she might have helped him. I don't know, he says, because he doesn't know how to explain that he was already sinking.

He tells her about how he took six months of leave to go back to Connecticut and sit beside his father, dying in a hospital bed, and that of all the deaths he's seen, the slow deaths, the quick deaths, the one constant has been pain. He tells her about watching them disconnect his father's respirator, about the desperate, gasping breaths around the tumor in his throat. About the realization when they turned the crank to put the casket in the ground that he'd never cried.

He tells her about rejoining his unit, now in Afghanistan. About the mission where he was taken by insurgents and shocked, over and over and over again, with a rusted pair of jumper cables attached to a truck battery. About the fuzzy sensation of being rescued, about waking in a hospital bed to find a man in a black suit sitting beside him.

We're impressed with the way you held up back there, son, the man told him. Reese may have added the "son" in his mind, later, he tells her, but that was the tone: we like your background, son; the CIA would like to make you a job offer, son; now you can make a real difference for your country, son.

He tells her about the year of training, the sleep deprivation and days and nights spent crawling through a swamp, still not nearly as bad as an active war zone. Like a year off, he says, and he almost manages to smile. And then he stops, because now he must tell her he is a killer.

She reaches out, takes his hand, tells him it's okay, to keep going. Don't, he thinks, don't try to pull me up from here, because I will just pull you down with me. And maybe she's not part of the innocent world anymore, but she doesn't belong at the bottom of the ocean.

Reese has killed more than two hundred people in his life, but the greater number of them have been on the battlefield, in war, where the kills still make you wake up occasionally in a cold sweat, even in the desert, but there's always some semblance of rules of engagement, even in a guerrilla war. In war, everyone sets himself up to kill or be killed.

But there are 25 men and 3 women he has killed, with premeditation. Killed in cold blood, killed under orders from his CIA handlers. He's killed them with a sniper rifle from the rooftop of a nearby building. He's killed them with poison slipped in their drinks and quick-slip injections in thick crowds. He's killed them with guns and knives at close range, and disposed of the bodies in ways that made him feel like even less of a human than the actual kills did.

And there was the time he came to realize that none of it was what he'd signed up for. None of it was what the man in the black suit had promised, son, and if this was what it took to serve his country, then he couldn't believe in his country anymore. There was the growing realization that perhaps his country wasn't giving the orders, perhaps this didn't just feel illegal, perhaps this actually was illegal, that somehow he'd signed on with some rogue faction, some group serving its own interests, under the auspices of the CIA, perhaps, but off the books.

There was the day he walked into the safehouse in Calexico, and found Cara Stanton's bullet-riddled body on the floor, and known in an instant that they were going to burn him, that they would not tolerate an unfaithful soldier fighting in whatever war this was.

This is what he tells her, and she whispers, "Oh, John," but she does not release his hand.