**HOLBORN, MANCHESTER STREETS. SEPTEMBER 21: ADMIS... (original) (Branch) (Branch) (Branch) (Branch) (Branch) (Branch) (Branch)

HOLBORN, MANCHESTER STREETS. SEPTEMBER 21: ADMISSION TO ST. THOMAS MENTAL CLINIC.

The rain came thin as wire and just as unforgiving, shaving the shine off the pavements until everything down Holborn looked lacquered and slick. It drummed the roof of his car, quiet and steady, a metronome for the thoughts he didn’t want. The engine hummed in that tight, unsettled way—idle too high, or maybe he was just hearing his pulse in it—and the wipers ticked back and forth, carving temporary windows through the night. Simon’s hands sat heavy on the wheel, the leather pebbled under his palms, knuckles showing pale like chalk where grip turned to a clenched sort of prayer. He refused to look left for too long because every time he did he saw her, too much of her—cheeks a bit hollow, mouth slack, that blur to her gaze he’d learned to hate. Clarisse Amelia Brooks, Sergeant in the book, prodigy with a rifle and a brain calibrated to angles and wind and time-to-target, and right now every bit of that brilliance drowned beneath whatever she’d put into herself. He could smell it on her the way you smell war on a man—metal and sick and a sweetness that wasn’t sweet.

He didn’t speak for a while. He didn’t need to. The city’s wet breath pressed against the windows, and the car’s heater tried and failed to make it feel like anywhere else. She breathed beside him on delay, each inhale late to the party like her lungs were answering from another room. Drool threaded silver from the corner of her lip and pooled at the hinge of her jaw, and sometimes her throat worked around a swallow that didn’t fully happen. Her eyes—Christ, her eyes—rolled and found the lights outside and didn’t keep them, like they were fish jerking on a line. Her pupils were wrong, the wrong regulation, too tight under the stuttering street lamps; he’d memorised that, could see it even in the shadows. He’d memorised all of it: the micro-flinch when a sudden noise hit, the way the tendons in her hand twitched like she was still counting shots on a rooftop, the flutter of pulse at her throat too fast then too slow then too fast again, and the blue that didn’t belong on her lips, just faint like a bruise a mouth could make.

When he finally spoke, his voice came out ground down to steel. “I’m taking ya to rehab.” He didn’t look at her; he looked at the road. The words sat between them like a detonation that had already happened. The rain kept timing them—tap, tap, tap—and the leather under his hands creaked because he hadn’t noticed how tight he’d gone. He tasted the phantom of a cigarette he hadn’t lit, tongue finding a ghost of smoke, the itch in his fingers wicked as a rash. He swallowed it and felt it burn anyway.

She made a sound at him, nothing with shape, just noise that floated over the drumming roof like spit on a hot plate. He saw her mouth try to form a word and fail the landing. Her hands, usually so precise—a woman who could slot a round through a moving gap at 800 metres and call it a warm-up—opened and closed like she’d forgotten what hands were for. He watched the fingers curl. He watched them twitch. He watched a tremor pass up her forearm like some small, mean animal moving under skin.

“Stop,” she mumbled, syllables stuck in wet cotton. “Stop, Simon—stop—no—don’t—” The consonants were barbed wire; they snagged. He stared ahead, jaw going rope-hard. The rain made the whole city look underwater. Pools formed in the gutter, a slick mirror of every mistake he’d made in the last six months. If he let himself count them he’d lose count with room to spare.

He said nothing, because words at this point felt like throwing matches into the Thames. But his mind had its own ugly mouth. He saw again the way he’d found her earlier—that flat in Southwark he’d bullied her into taking instead of that rotten bedsit near Elephant because “if you insist on living alone, Claire, you’re not living in a hole”—how the door had yielded to the key he kept like contraband, how the air had been thick with the metallic tang of a body going wrong. He’d stepped in and checked corners without thinking—old habits polishing the dark—then seen her on the sofa in a sprawl that wasn’t sleep. Her skin had gone waxy under the freckles he knew by constellation. A sheen of sweat glued curls to her forehead. The mess on the coffee table had told him enough, more than enough, nothing he wanted to catalogue. He kept his eyes from the specifics. He didn’t touch the kit. He touched her. He’d crouched and said her name loud enough to bounce off walls, and when she hadn’t come up fast enough for the fear boiling his blood, he’d raised the volume to the sort of tone you use when your teammate’s about to step on a mine. She’d answered delayed, eyes half-masted, a slow turn of the head and a smile that missed its mark, and then vomit, sudden as gunfire, down her front and onto the rug. He’d been there with a towel in a heartbeat, cursing at nothing, fingers on her neck to feel for a pulse like he had any right to, counting between breaths and not liking the count. He hated how steady his hands stayed while the inside of him tried to sprint.

Fourth time he’d found her like that. Fourth. Once in her flat, twice in the base’s toilets—locked stall, boots visible under the door, too still for taking a piss—and once in a briefing room with the lights off, her head lolling back on a chair as if the presentation had bored her to sleep. He’d covered her the first three. He’d cleaned her up and lied without blinking. He’d intercepted questions with that dead-eyed efficiency that made him good at pretending his heart had left the building years ago. He’d dragged her to the medbay under some other pretext or watched her like a wolf until he could get her to the barracks and sit with her, back to the door, counting the seconds between the rise and fall, making sure there was a next one. He’d told himself he was buying time so she could stand up and decide to stop. He’d told himself he was holding the line until she found it again. He’d told himself anything because telling himself the truth was too big, too bright, and threatened to blind him: that she was killing herself in square inches and he was letting it happen because he loved her and didn’t know how to make love into action without turning it into orders.

He’d done his homework. Christ, had he. He’d sat up nights scrolling on a phone held in hands that wanted to punch through plaster, reading what he could stomach—symptoms, behaviours, treatment, relapse, the way the brain hacks itself to make room for the thing that eats it. He’d looked at clinics until every website blurred into a glossy brochure of smiling liars. He’d talked to the right people without saying too much, priced things that should’ve been priceless, looked for places that wouldn’t grind her into dust or treat her like one of his lads who’d lost a step. He’d made calls. He’d said his name and then not said his name. He’d heard the phrases—“dual diagnosis”, “detox protocol”, “individualised plan”—and measured which ones rang true by the tone of the person saying them. He’d chosen St. Thomas because it wasn’t flashy and it didn’t need to be, because the woman on the phone sounded like she’d seen a thousand versions of this and still found room for one more. He’d paid the deposit with a clinical, military sort of hatred, the kind that fixes itself on a target and doesn’t let go. He’d packed the bag without asking her. He’d put in worn T-shirts she stole from him half the time anyway, soft joggers, a scarf she’d fallen asleep under on his sofa after a long op, toiletries he knew she liked because he knew the sound those lids made when she clicked them shut.

Price had clocked it weeks before Simon said a word. Of course he had. The old bastard had eyes like weather—rolling in slow, smelling rain before anyone else. He’d leaned on a door frame outside an empty range and lit a cigarillo he wasn’t supposed to have indoors and said, very quiet, “You’re covering for her.” No accusation. Just a fact placed gently on the table between them. Simon had stared at the paper target downrange like he could stare it into telling him what to do. “Aye,” he’d said after an uncounted minute. Price had nodded, as if that slotted into his map of the world, and said, “Sort it.” That had been the whole sermon. Later, when rumours started to show their teeth, Price had put his palm down over all of it and told the lads with the ease of a man who’d led boys into hell and brought at least some of them back: “Sergeant Brooks is on leave. That’s the beginning and the end.” Gaz’s mouth had flattened to a worrying line; Kyle had a good, big heart and the look in his eyes said he’d clocked more than he wanted. Soap had swallowed swears and offered jokes at the edges like he always did, trying to sew stitches with laughter. Simon hadn’t taken any of it. Simon had kept his distance and sharpened himself on the idea that doing the hard thing was the only thing left.

Now, rain hitting the quarter panel in a rhythm that made his molars ache, he shot a glance left because he couldn’t stop himself. She’d slipped sideways again, head listing toward the window like gravity had singled her out for punishment. Her breath fogged a damp flower onto the glass. Her lashes were clumped with wet. Her grey eyes—those odd, lovely eyes he’d catalogued against a dozen backgrounds, city rooftops and desert dawns—kept trying to find him and failing like he’d moved too far away. He swallowed something animal and useless.

She tried to speak again. Tried to marshal her tongue into forming a proper insult. “Turn… back,” she managed, each word an anchor dropped in mud. “Not… not goin’. I hate you.” The last came out clearer, and for a second she sounded like her, the cadence right, the bite sharp. It cut him. He didn’t bleed. He’d learned long ago how to stop that. But Christ, it cut. He let the pain move through and out like a round-through-and-through, a neat exit wound to show for it.

He pulled the car to the curb where the clinic’s frontage stood shy and simple against a parade of offices and solicitors. St. Thomas’s sign made no promises it couldn’t keep. The windows were clean, no tint, no hidden glamour. That was one of the reasons he’d picked it. No theatre. You went in, you did the work, or you didn’t, and either way the walls didn’t pretend to carry you. He shut off the engine and the sudden quiet landed heavy. The rain became louder for it. It always did.

He turned to her. Irritation wrestled with a gentler violence on his face, all of it undercut with something that never found the light around anyone else. He reached and caught her face between his palms, roughened hands gone careful. The pads of his thumbs sat against the hollows of her cheeks, and he felt heat there that wasn’t right, feverish from the inside out, skin clammy under it. He could feel a tremor chasing along her jaw, clacking teeth softly like dice in a cup.

“Honey,” he said, and winced at his own mouth for using the word. He didn’t do sweet. He didn’t do pet names. He did necessity and he did need and he did fury. But this had come from the place he didn’t interrogate. “Listen to me.” He dipped his head until his skull nearly touched hers, his breath fogging her hairline, rain ticking the car like static. “I wanna lend ya a hand, but this is your final shot, capisce? I’m fed up with rescuin’ you every single time. I’m not your bleedin’ babysitter, sweetie. Got my own dramas to deal with, y’savvy?”

Her eyes filled like a storm you could forecast by the ache behind your own eyes. Tears didn’t fall right away; they pooled, fattened, then slipped. It should’ve satisfied some grim ledger inside him—yes, good, feel it, let it burn—but it only made parts of him he didn’t have names for lurch around and bruise. He held her face a second longer and felt, in the ragged, shameful way a man can feel his own hands when they’re trying to mend what they’ve hurt, a scar under his shirt twinge like a bad omen. He resented his own body for thinking it had the right to a conscience.

He let go. The loss of his grip made her sway. He grabbed the keys and the bag he’d packed with the efficiency that had gotten him through too many doors with too many guns behind them. He stepped into the rain and lit a cigarette with cupped hands, lighter flame fighting the wind, then the first pull like a punch to the lungs. The relief was filthy, like scratching a rash until blood came. He hated that it helped. He took two drags and crushed it under his heel because he wouldn’t walk in stinking. He opened her door and bent to her, one forearm braced on the roof to keep the rain off her face.

“On your feet,” he said, and that came out officer-sharp. She moved as if responding to a command from a long way away. Her legs were a broken message. When she swung them out, the pavement waited a little too patiently, and she missed it by an inch on the first try like a drunk misjudging a step. She tried again. Her knee buckled. He slid a hand under her elbow and felt the bones as if the muscle had thinned in the hours since he last took stock. She stood. A victory only if you counted small.

“No—no—no,” she said, a litany on loop, and spat the last one as if she could eject the reality by force. “Fuck you, Simon. Hate you. You—” The rest fell apart. Her tongue fumbled. Drool slicked her lip again and her swallow stuck halfway like something in the mechanism had gummed up.

He hated hospitals. He hated stairs. He hated doors. He hated anything that made her shrink like this, all that power turned to a child’s clumsy fight. He’d had to bribe her with silence before, promise to keep his mouth shut in medbay if she’d just get her ribs looked at, just get a bandage on a leg she insisted wasn’t bad. Now he had no bribe. He had only the one thing left to spend.

“Look at me,” he said, and she tried, and her gaze drifted an inch to the left then returned with effort. “This is happening.” It wasn’t a threat and it wasn’t a plea. It was a line drawn with a boot in wet dirt. “You don’t go in, I leave.” The words tasted like rust and cost like blood. “You stay like this, you’re on your own. I mean it.” He watched the meaning arrive through fog into her understanding, saw some recognition flinch in the space between two slow blinks. He didn’t say the rest: I can’t watch you die like this. I can’t be the call they make when you stop breathing. I can’t love you from the edges while you carve yourself out from the middle. He didn’t say any of that because he wasn’t sure language could carry it.

She lunged to stand without him because stubbornness had been her first religion, and the world tilted under her. He was already there when she went down. He didn’t even think about it. He caught her under the arms as her knees met pavement and saved her face from striking the side of the car, her cheek glancing instead off his forearm. Pain flared through old scar tissue and he welcomed it because it gave him somewhere to put the other pain. “Jesus, Claire,” he hissed, not a prayer. She tried to fight him like water fights a dam—no plan, just pressure. She did not have the coordination to make it count. He drew her up, her breath hot on his neck and wrong again, shallow then gasping, then shallow. He counted. He stopped counting when he didn’t like the count.

Her skin was clammy where his hand found her wrist. He could feel tendons jumping, a bird trapped and mad. The inside of her elbow, where the arm bent into that little hollow he’d kissed in other contexts, was an atlas of bruises old and new. He didn’t let himself catalogue them too far down. He didn’t let himself think of the night he’d seen fresh marks during something that was meant to be respite, not revelation—the way he’d noticed, mid-heat, the angry red along a vein, and the way the bottom had dropped out of him faster than gravity permits. He’d gone still and cold and she’d known he’d known. She’d looked away and gone quiet the way she always did when cornered by reality. He’d pretended just long enough to make it a conversation and not a catastrophe in a bed that smelled like them. Then he’d lost the pretending and the argument had been a bloodletting with no cutting.

“Come here,” he said now, guiding rather than dragging, the bag’s strap biting into his other shoulder. He’d packed too much on purpose, made weight into a choice—take what you need, stay, settle in. Her feet didn’t always land where she aimed. He adjusted for it, an inch to the left, a half-step more pressure on the hip. He felt her shiver through the thin cotton of her shirt and thought about the radiators in that clinic already turned up, clean bedding, a room that didn’t smell like the gym and cordite and his detergent.

He kept touching her face with his eyes. She was beautiful in the way burn scars are beautiful—proof of fire and the living through it—and she was not beautiful now, not this blue at the mouth, not this unfocused. He could see the woman who’d held a rifle like an instrument inside the woman who couldn’t keep her balance, and he wanted to grab her by both shoulders and shake until the cage door opened and the right one stepped out. He didn’t. He tightened his jaw until his teeth protested and he breathed slowly, the way he’d learned to breathe when he wanted to put a knife through the table and instead had to drink tea.

“You’re angry,” she slurred, looking at his chest because that was where her eyes landed when his face was too much. “You always angry.” The words rode a wave of nausea; he saw it. He got the plastic bag from the door pocket up under her chin in time for the retch that wracked her. It came up thin and bitter, bile and gas and regret. He twisted the bag shut with a neatness that would have been funny in any other universe and set it aside. He wiped her mouth with his sleeve, careless of the damp, because it was his sleeve and because he’d lost the right to care about clean months ago.

He looked past her at the clinic’s door. He’d spoken to the woman at the desk earlier. He’d used a name that wasn’t his but was still true in a way that mattered. He’d said, “She’ll be out of her head,” and the woman had said, “We’ll be ready,” in a tone that didn’t promise miracles, just readiness. He clung to that. Readiness. He could live with that.

He thought in streaks that couldn’t be said out loud. Price’s hand on his shoulder once, heavy, warm. “You’re not God,” the Captain had said, quiet. “You don’t get to decide who gets saved. You only get to decide if you’ll help.” Gaz had left tea at her door like a neighbour with good manners. Johnny had sworn at the telly louder than necessary on nights she wasn’t there to swear back. The holes she left were suddenly visible to men who’d thought they’d patched themselves up fine. Simon had felt it like a draft in winter. He’d lit a cigarette about it and smoked it down to the filter.

Her body gave a treacherous little sway again, and he shouldered her into the line of him, his arm a bar across her back. He pressed two fingers softly to the side of her neck under the jawline, an old habit he couldn’t drop, felt the erratic rhythm like a drummer off his meds. He made an inventory because counting things was a way to make the world smaller and more manageable: lips discoloured, yes; pupils too small, check; skin clammy, check; breathing shallow with occasional gasp—he didn’t put numbers to it; tremors, present; speech slurred; gait unsteady to the point of hazard; cognition fluctuating with periods of agitation; affect labile—God, listen to him, a walking textbook—but the textbook kept him from falling apart, and he’d take whatever scaffolding he could get.

She fixed on the clinic’s sign as if it was looking back at her and whispered, “No,” with sudden clarity. Tears shocked her cheeks slick again. “Don’t put me there.” The last word bent like metal under heat. He lowered his head until his mouth was near her ear, the rain stuttering on the brim of his cap and running off in little rivers.

“I’m not putting you anywhere,” he said, voice soft like a leather strap. “I’m bringing you. Big difference.” He let the anger show then, because sometimes she needed the shape of it to push against. “You think I like this? You think this is a good time for me? I’ve been pulling you out the fire for months and you keep jumpin’ back in like you’re tryin’ to prove a point to the flames.” He felt her flinch under the words and pressed them anyway, not cruel but not gentle. “I love you,” he didn’t say. “I am terrified,” he didn’t say. “You’re not the only one with scars,” he didn’t say. What he said was, “Enough.”

She went quiet. The air between them filled with the rain and their breath. A siren somewhere played a long, thin note and then disappeared. London went about her endless business. Simon adjusted his grip and lifted the bag higher onto his shoulder until the strap bit into muscle and told him he was here.

“Claire,” he said, swinging her name like a rope between boats. “Look at me.” She managed it this time. Grey irises, silvered at the rims by the streetlights, found focus and held. “It’s this or a body bag,” he said, not interested in whispering. “Those are the options. I’m done pretending there’s a third.” He could taste ash he hadn’t smoked yet.

She shut her eyes. Her lashes touched her skin like lines of black thread. When she opened them again, defeat wasn’t what looked back at him. It was something worse, and also better. It was surrender that had a little spine in it. She nodded, barely, as if her neck was a bad hinge. The effort cost her. He saw the nausea surge again and then recede. She said, very small, “Don’t leave me,” and it was a little girl voice and not a sergeant’s and he felt his whole chest try to cave in to make room.

“I won’t,” he said, the lie and the truth married in one syllable. He wouldn’t leave her now. He would leave if she left herself. He’d said he would. He meant it. He hated that he meant it. He let the words be what they were and didn’t pick them apart in front of her.

He moved them forward. The pavement sucked at their boots with wet. The clinic’s steps were shallow and few and felt like a mountain. She stumbled on the first, cursed him and God and the architect under her breath, then made the second with his hand a firm bracket at her elbow. The glass doors stood ahead, throwing back a ghost of them—his bulk, her lean, the bag like a third person slung between them. The interior lights were too clean. He saw the woman at the desk clock them and stand, ready. He couldn’t hear her words through the glass and the rain. He didn’t need to. Readiness was the shape of her shoulders.

“You’re shaking,” he said uselessly, and felt her teeth click once like a metronome warming up. “I know,” she tried to say, and slurred it into “’knaw.” Her breath came in three quick sips and then a hold that made his hand on her back feel the absence. He resisted the instinct to bang her between the shoulder blades like a clogged machine. He breathed with her, slower, hoping some old animal part of her would match him. She did, a little. They stole a beat together.

He remembered other beats. The cadence of her footfalls on a corrugated rooftop, counted off in his ear. The rhythm of her laugh drowned under a hand in the back of an SUV while rain did this same song on the roof, easier times that weren’t easy at all. The pattern of her sarcasm in the debrief, precise as burst fire. The lullabies they’d never admit to humming in each other’s chests when the world didn’t want them anymore for an hour or two. He set them down like coins at a shrine and didn’t take them back.

“Price knows?” she asked, sudden and sharp around all her blurring, like she’d hit a clear patch in the fog. He blinked in surprise. “Aye,” he said. No use lying to a woman who could read the angle of a shoulder at 900 metres. “He’s with you. We all are.” He didn’t add that “with you” meant a thousand tiny griefs and a hundred soft watchful silences and a dozen hard decisions being rehearsed in private. He didn’t add that Johnny had called him a right bastard and then hugged him so hard his ribs had complained, because love in their world was a brawl or it wasn’t love at all. He didn’t add that Gaz had said nothing and looked at him like a man who’d put down a dog and was still hearing it howl in dreams. He didn’t add that Price had taken him aside and said, “You do the part that’s yours, son, and let the rest be hers,” in a voice that remembered all the boys who didn’t get a clinic, just a folded flag. He didn’t add any of it. He saved it for later, if there was a later.

They reached the door. He pressed the pad with the back of his hand and felt the resistance give. Warmth breathed on them from inside, the regulated, recirculated air of institutions, and for a heartbeat she recoiled, every part of her telling her to bolt. He tightened. She glared up at him with a hatred that wasn’t true and a terror that was, and he took both like a priest takes confession, head bowed into the force of it. “I’ve got you,” he said, and the words shocked him with their gentleness like a warm thing dropped in cold hands. He angled his body so the bag wouldn’t clip the frame. He guided her foot to the threshold because her toes missed it the first time. He knew the exact weight of her against his arm now—he could carry that number forever and lift it at any hour without needing to stretch first.

His scars hummed under his shirt. His fingers itched again for a cigarette, but he kept them flat, open, present. He thought suddenly, and wildly, about how he’d felt the first time he saw her shoot—a clean crack, a stillness falling over her that was antiseptic and holy, the kind of quiet that makes other louds make sense—and he grabbed that memory and pushed it into the slot of now, a wedge to hold the door open while they did this. He thought about the first time she’d let him take his mask off with the lights on and the door locked and the world outside banned by decree, how she’d behaved like he wasn’t made of broken glass, like he didn’t cut her with every move. He thought about the way she called him by his name when she was hurt, not Ghost, like a man might be enough. He put all of it against the panic that rose in his chest when she wavered on the last inch.

“Step,” he said, and she stepped.

He didn’t look past the threshold. He didn’t look at the woman moving toward them with gentle hands and a clipboard. He didn’t look at the chairs lined up like confessionals. He only looked at Claire. The rain stuttered and changed its tune behind them, hitting glass instead of steel. London took a breath without them. Simon tightened his grip one last fraction, felt her tremor settle a hair, and walked her forward, his boots squeaking on the new floor, her weight a living thing in the crook of his arm, his heart a hammer hooked to a wire he refused to cut. He didn’t say a prayer. He did the work. And outside, the pavements shone, and the car cooled, and in the reflection on the clinic door he watched a man who’d finally stopped mistaking patience for mercy carry a woman he loved more than he could stand into a place that might, if the world was feeling generous, teach them both how to come back.

HOLBORN, MANCHESTER STREETS. SEPTEMBER 21: ADMISSION — RECEPTION AND INTAKE.

The clinic’s doors sighed open on a wave of warm, recycled air that smelled faintly of lemon cleaner and a tired kind of hope. The reception was busy in the way a city evening is busy—people holding their lives together by handle or hinge, queue tape snaking through chairs, a water cooler gargling in the corner like it had nerves. A TV on mute in the upper right spat captions about mindfulness over stock footage of trees doing nothing helpful. Simon took it all in like he always did—entries, exits, angles, faces, weapons, threats—but tonight the threat had a shape he couldn’t put on a map, and it was pressed up against his side, breathing shallow, leaving a damp patch on his sleeve where her temple leaned.

Eyes came. Of course they did. Curiosity is a nosey bastard and it never stays home. Some of the looks were the kind people can’t help—soft, sorry, stitched in with their own scars. Some were clinical, measuring relapse against personal graphs. And some were that other kind: the private recoil dressed up as relief, a quick little twitch in the soul that says, thank God it’s not me. Simon felt those like grit in his molars. He didn’t broadcast a glare; he didn’t have to. Whatever his face was doing tonight it did enough. The judgy ones looked away, and the TV trees went on with their sanctimony.

The clientele told a complicated story whether they meant to or not. A man in a jogger set with neat white bandages wrapped tidy around both forearms, eyes too bright like he’d been emptied and refilled with soda water. A teenage girl with a mother welded to her elbow, the girl’s sweatshirt sleeves chewed at the cuffs, a grim little constellation of plasters visible when she lifted a paper cup to drink. Two lads with a brittle banter going like they’d die if they didn’t joke. A woman in an office dress with mascara parked in the hollows under her eyes and a phone she kept turning face down as if it were accusing her. A bloke in high-vis with hands like spades. A pensioner counting his breaths out loud because a therapist had told him to. Bandages. Slings. Blankets. The ordinary uniform of damage: civilian issue, one size fits all.

Claire moaned once, a low sound meant for no one, a long vowel bent round a pain she wasn’t present enough to point at. The noise slipped under the reception’s general hum and found Simon’s spine with sniper accuracy. She hated attention; she’d always hated it. Hated the medbay, hated waiting rooms, hated the fluorescent lit arenas where other people could inventory your weaknesses while wearing plastic smiles. Tonight she wasn’t awake enough to name the hate, but it was still in there, feral, pacing. He tightened the arm round her back by a hair and steered them to the counter like a tug easing a damaged ship to harbour.

The receptionist stood before he had to ask. She’d clocked them the moment the doors breathed and she moved with intent rather than bustle—no flapping, no fuss. Hijab a soft dove-grey that made the brown of her eyes warmer, suit jacket neat, a name badge—Amina—pinned straight. When she met Claire’s gaze, what was in hers wasn’t pity thank Christ; it was attention that didn’t flinch. She spoke first to Claire even though Simon’s size and posture said he was doing this. “Evening, love,” she said, voice low and steady, London rolled smooth. “We’ve got you. You can sit, yeah? We’ll do this somewhere quieter.”

Claire tried to say no. It came out as a vowel migrating. Amina didn’t pretend it was yes. She nodded anyway, like: message received. Then she cut her eyes to Simon with the sort of professional generosity he could work with. “Is she safe to walk if we go slow, or do you want a chair?”

“She’ll walk.” Simon kept his voice level out of respect for competence when he heard it. “I’ve got her.”

“I can see that.” No sarcasm; just data. “Let’s go through here.”

Amina led them past the chairs, past a pinboard blooming with group schedules and flyers for yoga and AA and family nights that promised things that might be true on Tuesdays between seven and eight. A door hummed open on a badge-swipe and they moved into a corridor where the lights were softer and the floor gave a hospital squeak under boot rubber. Amina kept a pace that matched Claire’s malfunctioning rhythm. “We’ll do intake,” she said. “Just basics to get started. Then nurses, then the doctor. You can be with her while we ask the questions. You look like you know her answers better than she does tonight.”

“Unfortunately,” Simon said, and the word had weight to it he didn’t like hearing out loud.

The intake office was small, functional, deliberately unthreatening in a way that would have made him laugh if he’d remembered how. A shelf with plant that was trying. A desk with a monitor tilted so it didn’t loom. Two chairs and one sofa that didn’t match either shade of brown already in the room. A box of tissues on the small table in that way these rooms always had tissues, like grief is a spilled drink everyone must mop silently. There was a window that looked into a square of courtyard where a tree grew with more optimism than anything else here.

Claire slumped into the sofa and immediately slid rightward as if gravity had shifted half a degree. Simon caught her under the arm and propped her with his thigh. Amina put a thin blanket over Claire’s knees without comment. Claire fought it with a resentful twitch and then forgot the fight existed. Her mouth made a wet sound as she tried to swallow. Her lips were still wrong-coloured. Simon noted it, and his fingers itched for a pulse again like a bad habit he had no intention of breaking.

Amina logged into whatever system ran the place, glanced up, and said gently, “Okay. I’m going to ask some questions. It’s paperwork, love, not judgement. If anything’s wrong we’ll fix it after. Sound all right?”

Claire’s eyes tracked somewhere over Amina’s left shoulder where a framed postcard of a sea cliff tried to suggest freedom. She blinked slow.

“Go on,” Simon said.

“Full name?”

“Clarisse Amelia Brooks.” He spelled it the way you do when it matters. “She goes by Claire.”

“Nationality?”

“British.”

“Date of birth?”

“Eighth of February, nineteen ninety-six.”

“ID number? NHS if you have it, otherwise whatever’s on her pass.” Amina kept her tone easy, not sticking on the oddness of military types and their paperwork.

Simon gave the digits from memory; there wasn’t a lot about Claire he didn’t have memorised these days—too much, not enough, depends what you’re counting.

“Profession?”

There was a beat where Amina looked like she’d already guessed from the stance and the haircut and the unadvertised competence humming off him, but she let him say it. “Sergeant,” he said. “SAS. Sniper qualified. Currently on leave.” He watched the word land. He watched Amina write nothing extra in her face even as her eyes recorded a thousand ramifications he didn’t need to explain. Professional.

“Civil status? Married, single, partnered—whatever word fits.”

“Single,” Simon said, tasting the lie that wasn’t a lie. He glanced at Claire’s hand out of reflex and felt stupid for it. The only ring she wore was the groove a rifle stock left when she trained too long.

“Phone number? Email? Address?”

He rattled them off: her official mobile that never left a locker, the personal number he never called because she ignored it until it was him, the email she pretended didn’t exist, the Southwark flat she hated because walls had opinions. Amina typed and didn’t wince at his cadence. Every so often, as she wrote, she’d say Claire’s name in a soft aside, like: you’re here, not a file.

“And next of kin?” Amina asked. “Or someone to contact in case we need immediate consent.” She looked at him, asking what she already knew.

“Leave that me,” Simon said. “Use me for primary. Secondary is Captain Price.” He gave the number that rang in the old man’s pocket like a church bell. “He’s aware.”

“All right,” Amina said. “And you are?”

“Simon Riley.” He watched the faint ripple through her expression like she’d heard the name somewhere she couldn’t place. He didn’t help her place it. He gave his number—the one he actually answered—and an email he actually read. He gave an address he actually slept in sometimes. “I’m the one bringing her in. I’m responsible.”

Amina nodded and added his details cleanly to a different box. “And you’ve got authority to consent to treatment on her behalf until she’s lucid?” She said it like she knew the answer but the boxes must be fed.

“I do.” He didn’t blink. “She’s not capable right now. She will be. Until then, I am.”

“Okay.” She breathed out like a person who had learned not to hurry breath. “Now the tricky bit. I’m going to ask about substances and history. I’ll try not to be awful about it.” She shifted so the monitor half-turned away, posture open, not interrogating. “Claire, love, I’ll ask you too, but I’m hearing that tonight’s answers might be coming through someone who knows you.”

Claire tried to focus for the length of a heartbeat and failed with dignity. Her knee jumped under the blanket. A tremor ran her fingers like piano keys no one intended to play. She said, very small, “’m here,” and the syllables hung there like a brave little flag with the wrong wind.

“What’s she using?” Amina asked.

Simon swallowed, heard the grit in his own throat. “Heroin,” he said, relieved the word of its Sunday shoes. “Benzos when she can get them—Xanax, clonazepam. Lithium’s in the flat, looks more decorative than prescribed, but I’m not her GP. Bupropion’s around. Booze enough to be trouble. Frequency… hidden. She hides it like it’s a game and she always wins.” He didn’t look at Claire when he said it. He stared at the tissue box like it dared him to break composure.

Amina nodded, the kind that means: thank you for not bullshitting me. “Route of administration for the heroin?” she asked, gentle not because she was scared of his temper, but because the question deserved gentleness.

“Injection.” He didn’t give the softening euphemisms. “Both arms. Fresh and old. I’m not guessing.” His jaw clicked at the hinge. He could taste smoke he hadn’t smoked.

“Last use?”

“Tonight,” he said. “At the flat. And pills before that. I don’t have a clock on it.”

“Overdoses?”

He breathed once. Twice. Didn’t let his body swing. “At least four that I know of. One tonight. Two on base—locked bathrooms. One in a briefing room. I pulled her out. No ambulance called on those—my fault. Tonight would’ve been one if I hadn’t found her. She keeps breathing like she owes me a favour when I ask.”

Amina didn’t look shocked. She looked like a person who understood numbers and the expensive, brittle miracles attached to them. “Any history of seizures? Heart conditions? Liver disease? Anything you know about?”

“Nightmares,” he said, and the word sounded stupid next to livers and hearts, but it belonged in the same catalogue. “PTSD. Trauma she doesn’t narrate. Childhood’s a locked room. Work’s a hell of locked rooms. She doesn’t self-harm, not that I’ve seen—no scars where those live. No suicide attempts I know of. Thoughts? I’d be an idiot to say no. She’s a sharp mind turned inward with a blade.” He pressed his thumb into the meat of his palm until a nerve shrieked.

“Any meds prescribed officially? Sleep, mood, otherwise?”

“SSRIs at some point. Prazosin for nightmares. Compliance is… situational.” He exhaled hard through his nose. “If you need the proper medical file, I’ll get it. Tomorrow. You’ll have it. I don’t play with her details. No emails. Hand to hand.”

“That works,” Amina said. “We’re used to people with complicated lives and jobs.” Her eyes flicked to Claire. “And complicated loyalties.” She typed, her fingers sure. “Detox plan will account for benzo taper and opiate withdrawal. We will not throw a chemical blanket over her and call it care. I’m saying that before you ask.”

He snorted once, gratitude wrapped in scorn. “I was going to ask with fewer polite syllables.”

“I assumed.” She gave him a ghost of a smile, the kind that says: don’t mistake kindness for softness. “All right. Side questions. Allergies?”

“Penicillin,” he said. “Latex makes her skin throw a tantrum. Seafood is fine, she insulted a prawn linguine last month and lived.”

Amina’s mouth twitched. She took the bag Simon had set on the floor and opened it with his nod. She inventoried out loud in a way that didn’t feel like theft. “Clothes. Toiletries. Books.” She looked up at him, one brow tipping. “A scarf that’s seen better days. We’ll keep her belongings in a secure locker. She can have them as appropriate. Phone we hold until the doctor clears. You can bring more later.”

“Fine,” he said, because it was. He’d put the scarf in on purpose. It smelled like the sleep between two war zones and he wanted that in the room even if she hated him for it.

“Visitors,” Amina said, back to the script. “We have set times. Boundaries are for everyone’s safety. Early days of withdrawal can be rough; we limit outside contact so the nurses can do their jobs and so the patient doesn’t bolt because the brain thinks discomfort equals death.”

“I want daily reports,” Simon said, and he leaned in not because she hadn’t heard him the first time but because he needed the room to understand he would not go away. “I want the names and credentials of every person who walks into her room. I want weekly visits minimum, not fortnightly, and if your policy says fortnightly I want your policy altered. I want a private room if you have it and if you don’t then make one. I want meals in her, not on a tray she can’t look at. I want no fuckwit with an online certificate dosing her into a coma to make his night easy. I want nurses with memories, not ghosts. I want trauma-informed hands only. And I want—if I come back here and she has a bruise you can’t account for with a blood pressure cuff—I want the person who did it. Understand?”

He wasn’t yelling. He didn’t need to. He had a voice for breaking doors that didn’t require volume; it required intent. The room didn’t shrink from him; it merely made adjustment calculations. Amina’s posture stayed open, but she sharpened. “We do not sedate for staff convenience,” she said, words precise. “We do not restrain unless there is immediate risk of harm, and never without physician order and documentation. We do not leave people in their own mess. We feed them. We wash them. We talk to them like they’re people even when they’re shouting. We protect their privacy and their bodies. We are not perfect; we are human. But we are not the place you are describing as your nightmare.”

“Good,” Simon said. “Then you’ll have no problem with the reports, the room, the credentials.”

“Reports, daily—you’ll get a summary each evening by secure message, or a phone call if you prefer. Credentials, I can list the care team with registrations. Private room—” She inclined her head. “We have two. One is free.” She didn’t add that it was free because money turned a lot of locks; she didn’t need to. “Visits—first seventy-two hours are nurse-only. After that, twice a week. I can push to three if the consultant agrees that your presence helps rather than complicates. If you’ve got magic words for him, use them. He likes magic words. They’re usually just facts wearing a suit.”

“Three,” Simon said. He had a number in his head and it was more. He kept it behind his teeth. “Give me his credentials.”

She wrote a name and a string of letters that meant a man who’d been told he was clever and then proved it the hard way. “Dr. Shah. Addiction medicine, psychiatry. Calm. Annoying in how often he’s right.”

Simon nodded once, the kind that closes a bracket. He reached for his wallet and put a card on the desk like a weapon. “Bill me for the private. For the extra time. For anything that makes this easier on her that isn’t bullshit.” He looked Amina in the eye. “Don’t cut corners. If you need kit you don’t have, call me.”

“Noted,” Amina said, and she made a note. “If we need a porter to carry the planet you’ve put on your shoulders, I’ll call you for that too.”

He let the line pass without a smile because his mouth had forgotten what that structure was for. Claire had been sliding inexorably toward the sofa’s arm throughout the exchange; he righted her again, his palm a broad, certain plane between her scapulae. Her eyes had that wet glaze that meant her brain was a step behind her body and her body was a step behind the chair. She drooled slightly; he flicked the damp away with a tissue and ignored the part of him that wanted to make that small humiliation disappear from the list of things that had happened to her.

“All right,” Amina said after one last look at the screen. “We’re going to start. Nurses will take vitals, get her into a gown if she tolerates it, begin the protocol for benzo taper and opiate withdrawal. She will not be comfortable. We will be kind. You can have five minutes with her now. Then we take her through.”

She put the bag behind the desk, wrote a locker number on a sticker, and handed the sticker to Simon like a key to a kingdom you only get to visit. She gave them the room then, stepping out with the same quiet efficiency she’d stepped in. The door clicked shut. The clinic air hummed.

For a second he didn’t know what to do with his hands. They were hands that knew a thousand ways to stop a heart and a hundred to start one, and very few for this. He sat on the edge of the sofa and angled towards Claire. She’d squirmed herself halfway down, her spine twisted into an S that promised nothing good later. He gripped her shoulders and lifted, slid, angled, the way you adjust a rifle on a bag so it lines up with a truth in the distance. He got her upright enough that he could see her eyes. They were trying, those eyes. Christ, they were always trying. The blue had leeched from her mouth a fraction; he noticed it with the relief of men who will take crumbs and call it bread.

“Hey,” he said, and his voice was not the one he used for men. It was rough from disuse, not design. “Look at me.”

She did, in the way a compass does—slowly, after a swing. Her gaze clicked into his, held for the length of a breath she couldn’t really own. She winced, tiny and involuntary. “You’ll leave,” she whispered, childhood and opiates twisting the vowels. “You’ll put me here and leave.”

He flinched like a punch had landed—but small, inside the ribcage where only he could see the bruise form. His scars sang a thin song under his shirt like weather moving over an old roof. “I’m leaving this room,” he said, precise, because honesty was a religion he tried to keep even when the sermons were miserable. “I’m not leaving you. I will be here when they let me be here. I will be on the end of the phone when they won’t. You will get sick of my voice.”

“You lie,” she said, that stubborn bastard spark waking for a second. “You say and then you go.”

“I’ve stayed,” he said, and didn’t list the nights. He didn’t have to. They were in his face and his posture and the fact he knew the smell of her hair after six hours under a helmet. “I’m staying now in the only way that helps. This is me staying.” He put his forehead to hers like a benediction, like a buttstock settling into a shoulder, like a secret told under a coat in the rain. “Hate me if that’s easier,” he said, and the words tasted like copper. “Hate me for a month. I’ll still be here at the end of it.”

Her mouth trembled. “Scared.”

“Good,” he said, because bullshit was poison now. “I’m scared. That means we can take it seriously.” He exhaled slow, and she matched him by mistake. “You’re going to shake. You’re going to hate everyone. You’re going to think your bones are trying to crawl out. They’ll stop. They’ll feed you. They’ll give you something for the parts that don’t need to be heroic. And then you’ll sleep, properly sleep, and remember what your head sounds like when it isn’t a riot.” He surprised himself with the length of the sentence. He stopped before he drifted into promises the universe might laugh at.

She closed her eyes and two tears eased out without drama. “Don’t let… them touch me,” she said, a child’s request rephrased by a soldier’s history.

He swallowed that like glass. “They’ll touch you to help,” he said. “To check, to fix, to keep you here. If anyone touches you wrong, I will take their hands.” He didn’t say cut. He didn’t need to.

The door opened gently and nurses appeared with the warmth of people who had long ago made an agreement with their job that they would not run at it shouting. A woman in her forties with arms you’d trust to catch things that fall—Del, her badge said—and a tall lad with kind shoulders—Elliot. They came with a cuff and a thermometer and voices tuned to the frequency of animals you don’t want to spook.

“Hi, Claire,” Del said, like an old friend in a shop aisle. “We’re going to take your blood pressure and see how your heart’s getting on. Then we’ll take you to a room where the lights don’t hum as much. I’m Del. This is Elliot. Can I sit next to you?”

Claire made a sound that was a yes by default, because no required a shape of thought she didn’t own right now. Simon watched every motion like a hawk mid-fast, not swooping but coiled as a possibility. Elliot looped the cuff with practised speed, tightened, released, his fingers getting that small permission that matters—no hovering, no snatch. Del slid the thermometer past cracked lips with a murmur that apologised to no one and asked for nothing. Numbers arrived and got written down in a shorthand that wasn’t for Simon. He read it anyway. Heart too eager. Pressure doing its own song. Temperature off by a fraction that told the tale of bodies forced to do things they resent.

“We’ll get you settled,” Del said after a glance at the figures. “Start some meds to take the edge off and keep you safe. Room’s ready. You can bring the blanket if you like.” She said it like it was a real choice and, Christ, it was, and choices were gold down here.

Claire’s fear arrived like a weather front—no lightning, just pressure change and a sense the air had too much in it. Her fingers curled round Simon’s, a weak little trap he didn’t try to escape. “Don’t,” she said, and this time anger failed to show; only the fear made it. “Please.”

He breathed in, breathed out. “I’m here,” he said. “They’re all right.” He lifted her knuckles to his mouth and pressed a kiss there that was not romantic and not chaste and not anything you could pin a medal on. It was a ritual older than any of the words he had for love. “Go,” he said softly. “Go or I carry you. Your choice.”

She made a ragged little sound that would have been a laugh in another life. Then she nodded—once, decisive as a shot called—and Del took that as consent because Del had lived long enough inside these rooms to know the difference between a nod that was a reflex and one that was a choice.

They got her standing. Elliot took the far side, a wall with hands. Del kept the blanket because blankets are sometimes the line between panic and endurance. Simon stood, too, and the room shrank around his decision to let go. He let go. He placed the bag of everything—that scarf, those T-shirts, the toothbrush he’d stood in a Tesco aisle and turned over in his hand like it could solve anything—on the chair. He put his card back in his pocket and took out his phone and checked that the ringer was on loud like some petty god might take offence and punish him for presumption. He looked at Amina, who had returned and stood in the doorway making herself as unimportant as a doorway could make itself.

“PIN code for updates,” she said, holding out a small white card with numbers. “If you call after hours. If you visit and the desk is new. If you need us to prove we’re us. You’ll get a separate set of codes for her consent flags—who can know what. Right now it’s you and the Captain.”

He took the card. He took the weight of it with a grim reverence he normally reserved for dog tags. “You’ll call me,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“Every evening,” Amina said. “If she spikes, we call you then.”

Del gave him a look over Claire’s shoulder, the professional’s plea wrapped in compassion. “First night is rough but useful,” she said. “Don’t come back to the door if you hear her. That’s not me locking you out; that’s me not making her do this twice.”

“I know,” he said, and his voice put gravel on the floor.

He stepped into Claire’s line of sight one more time before the corridor ate her. He put his hand on the back of her neck, a broad, steady weight that had seen her through firefights and exits off roofs. “I’ll be back,” he said. Not Hollywood. Not a promise to a god. A fact he was making with his own body. “Three days. Maybe sooner if I harass them enough. I’ll bring you the shit magazines and the good ones and you’ll complain about both.”

“You better,” she breathed, and the tiny snarl in the better was her, there she bloody was under all of it. Then the current took her—Del’s hand, Elliot’s patience, the corridor’s soft light—and she went. The blanket went with her. The tremor went with her. The room lost heat like someone had opened a door to weather. Simon stood a second too long in the empty and let his hands hang like he didn’t know what hands were for. Then he re-learned and closed them into fists because that was one lesson that never left him.

Outside, evening had deepened into the hour when builders go home and foxes begin their shift. The rain had slackened to a fine drizzle that wasn’t enough to clean anything. He hit the pavement like it had wronged him. He didn’t light a cigarette because his mouth would have tasted it like failure, and he needed his anger clean. He got in the car and sat without turning the engine over. The seat still held the warmth her body had pressed into it, and the ghost of it made him strike the heel of his hand hard into the steering wheel once, twice—enough to wake the horn into a strangled little cough he cut off immediately because the city did not need his grief dressed as noise.

He looked at his phone. Price’s thread sat there like a long road you walk at night because it always gets you home. He typed without drama.

—In.

—Private room. Protocol underway. Good team.

He watched the bubbles that meant the old man was answering with that plodding, deliberate two-thumbed style of his. The reply arrived like a hand on a shoulder you didn’t know you needed.

—Good lad. Stand down. Eat something. Call if they call.

Another ping, before he could decide if he was going to answer.

—Proud of you. Don’t let it go to your head.

He huffed, a sound that was nearly a laugh if you squinted. His thumbs moved.

—Stays between us.

—Always does.

He put the phone face down on his thigh, because if he looked at it every five seconds he’d invent emergencies and then punish the world for not having them. He set both hands on the wheel like he was about to break it and then didn’t. He breathed. Counted. He reversed, pulled into the shallow stream of Holborn traffic, and let London fold round him again.

The drive to his flat happened without his permission. He must have changed lanes, he must have checked mirrors; he could not recall the muscle-memory steps that carried him from clinic to car park and up the concrete stairwell that smelled like wet dust. His keys made the quiet household noises of a life he pretended he didn’t have. He stood in his own hallway for a beat and stared at the dark like something was going to step out of it and challenge him to say he belonged here. Nothing did. He moved through to the kitchen on the left because that’s where kettles live and men with nothing else to do make kettles earn their keep. He filled, boiled, poured, stared at steam, didn’t drink it. He left the mug on the counter to cool into an accusation.

The flat was too tidy, the way places get tidy when their owners spend their mess elsewhere. He sat on the sofa and immediately stood because his body didn’t want to stop now it had started. He walked to the window and looked out at a view that wasn’t a view—brick, fire escape, a sliver of sky with a plane threading it. He could still smell her on his sleeve, the sour under the shampoo, the human, the alive. He pressed the fabric to his face and let himself have one second of something that might have been prayer if you’d forced the word out of him at gunpoint.

The phone didn’t ring. He checked it anyway. The card Amina had given him lay on the coffee table where he’d put it like a deliberate act. Numbers. Codes. Systems that pretend to tame chaos. He kept his hands away from it like it was a lever that could drop a floor out from under him.

When he finally lowered himself onto the sofa again it was with the caution of a man sitting with injuries he refuses to name. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, the classic pose of footballers waiting for penalty kicks and men who’ve spent too long watching other people sleep to prove they’re still doing it. He rolled his shoulders because the bag that had bit into him all evening wasn’t on him now and his muscles didn’t know where to file themselves without the pain.

His eyes found the small stuff he never looked at. The spare toothbrush in the glass by the sink that wasn’t his, left from a night that had been both heartbreaking and ordinary. The book she’d not finished on the shelf because endings offended her. A hair tie around the gear stick in his car he’d noticed and not moved because moving it would be a statement he wasn’t ready to read. All of it made him want to put his fist through the plaster and then sit in the dust like a man who’d built something.

He didn’t. He stood again. He ate a thing that pretended to be dinner and tasted like nothing. He washed the plate, because muscle memory still outranks grief. He laid his phone on the nightstand like a talisman and failed to lie down because sleep was a language his body refused to speak while she was learning a different one in a room with a number he hadn’t asked for because he knew if he had it he’d go back and watch her breathe from the car park like a ghost.

He sat in the chair by the window instead, back to the glass, eyes on the door as if something might come through it that needed killing. He counted breaths he couldn’t hear. He thought of the nurses’ hands. He thought of Amina’s unflinching eyes and Dr. Shah’s string of letters and Del’s voice that sounded like early morning and Elliot’s careful wrists. He thought of Price’s old man pride coming through a text like warmth through a wall. He thought of Kyle’s silent tea, Johnny’s too-loud telly, the team’s orbit shifting round the hole she left like they’d rehearse their gravity until it held again.

His heart, idiot that it was, had not come home with him. It had stayed down there under softer lights, on a bed that wasn’t his, in a room where a scarf waited to become a blanket she’d pretend to hate. It beat there, a dog lying at a bedside it had not been invited to. He let it. He could afford to live without it for a while. He’d built his life like that anyway. The difference now, the only difference that mattered, was that he planned to go back for it.

HOLBORN, MANCHESTER STREETS. SEPTEMBER 21: ADMISSION — PRIVATE ROOM.

They took Claire down a corridor that smelled like soap and surrender, the lights turned low to keep nerves from snapping. The private room Amina had promised was there at the end, squared off and spare, soft-edged where it could be—good mattress, solid frame, bedstand with a call button, a chair angled to the bed as if conversation might someday happen. No window. No glass. No glittering excuses for panic. A plastic jug waited on a tray with cups that wouldn’t shatter if thrown. A wardrobe with no doors, just shelves, so nothing could be hidden and nothing needed to be.

Del and Elliot did the choreography without drama. They turned on the bathroom light and made sure the towels were the thick ones. “Hot water’s good,” Del said, testing the tap with the back of her wrist like she’d been taught by a grandmother and a ward sister. “You can shower if you want. Fresh gown here. You can keep the blanket after.” She held the gown out. Claire eyed it like it was a trick.

The high was still in her—sloppy and sugar-slow—but the mind underneath had started to wake with the wrong kind of clarity, the anxious, saw-toothed kind. Hands, always quick even at rest, lifted and then hovered in the air like frightened birds. “Don’t,” she muttered, when Elliot—careful, always careful—offered to steady her at the elbow. “Don’t touch me. Don’t—” The vowels went wide with fear she didn’t have language for. Elliot backed up a pace and took his hands out of the space, palms visible.

“No touching,” Del said, nodding like the mirror of consent. “You’ve got it. Door stays unlocked. We stay out here. You can shout if you need us and swear if you want. We’ll pretend we’ve never heard the words.”

Claire tried to snort like she would have once. It came out a hiccup. She took the gown and moved toward the bathroom with stubborn, clumsy authority, using the wall with the heel of her hand, the way she’d used walls in safehouses when the night ran too long. The door didn’t shut; she didn’t want it shut. She did what she could with the shower—water too hot, then too cold, her fingers not calibrated for taps. The water struck her like small, insistent fingers. She grimaced and bore it. The sensation of being watched by no one was enormous.

She came out damp and smaller, gown tied too low and off to one side like a boxer’s robe. Hair a dark tangle, curls at war with the towel she’d barely used. She saw the food then—soup in a lidded bowl, bread, a banana trying to be harmless—and the water, clear and stupid in its jug.

“Not hungry,” she said, throat raw from nothing. “Leave it.” Her eyes slid from the tray to the bed to Del’s face and barely managed to land.

“Tiny sips?” Del tried, not pressing, giving the words a soft landing. “Little and often. Helps with the bugs in the muscles. If it comes up, it comes up. We’re not grading you.”

“No,” Claire said. “Don’t want.” Her hands had returned to their hover. The blank space between bones and skin filled with a hum that wasn’t noise and wasn’t silence. She climbed onto the bed like a cat who didn’t trust the furniture. She grabbed at the sheet and pulled it high, then shoved it down, then pulled it high again because the heat and the cold were playing a stupid tug-of-war she could not referee. “Just—go.”

Del’s mouth worked around a protest and then didn’t. She tucked the blanket by the knees. “We’ll do checks,” she said. “Every fifteen minutes. That’s the rule for the first twelve hours. If you’re asleep, we’ll be ghosts. If you’re awake, we’ll be boring.” She nodded to Elliot, who adjusted the cuff and left it velcro’d loose at Claire’s bicep in case they needed it. They went. The door made the careful click of people who have learned to leave without leaving fear behind.

ST. THOMAS, NIGHT ONE: CLAIRE.

Time inverted. It expanded to a sticky sheet that clung to her face. It shrank to a hard pearl lodged under her breastbone. The room breathed. She was not sure she was breathing with it. The first checks came and went like timid waves. A torch under the eyelid of night, a soft voice saying her name and watching for the rise of ribs. She floated. She sank. The bed had a heartbeat. No—it was hers, off-kilter, elbows out, making a point of itself. Her stomach complained, a sharp, paper-cut ache that grew teeth.

The tremors started like gossip, a little shiver at the fingertips as if the air were colder than it was. She curled her hands under her thighs to hide it and discovered her thighs were shaking too. Sweat came next—thin at the hairline, then bold down the spine, and then everywhere, a film that made the gown cling in the wrong places. She hated the clamminess; she hated the heat. She asked for a window with a wordless, furious movement of shoulder. There was no window. Of course there wasn’t. Her skin put gooseflesh everywhere like an insult, and still the sweat lay like a film of guilt.

Eyes watered on their own schedule. She blinked and tears washed everything then left salt in the corners. She sniffed. Her nose ran anyway, a child’s indignity. She wiped it on the heel of her hand and then on the sheet because the tissues were too far away and her arms were lead. Her pupils dilated like flowers in time-lapse, the room’s edges fuzzing into a soft hostility. Her breath sped to keep up with nothing, short and shallow and stupid; each inhale felt like a decision the body was making without consulting the board.

A sound clawed its way out of her and surprised her with its childishness. A moan, a little animal that didn’t know it had a throat. It brought a silhouette to the door—Elliot, tall and careful—who stepped in with his palms already saying I’m not going to. “I’m here, Claire,” he said, low. “I’m going to sit in the chair. That’s all. You can tell me to sod off.”

She shook her head, a miserable little twist. She wanted no one and someone and silence and noise and water and oblivion and—she did not know. The muscles in her back clenched and then released like a bad dance. Her calves cramped, the mean knotting that makes runners swear. She tilted to the side, grasping at the sheet to anchor herself and found it inadequate. She turned her face to the pillow and felt her own breath bounce back hot and stale. Panic liked that. Panic grew its shoulders and sat down on her chest for a bit.

Elliot moved without moving closer. He narrated like a radio show from another room. “I’m getting the bowl,” he said. “I’m putting it here. You don’t have to use it. I’m turning the fan on low.” The fan’s whisper gave the room a better noise to listen to than her heart.

The nausea announced itself with a wave that was not metaphor. It was a physical tide rising from gut to throat. She had the thought—absurd, outraged—I didn’t even eat—and then threw up anyway, thin bile that burned and tasted like coins. The bowl took it. Her hands shook worse for the effort. She pressed her lips together until they hurt because she was not going to cry about puke in front of a man in a nurse’s polo. She cried anyway, involuntary, silent, the tears stealing out because the body had decided humiliation didn’t matter.

She rolled too fast and gravity punished her. She slid, the fine math of bed and person going wrong, and found the bowl with her elbow and then the floor with her hip. Hard. The shock cracked the shell of something brittle inside her and left her swearing in a whisper. Elliot was there then—not touching, hands in the space like safety barriers. “Claire,” he said. “Can I help you up?”

She heard the vowel in his voice that made him not a threat and still her ribcage locked like a trap. “Don’t,” she hissed. Fear tore the skin off the word. “Don’t—don’t—” The world doubled. Two Elliots. Two bowls. No floor. She retched again and missed, the bile hot on her chin, on the gown, on the pillow that had followed her to the edge. The smell punched her down into a place with no furniture.

“Del,” Elliot called, calm as a lifeguard. The door opened. Del was suddenly there with towels and a competence that rebuked chaos. “I’m coming into your space,” Del said, not asking permission so much as letting the words arrive before her hands. “I won’t touch your chest or your legs. I’m going to wipe your face. You can bite me if you want. I won’t take it personally.” The cloth was warm and smelled faintly of something citrus and clean. It pressed, soft, to Claire’s mouth, catching the strings of bile and foam. She gulped air too fast and choked on it. Del paused, waited, dabbed again. Efficiency felt like love when the world tipped.

The first drip of IV meds stung her hand, a cold worm under the skin. She looked at the cannula like a child would a bee on a jam jar. “No,” she said, then, coaxing the syllable with all the force she had, “Yes,” because the seesaw had decided. “Give it.” She smiled, suddenly, the wrong smile, the anticipatory one that had nothing to do with getting well. The world’s worst hope. Hit me. Make it warm. Make the bugs and the sirens and the hum stop.

“There’ll be no hit,” Del said, not unkind. “This isn’t what you think. This is to loosen the vice and steady the wires. You’re going to be cross with me in about two minutes.”

The drip did what it did—calmed the engine, sanded down the sharpest corners. It did not deliver the velvet parachute her body begged for. Claire’s grin—and what a sad scrap it was—collapsed into a snarl. “You liars,” she said, and the syllables fell over each other. “You—you said—” She pawed at the line with clumsy fingers, and Elliot held her hand lightly by the wrist without restraining it, letting her feel the contact and the option to choose not to pull. She let the hand fall and yawped a breath that sounded like a sob heard from a room away.

The room went strange. The fan’s steady susurration twisted into a chopper blade for a second, then an impossible gull. The floor bucked up under the bed as if the building were doing a sit-up. Claire grabbed the rail and every tendon in her forearm stood out like wire. Gunshots cracked from nowhere and everywhere; she ducked without moving, jaw snapping shut hard enough to click. The light flashed—a bulb dying—and came back like a muzzle flare. She was there, then here, then both. The wall tried to open and show her a sky. The door tried to be a door and a hatch and a mouth.

When the door actually opened, her heart left its leash. A man—no more tall than any man—filled the frame with the outline of an uncle who hadn’t lived on this planet for years but had lived in her head since, rent unpaid. “No,” she said, and then she screamed it, a torn sound that startled even herself. She saw hands too big, too particular, always there, hands that taught dread at a molecular level. Memory wore his face even if history didn’t. Del was already moving—between, blocking, bending the figure into a nurse with gentle shoulders and a bag of saline. “No,” Claire sobbed, smaller now, “no no no, don’t—don’t—don’t—” The bed bucked again. Or she did.

She called for Simon then, because his name was the only one shaped to bring the world back into a room. “Si—” She couldn’t finish it. It was the geography of a child calling for a parent, the map to a door that should open and never did. “Simon.” The second time it made a sound like a prayer the body does by itself when the brain is too busy falling apart.

Her nerves lit. Fire ran the route she’d drawn for it with needles, an electrician’s nightmare under the skin. She felt crawling—a parade under dermis, worms, wires, something, nibbling at the blueprint of her. She clawed before she knew she’d decided to, fingers finding forearm, belly, face. The nails skidded, caught, skidded, caught. Skin opened in sudden small mouths that bled with disproportionate embarrassment. “Get them out,” she begged, hoarse, eyes wild and unseeing. “Get—them—out—”

Del’s voice tried to be bigger than hallucination. “Nothing’s under your skin, love. It’s your head lying to your nerves.”

“Liar,” Claire spat, and then vomited again, a thin, sour flood, and saw maggots in it, white and wriggling and righteous. Terror shook her voice to pieces. “Get them out get them out get them out—” She dug so hard her nails went under the top layer and found the slap of blood. Elliot reached and then stopped and then reached again because letting her tear herself up was its own violence. He caught her wrists and she flinched like he’d hit her. “Don’t touch,” she wept, writhing away—reflexive, fierce—and he let go at once, palms showing, stance back.

“We need the cuffs,” Del said, voice dropping into the register of decisions. “Soft ones. Now.” Another nurse appeared like a conjured thing with padded restraints that looked like sleep masks and were nothing like sleep. “Claire, I’m going to keep your hands safe,” Del said, hands already careful on the ward line. “Not to punish you. Not to win. Just to keep the rest of you attached.” Claire cried harder, keening, the sound dissolving into a pitch she’d have mocked as melodrama any other night. The cuffs went on, one wrist then the other, the velcro the loudest noise in the room. The strap on the left chafed immediately because the skin there had been rubbed stupid by her own nails. She yanked against them with the full logic of panic and discovered they held like promises are supposed to. The discovery destroyed her. She sobbed, little hiccuping hammers of sound.

Her bladder emptied itself without asking her first. Warmth spread under her and then turned cold because humiliation works faster than physics. She tried to curl in on herself and couldn’t because of the new angles of restraint. “Sorry,” she said, over and over, automatic, a childhood catechism that outlived its priests. “I’m sorry. Sorry—"

“Don’t be,” Del said, blunt and kind. “We’ve seen more piss than the Thames has water. Let it go.” She eased a pad under Claire’s hips with the sort of skill that comes from years of this exact moment. Elliot cleaned the sheet like it wasn’t a battlefield, like it was a kitchen table. They were two people performing a duet in which neither instrument was envy.

The seizures took her like weather moves offshore—sudden, total. One second the room was a shouting match with invisible things, the next her body decided it was an uncooperative electrified fish. The world clipped out. Then it clipped back in as a strobe of lights and hard floor coming up. She was on the ground and then on a lap—Del’s lap, thighs strong, arm a brace behind Claire’s neck, hand cushioning scalp so it didn’t kiss tile. “You’re safe,” Del said, over and over, not because the words make safety but because they tell the body there’s something to come back to when it’s done with the convulsion. Elliot timed it under his breath, that low, steady count professionals do so they don’t accidentally pray.

Foam webbed Claire’s lip. Saliva ran hot to her ear and into her hair. Her eyes rolled and saw nothing. Her arms jerked against the soft cuffs and found all the heavens empty. Her legs kicked at nothing and met nothing. The world narrowed to a migraine of electricity and soundless roaring—a bomb went off and I didn’t die, that awful post-blast reality where everything is too loud and too silent. When it let her go, she sobbed without sound and then with it, little rising cries that belonged to toddlers and the newly bereaved.

“Number one,” Elliot said, not to Claire, not to shame, to the chart that would tell a doctor how the map had looked in the morning. They got her back into bed. IV still in. Line checked. Vitals made a terrible kind of sense on a screen that pretended objectivity. Fever wanted a number that would worry people. Heart rate held a beat like it had traded its rhythm for a drum solo. Blood pressure had opinions but nothing dramatic enough to save her from the process.

They tried oral again—tiny pill against gums, a sip of water past a cracked mouth. Claire gagged and vomited and choked and wept and repeated the process with grim effectiveness. “All right,” Del said, after the third attempt went the same way and the corner of Claire’s mouth had split with the effort. “We go slower. We go sideways. We go under.” They upped the IV rate by nothing that would insult her veins. They added a syringe driver with something to pretend to be mercy. It wasn’t heroin. Claire hated it on principle.

She slept for seven minutes that weren’t sleep. She dreamt with her eyes open—gunshots stitched into the fan’s motor, Simon’s hand on the back of her neck and then not, hands from before-that dragging ankles and wrists and making the room smaller than the cupboard that had taught her dark’s shapes. She woke with a ragged scream that made the nurse in the bay twitch and then stand and exhale and relax hands. “Claire,” Del said, and the name was a hook she could grab with her stupid shaking fingers. “With me. One thing. Name something real.”

“Blanket,” Claire whispered, shocked she had the word. “Blanket.”

“Good. Colour?”

“Blue,” she said, and the room nodded—yes. “Blue.” She panted it like a fact that could keep wolves back for two seconds.

The second seizure came meaner, quicker, a cheap shot between rounds. Del had Claire’s head before the floor could. “You’re not breaking her,” Del told the universe, possibly blaspheming, possibly not. “Not tonight.” Elliot hit a button, and a quiet alarm downstream brought a doctor sleepy and focused, who pressed a tongue depressor into a nurse’s hand and said, “Not for biting—God, no—just to keep fingers safe if she tries to chew her way out.” They added something gentle and chemical to the line. The seizure hated that. It ended like a sulk.

Claire pissed again and didn’t know until the cold said so. She apologized to the ceiling. They cleaned her like it was Tuesday and laundry is a fact of life. She called for Simon and then took it back because she didn’t want him seeing her like this and then called for him again because wanting is mean. She pulled against the cuffs and sobbed and talked to ghosts through the wall. She said sorry to someone who wasn’t there, someone who had been there once when she needed not to be alone and had left because he was supposed to and that had been correct and hateful and right and not enough. She laughed once, a cracked little cackle, at something only she could see, then recoiled like it bit. She saw the worms again, bright as the inside of a lie, and scratched until her nails painted her own cheeks with thin lines of red. Del caught her hands, pressed them into the mattress. “We’re not letting you pull this house down on yourself,” Del murmured. “Scream at me; hate me; I’ll write it on my nametag. You don’t get to bleed for their ghosts.”

Third seizure. Fourth. Fifth. Elliot’s count went pragmatic: three minutes, two; one minute, four. The chart filled with numbers that looked like war poetry if you knew the meter. The medication worked and didn’t; the body accepted and rejected; the line helped and did not cure. Claire’s stomach tried to turn itself inside out for hours because that’s what bellies do in protest. Her muscles ached the way muscles ache when you’ve fought a fight that involved every fibre and lost on points. Her teeth hurt. Her eyeballs hurt. Her scalp hurt. She shivered so hard her bones sounded like a bag of cutlery. She burned so hot the room might have held up her fever to the light like a jewel.

Del stayed. Elliot stayed. Another nurse spelled them and got spelled and came back because some nights put a leash on you and you don’t complain. Del’s hand found the hair at Claire’s temple in the sweaty tangle and stroked there when the worst of the writhing made less sense than touch. “Baby,” Del said once, softly, the endearment offered and not pressed. “You’re not dying. You’re not. It feels like dying on purpose. It’s not. It’s your body throwing everything at the wall because it thinks you’ve betrayed it by not giving it the thing that kills it.” Claire wept and hated and let the hand keep doing what it was doing because the hand was connected to a voice and that voice was the only thing that told time in a room without windows.

Eventually, the medications spun a thicker veil. Not a velvet one. A grey wool blanket you hide under when you’re small and the thunder’s too close. Claire slept because the body turned itself off to avoid the fuse burning all the way to the dynamite. It wasn’t rest; it was absence. The nurses took the absence like a gift and checked vitals as if quiet were a trap that might spring if you offended it.

WATERLOO FLATS. SEPTEMBER 22, MORNING — SIMON.

He went to Price at nine because eight would have been rude and seven would have been a confession he didn’t intend to make. The Captain opened his office door before Simon knocked like he’d been standing on the other side waiting for the heaviness in the hall. The file was already on the desk. Brown envelope, elastic band, weight of years. Price’s hand lay on it the way a man puts a palm on the flank of a horse to calm it. “You sure?” Price asked, not to test, to honour.

“No,” Simon said. He took the file anyway. It was heavier than a box of rounds, lighter than a sin. Price’s brow did the paternal thing—stern, soft, wrinkled with some joke about to salvage the mood and then not delivered because the mood shouldn’t be salvaged. “Bring it back,” he said. “It’s hers.” He didn’t say and yours only by permission. He didn’t have to. Simon’s mouth did a line that meant he understood rules even when he wanted to bend bars.

He didn’t open it. He didn’t even loosen the band. He drove to the clinic with it on the passenger seat like a passenger who refused to talk. Amina was at the desk when he came in, hijab a dark navy today, face a kind of resigned that wasn’t defeat—just the shadow heavy nights cast. She didn’t give him the smile she’d given yesterday. She gave him honesty instead, and he preferred that. “Good morning,” she said. “Rough night.”

He didn’t ask “how rough?” like a coward. He let her hand him the paper, the printed report clipped tidy, the boxes filled, the margins tidy. She didn’t narrate. She didn’t warn. She watched him take it in as if she were monitoring a drug she’d just pushed.

He read. He read because it was what there was to do. He read the words he’d prepared for and still wanted to throw through a window. Five tonic-clonic seizures, duration variable. Repeated emesis. Hallucinations: tactile (formication), auditory (explosive sounds), visual (persecutory figures). Urinary incontinence x2. Self-injurious scratching to face, forearms, abdomen; cleaned, dressed; soft restraints applied per protocol to prevent further injury. Medications administered IV and IM; limited oral tolerance. Vitals: tachycardic, febrile, hypertensive spikes managed; O2 sat stable. Patient reluctant to accept assistance from male staff; female staff assigned whenever possible. Patient oriented x0 during peak; oriented x2 during interludes (self and place). Calling for “Simon”— He stopped there. He didn’t want to see his name typed in a font that belonged to procedure. He forced his eyes further. —periodically. Comfort measures used. Patient currently sedated/asleep. Will continue Q15 checks and seizure precautions.

It gutted him. There wasn’t a better, cleverer, colder phrase. He’d seen things that broke men and he’d stayed intact because that’s what he does. This—pain transmuted into tidy type—managed to take a blade to the place he kept that intactness and lever it. He felt the tremor before he noticed it; the paper whispered against itself because his hands couldn’t keep still. He anchored them on the counter and the counter took the weight without complaint. He nodded once, twice, because nodding was cheaper than speaking.

“Can I—” He had to stop, assemble words, commit to them. “Can I see her.”

“Usually not,” Amina said, and the words had policy in them and also memory. “But she’s asleep now. She’s stitched up so she won’t frighten you with the red bits and you won’t frighten her by existing. Two minutes. No touching.”

He almost grunted that he didn’t frighten her. He shut his mouth because last night’s paper had just told him she’d been frightened of everything wearing a shape. “Two minutes,” he said. It came out like a bargain with someone vengeful.

Amina led him the same corridor, past the same pinboard whose promises seemed stupider in daylight. She knocked on the door like courtesy mattered even when the person on the other side was unconscious and in cuffs. Del stood, if not at attention then something like it, a sentinel with a pulse. The look she gave Simon would have gotten some men defensive. He took it like a report that had earned the right to be hard. “She’s all right,” Del said first, in defiance of the evidence. “She’s through the first wave. She’s sleeping because sleep won. Not because we drowned her in it.”

The bed held Claire like one half of a reunion. Bandages made little flags: over the cheekbone where her nails had been mean, over the forearm where veins had been too easy to find, over the belly where she’d tried to excavate the crawling. The soft cuffs were still there—white against the brown of the blanket—loose now, because the fight had gone for the moment. Tape held lines and hope to the back of her hand. Her lips were less blue and more human wrong—a chapping pink that said what nastiness had been happening there. The blanket hid the worst; the worst always hid where blankets worked. But he could see the tremor still, small, a metronome set too fast in a finger. He could see the exhaustion, which is its own bruising. He could see, horribly, the word Self-harm: acute scratching printed on the report peeking from the clipboard at the foot. Too soon. Too close. Not some teenager’s hidden razor dramatics—this was panic given hands and turning them inward because monsters prefer that.

He didn’t touch her, because Amina had laid the line and Del’s eyes said Not now. He put his hands on the rail instead and nearly lifted the bed with the force of not touching. He looked at her and the funhouse mirror funnily stopped—memory finally matched the face in front of him: his Claire, high cheekbones and those grey eyes that were now closed because the brain had shut the shutters. He wanted, with a crudeness that scared him, to pick her up and carry her out and sit with her on his shitty sofa and smoke cigarettes until both of them forgot what time was. He did not. He watched the breath. He counted it even though he said he wouldn’t. He let the count lull that awful part of him that believed math could bridle chaos.

Del said, quieter, like something confided: “She kept calling your name between the other bits. We told her you were coming when you could. She asked us not to let anyone touch her who wasn’t kind. We tried.”

He couldn’t unclench his jaw enough to say thank you in a way that would sound like gratitude and not like a threat to the entire earth if it failed. He nodded. Twice. Three times. His scars came alive under the shirt like bad weather announcing itself on old wounds. He stood there for the two minutes and then two more because no one stopped him and then one less because he was not going to be the problem.

When he left, he left a piece of himself he hadn’t known how to name hooked to the bed-rail, a little rag of something that would stay there until she didn’t need it, which might be never. In the corridor he breathed the institutional air and it didn’t fix him. Amina gave him a look that meant we did what we could; we will keep doing it; go eat something before you start making demands we already agree with. He surprised them both by saying, voice hoarse, “Thank you,” and meaning it like an oath. Then he went, because standing still made him feel like he was the wrong kind of statue.

He made it as far as the car before he had to sit with his head down on the steering wheel—not the hitting now, not the borrowed violence; just the posture of a man being very, very quiet so that something in the sternum stops rattling. Price’s envelope lay on the passenger seat like it wanted to be opened. He still didn’t. He reached across and put his hand on it as if it might try to run. “Soon,” he told it, addressing paper like a lunatic. “When it’s not prying. When she can look at me while I’m looking at it.” The engine turned over. The day had the indecency to be bright. He drove into it with the same expression he wore when weather tried to tell him what to do: grim, patient, and swearing under his breath at every light that thought it could stop him.

HEREFORD GARRISON. SEPTEMBER 22: ROUTINE WITHOUT HER.

Base looked the same because base didn’t care who was missing. Concrete doesn’t grieve; it just holds weight. Simon walked the morning like he’d been told to balance a cup on his head—straight spine, economical steps, eyes that didn’t invite anyone in. The new sergeant—Henry Wickham or Whitcomb or some W—arrived crisp and keen with boots that still had the shop’s opinion on them. The lad’s salute came fast enough to chip a tooth. Simon gave him the blank that meant don’t. Not because the kid had done anything wrong; because wrong had already happened elsewhere and Simon had a narrow bandwidth for anything that asked to be regarded as real. Wickham tried to introduce himself twice and got the same outcome both times: air, a nod that wasn’t a nod, Ghost moving on as if the bloke were a draft that would settle when the window shut.

Soap and Gaz were the gravity that kept the day from drifting far enough out to freeze. Johnny planted himself in Simon’s orbit with the refusal of a dog who’s decided what shed you’re sitting in today, deal with it. He kept Claire alive by accident and on purpose—“Remember when she nicked the last jammy dodger and told me it was for the good of the unit?”—and Gaz, perceptive bastard, laughed too loud at the punch lines, as if volume might fill the place where her laugh used to live. They didn’t say her name in open rooms; it felt like throwing blood in the water. But they did leave her chair at the end of the table alone—no kit dumped there, no idle coffee ring, no jacket casually slung. Her locker stayed closed. Her rifle case sat locked and labelled in Simon’s cage like an altar: clean, oiled, waiting. He checked the lock twice without looking like he checked the lock. Rituals matter when you can’t do sacraments.

Price gave him work the way a father gives a son a spade at a graveside. Not orders—the old man knew the difference—but tasks with edges you could get your hands round: range recalibration, sim runs, a bastard of a comms exercise that required attention to the millisecond. “Keep busy,” was the message in the man’s eyebrow; “or I will keep you busy.” Simon took it, grateful and resentful in equal measure, which is a familiar mix in this family. He ran the new sergeant through cold-bore drills without words, just pacing and targets. The lad shot straight enough. Simon didn’t say so. Straight isn’t her sharp. Straight doesn’t make the wind look like a friendly opinion. He caught himself wanting to correct Whitcomb’s stance in the smallest of ways and felt a bite of grief so sharp he nearly swore out loud. That had been Claire’s favourite hobby—nudging his foot half an inch, tapping a shoulder blade into a better line, whispering some smug little “there” by his ear. He missed being corrected. He missed it enough to hate himself for missing it.

In the mess, he ate fast and uninterested. He nearly set a second fork next to his plate out of habit. She’d always nick bites of whatever he had, swearing she didn’t want a full portion because “I’m not a mule, Riley, I’m a woman,” then stealing half of his anyway and leaving him with a crust and the honour of having fed someone. He caught himself glancing at the doorway twice, stupid muscle memory expecting that particular silhouette: the quickness of her, the way she scanned a room without advertising it, the low ponytail on days she’d allow it and the defiant curls on days she wouldn’t. The place she’d choose to sit depended on who annoyed her; she’d plant herself opposite Gaz if she intended to argue tactics for fun, beside Soap if she needed to borrow mischief, across from Simon if she wanted to pick a fight or a truce. The chair stayed cold. Johnny filled the air because silence can turn on you. Kyle watched Simon without staring, which is an art.

Wickham, poor bastard, made the mistake of asking, “So Sergeant Brooks, what’s she on leave for?” The room went a degree quieter without anyone arranging it. Simon’s stare hit the new lad like a thrown hammer—no drama, just physics. “She’s on leave,” he said. Nothing else. Gaz’s fork paused midair; Soap’s jaw worked on a response and then didn’t. Wickham tried a smile that said I’m friendly, I belong, I read the room but I’m daft enough to push. “Only—just wanted to know when she’s back, sir. So I can—” Simon didn’t let him finish. “You don’t need to know a fucking thing beyond your sight picture,” he said, not raising his voice, making it feel like a raised voice anyway. “You’re a placeholder, not a replacement. Shoot. Shut it. Try not to die.” The lad shut it. Johnny kicked Simon under the table later and gave him a look that said too much and fair enough in the same glance. Simon took both verdicts and wore them like kit.

Every corridor contained a ghost of her moving a second ahead of him. Training hall: her telling him his left shoulder’s carrying a sulk. Armoury: her short-swearing at a jammed bolt as if it had personally insulted a grandmother. The motor pool: her face tipped up into rain, eyes grey going lighter, an expression that meant she’d let herself feel weather for a whole ten seconds before slamming the door on the sentiment. He missed her at every turn and resented the missing like it was a weakness he should be able to train out. He texted Amina at noon and got the evening-comes-later reply he’d been promised, and he spent the next ten minutes finding something to dismantle and reassemble because if he didn’t he’d start pacing like a caged dog.

Wickham tried again in the afternoon—optimism is a disease—and asked Gaz if there was anything he should “know about working with her when she’s back.” Kyle said, with a deadpan that could kill small gods, “Don’t get in her way and don’t misunderstand a kindness for a concession,” then added, kinder, “She sees angles you don’t. Trust the angles.” Soap chimed in, “And don’t call her ‘love,’ unless you like your nose whistling when you breathe.” Wickham looked at Simon like he wanted confirmation and got nothing but a profile that could be used to teach intimidation to statues. The lad stopped asking. He’d learn, if he stayed. Or he’d be transferred to a desk where chairs don’t bite.

Evening had the decency to arrive on time. Simon didn’t go to his quarters because his quarters remembered things he didn’t want to rehearse. He went to the gym instead and waged a private war against iron. Bench, press, repeat. Jaw clenched. Triceps screaming in that useful way. He stared down his reflection like the glass had said something filthy about his mother. The man who looked back was the same bastard as this morning and a worse one for the hours in between. He could feel the version of himself that didn’t care much making a pitch: Go cold. You know how. It’s easier than heat. He didn’t buy it. He lifted instead.

ST. THOMAS, DAY TWO: CLAIRE.

Hours were knives. She cut herself on the hours picking them up wrong. Morning tasted like old pennies and something sourer. Del brought food that smelled decent enough for a person who wasn’t her: toast, peanut butter, banana slices trying to be friendly. The knife had left a neat little scroll pattern in the spread and Claire hated it for looking so pleased with itself. “No,” she said, and then because refusing felt like a spine, “Fuck off.” Del didn’t. Del set it by and sat with a posture that said I can outwait a storm. Claire stared at the toast long enough to grow a belief that it stared back. It didn’t blink.

Water worked in sips. She let that in because the mouth begged. Bread came only when rage flagged. A bite. Chew it to paste. Hate it for being helpful. Another bite at noon. The rest of the day she offered the tray a narrow, knife-thin look and turned her face to the wall. Elliot tried walking in the garden as a concept—“ten minutes, shoes on, sun on face”—and she stared at him like he’d suggested she take up needlepoint. “Don’t go anywhere,” she said, and meant the words in three different directions. The books Simon had packed sat like little good soldiers on the shelf. She didn’t touch them. If she touched them they might become real and then she’d have to stop being furious long enough to read and that was unacceptable.

It turned out you could be furious and ill at the same time. The fury didn’t cancel the sweating; the sweating didn’t douse the fury. She shook. The tremors were back as if the night had been rehearsal and the matinee had just begun. She lay on top of the blanket and then under it and then kicked it off and then asked it back with her knees because pride had left the building. Her skin built a salt map nobody had asked for. Her ribs felt like someone had wired them too tight. The air bent in weird places—faces where there weren’t faces, doorways breathing, the edge of the wardrobe looking like a shoulder for half a second. Hands grabbed that weren’t there. She flinched, flinched, flinched, then swore at herself for flinching.

Craving wrote itself across her nerves in capital letters. Her brain tried to negotiate with whatever bastard was in charge: Just a little and we’ll stop this, right? Just a little and the floor will quit it and the light will shut up and the bugs will move out. She said out loud, “You’re not getting it,” and didn’t know if she meant herself or the universe. Del heard it and pretended not to. Elliot heard it and said, “I know,” in a tone that didn’t have a solution hiding behind it.

By afternoon, the hallucinations had opinions. She heard shoves and felt them, a palm on the shoulder turning into something worse, a voice in the hinge of the door she couldn’t quite parse into words that had human grammar. She fought shadows and nurses both; it didn’t matter that logic told her who was who. She was a bag of reflexes and most of them were mean. When Elliot leaned in too fast, she struck, a messy, open-palmed hit that made both of them flinch—for different reasons. “Sorry,” she said, immediately, automatically, then growled, “Don’t crowd,” because apology tasted like weakness on a day she was building a castle out of rage.

The seizures picked their times like bullies. One knocked her sideways while she was upright enough to think she’d beaten this hour. She went into it with a hiss and came out of it with a raw throat and the metallic stink of bitten tongue. She bit her own wrist afterward to stop the itch—the itch that came from nowhere and everywhere, a crawling under the skin that screamed for needles or knives or teeth. She chose the weapon she had. Teeth won over reason. Blood hit her tongue and her stomach lurched and she laughed at the wildness of it, a broken little chuckle that made Del’s eyes flash and then soften the way a mother’s might when a toddler shows teeth to prove they’re a wolf.

Containment again, because there are points at which choice takes a backseat and safety grabs the wheel. Cuffs. Soft, but she could make them bite if she rolled her wrist just so. So she did. Over and over. Friction built raw spots into wounds. She rubbed until the strap found meat and then kept rubbing because pain had become a language and she was fluent. Elliot slid foam under the strap; she tossed her head like a horse who hates a halter.

Evening gathered with no windows to show it. She slept the way drowning is not sleeping. She woke to her own voice mid-curse, mid-prayer, mid-Simon. She called him an arsehole. She called him by his name like it could turn the wall into a door. She hated him for putting her here. She wanted him here to put her here again because she could not trust herself with freedom. She wanted ten contradictory things and none of them were on the menu. The nurses took all of it and wrote some of it down because the job demands proof to show the morning.

HEREFORD GYM, 2100 HOURS: PRICE AND THE LONG TALK.

Sweat, iron, breath with edges. Simon had found the point beyond failure and was staying there like a martyr mainly to spite the philosophy. The gym smelt of rubber and men who pretend they aren’t desperate. He didn’t hear Price come in. He felt him in the floor—the old man had a weight your bones notice. “You’re going to tear something useful,” Price said mildly, setting his cigarillo on the windowsill like an old friend made of smoke and disobedience. “And I’ll have to write ‘ghost pulled his own arse off the bone’ on a form.”

“Give me the form,” Simon said. He didn’t stop. He didn’t put the bar down until his arms shook with a frankness he respected in other contexts. He racked it like it had suggested something untoward about Claire and sat up slow. Price handed him a towel with a motion that said clean yourself up, soldier, and I’m not your mother but today I might audition. Simon scrubbed at his face like he could wipe off the day. It stayed.

“Report,” Price said, and it wasn’t an order so much as an invitation to put the weight somewhere else for a minute.

“Five seizures,” Simon said, and his voice did that thing where it starts low and decides to keep going lower. “Hallucinations. Puking. Pissing. Scratches. Cuffs.” He didn’t look at Price when he said cuffs, because the word set off a minefield in his head—restraint, consent, protection, harm. “She called for me.” That last came out like he’d been the one who bit his wrist.

Price leaned against the mirror and didn’t make them look at themselves more than they had to. “That tracks,” he said, which is not comfort and not dismissal; it’s a man laying a ruler on a table and measuring clean. “You did the right thing.”

“I did it late,” Simon said, and the anger felt safer than the grief. “I knew. I knew months ago. I saw the fucking signs and decided to be kind instead of useful. Covered for her. Wrapped it up in patience and called it love. Now she’s strapped to a bed and some poor bastards are collecting her tears in a bowl.”

Price let the ugly sit. “You gave her the runway,” he said after a quiet. “She wasn’t ready to land. Now she is or she’ll crash. You can stand on the tarmac shaking your fist at the weather all you like. Doesn’t move the storm.”

“She asked me not to leave,” Simon said. He didn’t mean to. The words arrived without permission and sat there between them like something bleeding. “She said it quiet and mean. Like a child. Felt like my ribs were mismatched afterwards.”

Price’s mouth went softer at the edges. “She says that to everyone, I reckon, whether she says it out loud or not.” He took the cigarillo off the sill, looked at it like a moral question, put it back. “First time I saw her, she was seventeen and crawling out of a shit-pit someone thought was a character-building exercise.” He told it simple, the way men tell a thing they’ve had to make peace with: the rain, the stink, the veterans with their granddad’s cruelty dressing itself up as tradition, the thinness of her like a ledger line you could snap, the eye that met his without looking for permission. “I weren’t Captain yet,” he said, regret as dry as a biscuit. “If I’d had the hat, I’d’ve put a stop to it and sent a few of those pricks to clean latrines with their tongues. I called for a medic. Offered a hand. She crawled anyway, stood under her own steam, wiped mud and pig off her face, and called me sir with a lip split so wide I thought it might reach her elbow if she smiled. She didn’t smile.”

Simon’s jaw clicked. He could see it: a girl with weapons disguised as bones, asked to prove that she belonged in a room she’d already earned on talent, crawling through filth and not asking for rescue because rescue is an IOU you pay with interest for years. It made a clean hot line of violence burn under his skin for people he didn’t know and couldn’t punch now. “Good,” he said, eventually, because there’s a good that only arrives by surviving, and he hated that some good requires that. “Explains a few things.”

“Explains why she’d rather chew her own arm off than ask for help,” Price said, lightly enough to stop the words from buckling under their own weight. “Explains why she chose you to do the ugly bit. She trusts you to be cruel in service of care.” He met Simon’s eyes. “And she trusts that you’ll come back. So you’ll come back—on the schedule that helps her, not the one that anaesthetises you.”

“I’ll come back,” Simon said, and the promise felt like sandpaper on the parts of him that wanted to sprint. He sat there a second longer, elbows on knees, towel ticking sweat to the floor, and let Price be the wall he leaned against without leaning. They talked another while—longer than either of them usually tolerated—details about meds he’d looked up, about rooms without windows that still felt safer than rooms with men in them, about the new sergeant and the urge to put him in a locker for breathing too loud, about the way missing someone makes you want to scrap with god and ducks in the same afternoon.

Price ended it the way he ends things he needs to end without making the other man feel sent away. “Go shower,” he said. “Eat. Text me if she spikes or if you need me to tell you you’re not a bastard.” He clapped a palm to Simon’s shoulder once—heavy, accurate—and left the gym smelling faintly of smoke he hadn’t lit.

FLASHBACK — SIX MONTHS AGO: THE LINE HE DREW.

It had been one of those nights that tried to pretend it was quiet. Base had a way of borrowing silence from the future and spending it all at once; that night, for a minute, it loaned them a pocket of peace. She had wandered into his room like it wasn’t wandering, the way she did when she’d run out of places to put the day. They operated on a system of plausible deniability and obvious intent. She sat on his bunk, said nothing, tilted her head at him like well? and he came to stand between her knees because that was their grammar.

He didn’t let women on top as a rule because control is a religion and he’s orthodox. Claire was the exception built into the rule from the start, because she’s not a category to him; she’s a person and persons break rules if you’re honest about them. She’d climbed astride with that little grunt she makes when she’s committing to anything, hands on the bedframe, hair loose because she’d decided it belonged to her more than the day did. He’d gripped her hips and met her with a possessiveness he’d never gift anyone else, breath catching in tandem with hers, the look she gave him—half-lidded, alive, here—like a blow that didn’t bruise. He brought her face close, palm on the back of her head, not a pull, never that, just a tether so he could watch her mouth shape his name. He kissed her and tasted the rain she’d walked through getting here and the bourbon she shouldn’t have bothered with because she was already enough to make him forget his own.

He drew back to look. He always looked. He read pupils like weather and hands like terrain. Her pupils were wrong—too blown for the light in the room, wrong for the tempo. He tracked the smile she gave him and saw it slip at the edges, an afterglow with no cause. He glanced down at the crook of her arm, a habit he hadn’t had to form so much as discover. Fresh track, angry and flat, with the lie of long sleeves folded at the foot of the bed. He felt the bottom drop out with the speed of a trap door. The frustration didn’t arrive like thunder; it arrived like a knife sliding home.

He moved her. Not rough, not kind; decisive. Hands at her waist, air-swap, a shift that made the mattress complain. She let out a surprised sound, a small wounded fox noise, and blinked at him as if he’d changed the script mid-scene. “What—” she started, and he was already reaching for the duvet, throwing it over her because dignity is not negotiable in his house.

“No,” he said, the word flat enough to press flowers. He planted his feet so he wouldn’t reach for her by habit. “Not like this.”

She frowned the way she frowned at a bad range call, incredulous, annoyed. “I am like this,” she said with an ugly little laugh. “I’m fine, Simon. Don’t get pious.”

“You’re not,” he said, and hated that the line between lecture and plea in his voice made him sound like he cared enough to beg. “You’re somewhere else and you brought your body as a proxy. I don’t fuck proxies.”

“Christ,” she sneered, reaching for her bra as if armour could be assembled post hoc. “Always with the rules. You get off on them, don’t you? You like it when I do what you say. That’s all this is—order me around with your cock half out, Ghost, it’s your kink.”

He laughed then—sharp, joyless—because anger chooses its own exits. “Don’t cheapen us,” he said, and the us landed like a hand on a table between them neither wanted to admit was there. “I’m not putting myself inside you when you’re not fully in the room. That’s not control; that’s consent. You know the difference.”

She went still for a second, and he saw the hurt behind the outrage, and then she did what she always did when the heart got near the surface: she weaponised it. “You don’t get to make the ground rules for my body,” she snapped, one arm back through the strap with a vicious little tug. “You don’t get to decide when I’m ‘present’ enough to be worth the honour of your sainted dick. You think you’re protecting me? You’re just protecting your fantasy of being the good man in the bad mask.”

“Maybe,” he said, because he refuses to lie to win. “But I’m also protecting me from waking up next to you and wondering whether I took advantage because you were clever enough to look me in the eye and make me want to ignore what I knew. I’m not doing it. Hate me now; thank me when you’ve slept for six months.”

“Fuck you,” she said, dressing fast, the efficiency of exit making his stomach turn with a pathetic little loyalty that wanted her to stay and call him names here instead of out there. “You don’t own me. You don’t get to be my conscience because you’re older and bigger and like hearing yourself talk.” She slammed his door so hard the frame clicked in the wall. He sat down on the edge of the bed and stared at the space she’d left like it was a puzzle with three pieces missing. Later, when they’d stopped pretending the fight hadn’t left teeth marks, they came to an agreement that was less a treaty than a ceasefire with conditions. He didn’t budge on the line. She pretended she’d always liked that about him and hated him for it when it interfered with her plan. They slept together again on better nights. And on worse ones, he brought her tea and pretended not to smell the pharmacy on her skin because he was, as he would later admit to Price, too fucking kind for too fucking long.

ST. THOMAS, NIGHT TWO: CLAIRE (AFTER).

By night her rage had burned down to wire and the wire hummed. Del had coaxed exactly half a slice of bread and a bruise-coloured banana into the ledger. Water kept tally for both teams. Claire spent the evening refusing anything that looked like being helped; it felt like drowning out of spite and she still chose it. The meds dripped in steady, boring comfort—care that doesn’t seduce. The room blinked in and out of the weird. She saw hands on the ceiling once and told them to piss off aloud. Elliot pretended he hadn’t heard because acknowledging wall-hands gives them union rights.

When the seizures came again they were nastier about it, as if insulted by her stubbornness. The second of the night arrived on a breath that had been only a little too fast and knocked her sideways into that shivering, trapped fish place. Del’s hands had a memory now of where Claire’s head liked to hit first; they beat the floor to it. A doctor with a kind mouth and a sharp mind—Shah—adjusted a dial and said something calm that made the monitor’s numbers make a different kind of sense. Claire’s wrist—already raw under the cuff—took more friction as she dragged it, dragged it, dragged it, seeking a pain that matched the one inside. Del slipped gauze under the strap. “I know,” she said. “I know you hate me.”

“I hate you,” Claire agreed, honest as a slap, tears shocking her face again because the body is a treacherous friend. She tried to spit and didn’t have the water to waste. She laughed at that, brief and wild. Then she called for Simon like a kid checks there’s a hand on the back of their head before they jump in a pool. When he didn’t appear (because this wasn’t a film with noble, timely entrances), she swore and told the room she wanted to go home and told the room she wanted to die and told the room to stop looking at her. The room took it all. Del sat. Elliot stood by the door like a gentle bouncer. The drip ticked. The fan talked nonsense. The body continued.

Toward dawn, exhaustion came in heavy boots and stood on her chest until she lay down. Sleep that wasn’t sleep arrived, mean but necessary. Del checked the cuffs, looser now that the fight was gone. She wiped the dried blood from the corners of Claire’s mouth with a cloth the temperature of mercy. She counted, recorded, breathed, watched. When the day nurse arrived with coffee that could stun a mule, Del gave handover in clipped notes and soft emphasis like the prayer they let her say at work.

HEREFORD, 2300 HOURS: ALWAYS BACK TO WORK.

Simon showered hard enough to take a layer off and failed to wash the day away as expected. He texted Amina a single word—Status?—and put the phone face down so he wouldn’t stare in a way that made the minutes pull teeth. He lay on his bunk for a time that wasn’t sleep and wasn’t not-sleep, thinking about the file he hadn’t opened and the bandage on Claire’s cheek he had. He thought about the new lad’s eager eyes and how life would sand them down regardless of Simon’s disdain. He thought about the empty chair at the table and the way Gaz had set a mug in front of it without realising and then taken it away with a quick, guilty movement like he’d been caught pouring whisky for a ghost.

He imagined Claire breathing. Counted it. Stopped when he realised he was matching her in his head and throttling his own lungs into the wrong rhythm. He told himself, out loud, because you have to hear some things: “You did the right thing.” He added, because he’s honest even when it hurts, “You did it late.” He stared at the ceiling and wished it would give him something other than cracks and a spider who’d beaten the base’s extermination protocol. He closed his eyes and saw her at seventeen, mud to her elbows, lip split, telling a man twice her weight sir like an insult delivered as a compliment. He opened his eyes and saw her at twenty-nine, bandage on her face, calling him by his name in a room without windows.

He let the hurt sit in his chest and didn’t try to tidy it. He planned tomorrow, because plans are a scaffold over a ravine. Range at 0600. Paperwork at 0900. Visit request at 1200 failed on principle; he’d make another at 1201 for sport. Call in at 1800. Eat something that resembled food and not penance. Breathe. Repeat. He slept eventually because the body will sedate you when the mind won’t, and he woke at 0430 with his hand already reaching for the phone and a word on his tongue he wouldn’t say to anyone else: Please.

HEREFORD GARRISON. SEPTEMBER 23: MORNING WITHOUT HER.

The alarm went at the same brutal minute it always did and the room, bastard that it was, stayed exactly as empty as he’d left it. No extra heat in the bed, no weight like a cat curled long beside him stealing half his blanket and half his patience, no soft, sleepy kick to his shin because “you’re hogging all of Wales, Riley, shift over.” No voice, gravel-quiet, running her mouth before coffee—needling him about the boots he hadn’t lined, the shirt he’d folded wrong, the imaginary fault in his stance she’d fix by pushing his shoulder an inch and smirking when he let her. No kiss stolen mid-argument to shut her up because words were a luxury and he couldn’t afford a full-blown debate about toast at 0500. Just his own breath and the radiator’s clank and the knowledge that she was a mile of city away in a room without a window teaching her body how to live without a weapon it had decided was a god.

He lay there one beat too long, catalogued the ache like kit, then swung out. Floor cold. Shower hotter than it needed to be because punishment and mercy share a tap. Shave fast. T-shirt, vest, the rest. He looked at the bed once more and hated himself for the habit. If he let himself, he’d see her as she’d been: sprawled naked and unashamed and infuriatingly smug about being warm while he froze, tracing something thoughtless on his chest with a finger while narrating the day he’d have whether he liked it or not. He killed the picture before it could grow a voice.

Range at 0600, rifle in hand like she’d put it there, cheek weld just so because she’d made that muscle memory his. He ran cold-bore drills with a precision that had nothing to do with pride and everything to do with staying on the rails. The new sergeant appeared at the edge of the world smelling of laundry and hope; Simon ignored him with the thoroughness of a man who doesn’t have spare oxygen. He called wind, corrected for nothing and everything, took the smallest pleasure in a group so tight you could hide it under a coin and felt immediately disloyal for feeling anything good without her there to scoff at him.

Paperwork at 0900, the kind that breeds if you don’t salt the earth. He filled boxes like a good boy and didn’t once write the word that kept chewing his tongue from the inside. At 1100 he stood in Price’s doorway and simply said, “Clinic.” Price looked up, measured the edges of him with that fatherly eye that never missed. “Back before last light,” the Captain said, a question sewn inside a statement. “Aye,” Simon answered. He didn’t add unless because he refused to feed the universe clauses.

He texted Amina from the car park—En route.—and got the habitual, blessedly boring Understood. He drove, and the city obligingly stayed itself; buses shouldered lanes, pedestrians pretended death was theoretical, a pigeon turned its head to watch him like it knew too much. His hands sat steady on the wheel. He wasn’t fooled by steady.

ST. THOMAS, NOON: THE PLATE SHE WOULDN’T TOUCH.

The reception had day-face on: fewer chairs full, the TV still lying about serenity, coffee that smelled like a compromise. Amina was there the way mountains are there—fixed, useful, not asking for applause. She slid a single-sheet report across the counter like it might crack if mishandled. “Yesterday,” she said. “You’ll hate it. You’ll also have read worse things that told you less.”

He read. Oral intake minimal to nil. Bread with peanut butter 1600 previous day; water sips only. Continued tactile and visual disturbances; intermittent agitation; verbalised desire to leave, to die, to ‘get the bugs out.’ Seizure activity x2; post-ictal confusion; IM medication administered per protocol. Restraint friction injury at wrists—dressings applied; behaviour meets threshold for classification as self-harm (repetitive harmful rubbing in context of distress). Declines garden, group, reading; isolative; guarded with male staff, minimally engaged with female staff. The tidy paragraphs felt like being flayed with paper. He’d done his homework. He knew this first-phase detox like a map carved into the underside of his skull—autonomic misery, craving, insomnia, the whole circus. Knowing didn’t mean the words didn’t land like bolts.

“Lunch,” Amina said, an eyebrow a kind of apology. “She’s not taking to it. Del’s with her.”

He nodded, absorbed the word lunch like it was a delicate instrument, and followed the corridor to the now-familiar door. Del came out with a plate that would have made a nutritionist proud and an addict murderous: greens bright enough to look alive, a slice of chicken small enough to feel possible, rice that hadn’t been cooked into punishment. Del’s face carried the tolerable frustration of professionals who know the limits of persuasion. “She’s not eating,” Del said. “Not since the bit of bread yesterday. We can’t force. I’ve tried everything short of juggling.” She had a smear of peanut butter on her sleeve like a medal. “She’s raw,” Del added, softer. “Everything sits wrong. I’ll take any trick you’ve got that isn’t dropping a kebab from God.”

“I’ll try,” Simon said, and his voice had its old gravel. “No promises. She’s stubborn on a good day.”

“You don’t say.” Del’s mouth shaped a smile that didn’t quite make it. “Five minutes alone. If she spikes—”

“I’ll shout,” he said, and opened the door like men open doors to rooms that keep their hearts hostage.

ST. THOMAS, 1200: CLAIRE (FLASHBACK FIVE YEARS).

Time did that trick where it folds into itself like bad paper. She was nineteen again and stupid with the belief that youth insulated you from consequence. Barracks that smelled of old damp and new detergent. Two men who wore their rank on their tongues more than their sleeves—Robert Prescott and Michael Jenkings, both too old to be impressed by being adored and too young to have learned not to want it anyway. She’d slept with them because she’d wanted to prove a theorem about not being owned by anyone, because she’d been lonely, because they’d been there with open palms and a way of talking that made refusal feel like an accusation. She had hated being on her stomach and that’s exactly where she was, cheek to a sheet with the laundry room’s cheap scent in it, dizzy in a way that wasn’t erotic but got painted with the word anyway. Meth made everything bright and far; her hands couldn’t find the bedframe long enough to tell her body where it was in space. Robbie had laughed and dragged her fingers away like it was funny, like she was a toddler playing near a socket. The room tilted. She’d said—she had said—“Stop, I need—” and the bed had kept stuttering under her as if the furniture were the boss. She’d needed to be sick and she’d been sick and they’d made the faces men make when they’ve been reminded women have bodies that do unfriendly things and then they’d joked about stumblers and junkies and clinics and the word had hit her like a stamp: junkie. She’d shaken for hours and mumbled apologies to no one in particular and they’d laughed and finished what they’d decided to finish, the noise in her head drowning the parts of her that had enough rank to say no. The next morning she’d left without her underwear and spent three hours on the bathroom floor exactly cold enough to remember her name. She’d filed it under my own fault and thrown away the file and found it again every time she looked in a mirror.

Now, white room, no window, twenty-four and falling apart exactly where prophecy had said she would. The door opened and brought Simon in like a verdict and a reprieve. Pathetic, her mind hissed. Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic. She refused to look at him because if she did she’d see it in his face and he’d deny it and she’d call him a liar and they’d waste the two minutes on a fight they’d both lose.

ST. THOMAS, 1205: TALKING, SORT OF.

He knew the worst before he crossed the threshold, because the body tells you what the paper will only confirm: the air held that thin metallic tang of antiseptic and blood that says dressings recently changed; the fan did its patient, merciless little hum; the rhythm of her breath sat too high in the chest, shallow, stingy. He took the rest in like a marksman reads wind—bandages at the wrists, clean and fresh but already trying to pink through at the edges; a thin strip across her cheekbone, the adhesive tugging a curl; old track lines and new scratches laid over old track lines like disputed borders on a bad map; the way she sat half-crossed, feet tucked in close, making herself smaller, elbows clamped like she could keep all the pieces in if she kept herself compact. Her hair was pulled back in a hurry, a few dark curls breaking perimeter to stick damp against her neck. Two tremors per five seconds in the left hand; three per five in the right—he counted without agreeing to count. Her pupils were better than Thursday and worse than a life he wanted for her. She didn’t meet his eyes once, and he took the sting like a man taking a staple out of his own thumb—swift, inevitable.

He sat on the chair at a diagonal and let the silence do some work. Talking too soon spooks deer and addicts alike. He looked at the tray at the foot of the bed—Del’s best shot at kindness—and reached for the fork because courage often looks like eating greens.

“You need to start eating,” he said finally, voice low enough not to echo. No stroking, no softening, just that blunt path he trusted more than platitudes. “Thoughts get worse if you don’t. You know that. I’m not lettin’ you rot here. That’s not the assignment.”

Nothing. She was a statue built by a furious god who didn’t love statues but kept making them anyway. He watched her jaw—not clenched, exactly, but braced. He watched the swallow catch and fail and try again. He waited. He was good at waiting when he had a purpose to nail his feet to the floor.

Ten minutes, by his inner clock. Then, without looking at him, she said, very evenly, “I can’t get the maggots off my head.” The syllables were handled with care, as if they might cut. “Don’t come this week. Get rid of the bugs first. Then come. Don’t—” She faltered and gathered herself. “Don’t look at me like this.”

He felt the old, dangerous urge to shake sense into someone he loved—a fantasy as useless as it is universal. He controlled it with the neatness of a man who knows what control is for. “Fuck off,” he said, because there are times when tenderness wears that shape and he refused to let her mistake her shame for his. “I’ll look at you however you come, Claire. Bugs and all. Eat.”

He picked up the fork and carved a bite out of the rice and chicken. Ate it himself, swallowed like the food had been made of penance. Took another. She watched—he saw it in the tightness of her cheek, a fractional turn, a flicker of eye toward movement. “It’s not poison,” he said, and set the fork in her reach. He didn’t hand it to her; he placed it where she’d have to choose it. Choice matters when the rest of the day is nothing but being carried.

For a minute the fork sat there like an accusation. Then her hand came out, tremor and all, and took it. She didn’t look up. She carved a cynical, tiny bite—the sort of bite she took when she planned to hate the whole exercise—and put it in her mouth like a dare. Chewed. Swallowed. It was the smallest battlefield in the world and it felt like a war turning. He didn’t smile. He didn’t move. He ate another bite himself, made a face at nothing as if the chicken had personally offended him, and handed the tray a little closer like a man sliding chips in someone else’s favour.

They worked through it that way—him taking one, her taking one, then her taking two in a row because he’d leaned back and pretended indifference with the skill of a man who had bribed toddlers and soldiers in the same lifetime. Halfway through, she put a hand flat against her stomach and looked suddenly stricken in a way he recognised from long nights and bad ration packs. “Enough,” he said before she had to shape the word. “We’ll pretend you ate the lot and I’ll lie to Del for both of us and she’ll pretend to be fooled.”

Silence again, but a different kind. He shifted, found a position with his elbows on his knees, and started talking nonsense on purpose. Base gossip, scrubbed of names and edges. How Soap had tried to fix the kettle with a multitool and nearly achieved arson. How Gaz had won a packet of crisps off a corporal by knowing an obscure fact about the ranges in Waziristan. How Wickham’s boots squeaked like a mouse orchestra and how, if she didn’t come back soon to correct it, Simon would be forced to kill on principle. He kept it in that low, sardonic register that didn’t require anything of her except endurance. He watched her face for flinches that would tell him when he’d hit a nerve. He avoided talking about anything that started with why.

He didn’t talk about her face, the neat lines her nails had made. He didn’t talk about the rawness under the cuff, though when she shifted he logged the way her wrists flinched under even the suggestion of movement. He didn’t talk about the specific way her breath hitched on a certain syllable that told him the hallucinations were still holding court, bugs crawling the corridor between nerves and thought. He filed everything. That’s what he does. The brain, wired for war, makes lists whether you ask it to or not: colour back in lips (some), bandage adhesive curling (left cheek), IV site (right hand, no phlebitis), tremor frequency (down to two per five seconds when distracted), appetite (present if provoked, weak), compliance with insult (high—took fuck off as intended). He laid his hand flat against his own thigh to stop it from reaching of its own accord.

Towards the hour’s end, her eyes had that glassy weight of a person whose body intends to take them whether they like it or not. He kept talking through the first signs of slide so that if she fell, she’d fall into his voice instead of the explosion noise that her head liked to produce. Her lashes lowered. Her mouth softened around nothing. The line of her shoulders lost the map of bracing. Sleep took her with that ugly, necessary gracelessness of healing. He sat another five minutes, memorising her breathing all over again like he’d been assigned it in a class and intended to come first.

He stood like a man defusing a thing. At the door he looked back once and let himself think the word he avoided like superstition—mine—and then shut it before the thought could ruin anything good. Del met him in the corridor with a nurse’s poker face and a woman’s gratitude. “That was something,” she said. “I’ll take half a plate and call it a miracle.”

“Call me next time,” he said. “You need her to eat, you call me. I’ll bring a buffet and a bloody circus if that’s what it takes.”

“Circus is Thursdays,” Del deadpanned, then sobered. “We’ll call you.”

He stopped at Amina’s desk on the way out. “She ate,” he said, a man announcing a small victory as if it were a territorial claim on the moon.

“I know,” Amina said, because the ward had ears. “Good. Go be a person for four hours. We’ll mind her.”

He grunted something that wanted to be thanks and got in his car and sat with his hands on the wheel and let the way his chest hurt be a sign he was still doing this the only way he knew: all in, no safety on.

On the way back, he ran red lights in his head and stopped at all of them in the world. He told himself again the same two sentences he’d been beating into his skull since Thursday: You did the right thing. You did it late. He decided that guilt would be allowed to sit in the back seat and shut up while he concentrated on the road.

Back at base, everything still had her outline in it. He put his head down and did what Price put in front of him. He ate on purpose. He slept that night without dreaming because his brain, exhausted from not thinking about maggots and men who needed killing, put a blackout sheet over the windows and told the monsters to try again tomorrow. And somewhere under that roof in London, she slept too—badly, reluctantly, but under. The bugs would keep talking. He’d keep answering. That was the deal.

HEREFORD GARRISON. SEPTEMBER 24: BRACING FOR THE PEAK.

Morning arrived the way a drill sergeant arrives—boots first, voice later. Simon woke to the room’s blank face and the habit of reaching to the right for a woman who wasn’t there, a hand’s worth of empty that still surprised him even though he’d told himself last night not to be an idiot about it. No warm curve tucked under his arm, no curl snapping at his chin, no soft, derisive “you snore” that always turned, without fail, into him kissing it off her mouth before she could build a whole case. He lay still, took the hit without dramatics, and got up. Teeth, shower, kit. His phone buzzed while he was lacing his boots: Amina, concise as a field medic under fire, sending three links with short, unflinching headers—“acute withdrawal course,” “peak symptom window,” “why worse can be better.” He didn’t need the education; he’d already sat up at 0300 nights reading the science until the graphs looked like targets. But there was mercy in someone else carrying a sliver of the information for him, so he opened the first anyway and let sentences do their dry work. Peak between 48–72 hours, sometimes longer if polysubstance is in the mix. Hyperalgesia, autonomic flares, rebound anxiety, hallucinations may intensify. If your person looks worse, it may mean the body is doing exactly what it must. He hated the calm in the language, hated the way it smoothed a blade into a butter knife. He texted a single word—Got it—because acknowledging was a way of saying thank you without spending feelings he didn’t have spare.

He told Price over coffee because the old man deserved—and required—advance notice if his ghost was going to be tethered to a phone like a nervous parent. Price nodded like a tree does in wind, slow and with roots. “Right,” he said. “We’ll share the weight.” He meant the practical things—cover the range rotation, tell Gaz to eat the admin for a day, let Johnny run his mouth like mortar to fill gaps—and he meant the other thing, the thing there weren’t words for: I’ll hold your line if your hands shake. Simon believed him because the man has never lied where it counted. Soap got the abbreviated version in the corridor—“she’s about to hit the wall; don’t be a pillock if I’m short”—and responded by clapping him so hard on the back his lungs hiccuped and promising to keep Wickham so busy with awkward small talk that the kid’s tongue would sign a transfer request by tea.

He braced the way he knows how: checked the fuel in the car, topped the boot with nothing useful—spare shirt, a bottle of water he might never drink, the envelope with her medical history still closed because opening it without her felt like picking a lock you technically had a key for but didn’t own the right to use. He re-routed the charger cable so it wouldn’t snag when he grabbed the phone at speed. He told himself not to grab the phone at speed unless the phone shouted. He failed at that promise in spirit and kept it in action, which is half the battle. He went to the range at six sharp, rifle a comfort in the hand that had learned the heft of her shoulder tapping him into better alignment; he put rounds into paper with the cold efficiency of a man storing control somewhere, anywhere, so he’d have it to spend later. He made himself do the paperwork at nine so Price wouldn’t stand in his doorway with that son, if you don’t occupy your hands I’ll assign you to latrines until you invent a new word for bleach look. He set his phone on the desk face down and discovered that did nothing to stop his mind glancing at it every twelve seconds like a nervous tic. He told himself again—and again and again—that worse did not mean failing, that worse sometimes meant moving through.

ST. THOMAS, 1100: CLAIRE — THE PEAK ARRIVES WEARING WATER.

The bathroom was a place that should have belonged to ordinary things: tile, hot water, the small moral victory of doing something human without supervision. She insisted on showering alone; Del and the others respected it as far as protocol let them—door ajar, feet audible, a voice within easy call. The water came on hot and needled her skin in the right way for three seconds, five, maybe ten. Then the trick happened—the one hallucinations love because it recruits every sense and humiliates you with your own body. The stream thickened. It was nothing and then it was syrup and then it was heavier than that. She felt it hit the crown of her head and drag, viscous, down the line of her spine. She blinked and the colour shifted in a way that made the stomach pitch: pink to red to wrong. It was blood. It was everywhere in the way everywhere makes sense when fear is steering—ropey, sticky, a sheet of it, the drain gagging. She tipped her face up and it got into her mouth and that was it; panic detonated at sternum height and blew out through limbs.

She made a sound no one should have to hear themselves make—open and animal—and her knees gave, skull ringing the tile in a blunt, hard thunk that the hallway registered before the nurse did. “Claire?” a voice said from the doorway, soft and level, and her brain translated it as an order from underground. “They’re in me,” she said, and the words came as a gasp, as if each consonant cost a piece of oxygen she didn’t own. “They’re—get them off—get them off—” Her hands were already there, doing what hands do when your nerves lie: nails to chest, belly, arms, neck, face, thighs, the litany of soft places and precious vessels. She raked and raked, and the pain, traitor that it is, told her she was winning because it was at least her pain and not theirs.

The nurse came in quick—protocol chess, Hello-I’m-here with one hand, towel with the other, radio clipped in place, leaving herself wide as a target so Claire could see the movement and not read a grab. “Claire, love, I’m in your space,” she said, and gave the language ahead of the action so it had time to arrive. “I’m going to—” The strike wasn’t a plan; it was a flinch writ large. Claire’s palm caught the nurse’s cheek with the heel of the hand, a messy, open slap that left surprise blooming under the skin immediately. Horror chased it out of her throat. “Sorry,” she sobbed, “sorry, sorry, they’re eating me,” because the apology came trained from childhood while the desperation was being written in real time.

Del was there and then Elliot, moving like two sides of the same thought. The floor was already mean with water-that-wasn’t-water; the towel became a rope, became a blanket, became anything but the thing Claire’s brain said it was. “Containment,” Del said, not to Claire, to the process, and they did it—safe hands, not too many at once, limbs pinned in ways that didn’t remember other bad pinning. Claire bucked because the bugs were under her scalp now, calling the inside of her head home, and the logic of her body said knock until the door opens. She banged her temple sideways into the padded restraint they’d only just got back on and when that didn’t do it she found the tile again, a short, savage thud that made Del swear under her breath without breaking tone. The cut wasn’t dramatic, but head wounds announce themselves; blood said hello as if auditioning for the part of confirmation, and the fear of this one is your fault rose in the room and then got put down by training.

“Sedation,” Elliot said, already reaching, and Del nodded because there are thresholds beyond which ‘ride it out’ becomes a cruelty. IM—faster than the drip that would get shoved out again by a stomach determined to reject every peace offering—hip, press, withdraw. “You’ll feel floaty,” Del told her, voice pressed low and repetitive to give the drug a bridge into the nervous system. “You won’t die. You won’t. This is horrible; it ends. It ends.” Claire sobbed something that might have been no and might have been now. The edges dulled, not by kindness but by chemistry doing exactly what it was paid to do. The scratching slowed because the hands were held and because the room had turned woolly enough to make rage trip over its own feet. She cried on the floor for a while longer—snot and tears and the sound toddlers make after the shock has passed and the pain has settled into its job—and then the sedative paid out the curtain like an exhausted stagehand. They patched what could be patched without waking whatever beasts were waiting for their turn, cleaned the scalp, taped with pressure to stop the new leak, dressed the rails of her wrists where friction had chewed; they logged vitals that made clinicians grunt and then settle; they wrote notes that avoided poetry and favoured the hard square of facts.

They put her to bed. Soft cuffs back on, looser; pads under bone points because prevention is a religion in these wards. Del sat a long time, hand near but not on, counting the metronome of a pulse that had remembered a beat it could keep. Elliot mopped the blood-that-wasn’t from the tile and rinsed towels and filled in the boxes that the evening would use to tell a morning not to panic.

HEREFORD BRIEFING ROOM. LATE AFTERNOON: THE TASKING AND THE COUNTING.

The whiteboard looked like any whiteboard—red lines over maps, a mission title written by a man who thought capitals make courage. Price delivered it in his clean, clipped method, no dramatics: two days on ground, Nepal, allied brief to cut a couple of arms-trafficking ribs out of a larger cage so someone else’s border would sleep better. Insertion plain. Extraction wearing someone else’s moustache. Wickham practically vibrated like a Labrador staring at a pond. Soap and Gaz wore their professional faces, which is to say they grinned like idiots so no one would worry about what they were thinking. Simon did the math automatically—the time zones, the knock-on effect on his clinic windows, the hours he could make if he bullied policy politely enough and bribed it with clean credentials. He nodded when Price’s eyes found his. He didn’t say I’ll go and I’ll still be here. He didn’t need to; the Captain could hear the twin propellers in the way he said aye.

He checked his phone twice during a slide that did not require him and got precisely what he deserved for checking: nothing. The worst part of modern life is that your pocket becomes a little box that meows for attention whether or not the cat is there. He tucked it face down, again, like that could fix the manic energy that wanted to sleep in his blood and didn’t. He ran Wickham and three others through dry runs on the killhouse afterwards with a brutality that wasn’t aimed at them and they were smart enough not to mistake themselves for targets. Wickham tried to ask if Sergeant Brooks would “be back in time to—” and Simon’s look did the work of several paragraphs. “Focus on your corners,” he said, and the kid miraculously remembered he had corners.

Night crawled over the base like the sensible thing it is, turning everything stealth by default. Amina’s update arrived at 1943 and Simon opened it in a sliver of hallway where the light made his skin look tired.

ST. THOMAS, 1943: THE REPORT THAT MADE HIM BURN.

It was clinical, which is the point. It did not pander. It did not flinch. He read it like a man reading his own name off a list he doesn’t want to be on.

DATE/TIME: 24 Sept, 10:56–11:35
INCIDENT: Acute exacerbation of hallucinations during shower (patient unaccompanied in stall, nurse stationed within doorway per protocol). Patient reported “blood in water,” “bugs eating skin.” Immediate escalation of tactile hallucinations (formication) with severe distress. Patient began repetitive scratching across anterior chest, abdomen, neck, face, bilateral thighs and upper extremities. Nurse attempted verbal de-escalation; entered stall to provide towel and containment. Patient delivered open-handed strike to left cheek (no injury requiring care; nurse not seeking charge). Patient repeatedly struck head against floor and bed rail when transferred; one scalp laceration (left parietal region, approx. 2.5 cm linear, edges clean), controlled with pressure and closed using adhesive strips; no loss of consciousness observed; serial neuro checks initiated.

INTERVENTIONS: Soft restraints applied to upper extremities to prevent further self-injury; additional padding placed under occiput and wrists. IM sedation administered (midazolam 2 mg, haloperidol 2.5 mg) following failed verbal redirection and imminent risk of self-harm (head banging, compulsive scratching). Wounds cleaned with sterile saline; superficial excoriations to wrists at restraint contact (bilateral) dressed with non-adherent pads; multiple superficial linear abrasions to face/neck/torso irrigated; topical antibiotic applied. Vitals: HR 132–148 during peak; BP 156/94 with spikes; RR 26–32; O2 sat maintained >96% RA. Temp peaked at 38.4°C. Post-ictal state observed following brief tonic event (~30 sec), GCS 10→14 over 15 minutes.

BEHAVIORAL: Patient tearful, expressing remorse (“sorry”) post-strike; alternating agitation with collapse; repeated verbalizations: “get them off,” “they’re under my skin,” “bugs in my head,” “don’t touch me” (male staff), calling for “Simon” intermittently. Patient refused oral intake at lunch (0%); water tolerated in sips.

PLAN: Continue Q15 monitoring; maintain seizure precautions; neuro observation hourly x 6 for scalp injury/concussion watch; reassess restraint need q2hrs; offer nutrition in small, frequent portions; liaise with psychiatrist (Dr. Shah) re: adjustment of benzodiazepine taper and addition of adjuncts for hallucinosis. Notify designated contact if escalation recurs.

He felt heat rise under his skin as he read, not the righteous, run-at-gunfire kind, but the kind that makes your jaw threaten to crack and your hands seek a fight with furniture. The line open-handed strike to left cheek made a short, clean grief open inside him because he could hear the sorry that followed, could imagine the nurse—no, not imagine; Del—catching it with a grace that should be illegal to ask of anybody. The words head banging made the back of his skull itch; the scalp-laceration detail was so precise he could see the location on her head as if it were his own. GCS numbers ticked down his vision like a countdown. Calling for “Simon.” He shut his eyes because he didn’t have the capacity to keep them open under that sentence. He breathed and let the report finish being the report. He typed Received. Thank you. Tell Del I read it, and then deleted I appreciate you because it sounded like a condolence card, and then sent it plain because functions matter and gratitude isn’t a weakness when it’s for the people who kept your person’s skull from the tile.

HEREFORD GYM. 0200 HOURS: LIFT, SWALLOW, LIGHT.

He made the gym answer for all of it. He picked weight like he was choosing stones to build a house with and then threw the stones at a storm. Deadlifts because they yank rage out by the hamstrings. Rows because the movement makes your back remember it has purpose beyond bracing for bad news. He worked until his vision went grainy at the edges and his breath sounded like the ocean shoved up a pipe. He didn’t count sets; he counted not thinking about the line bugs in my head. He didn’t chase a burn; he chased silence. Johnny popped his head in at some hour that shouldn’t have men in it and made a face like you’re a bastard and do you want a protein bar and I love you the way wolves do, from across a clearing and then left because he understands the difference between staying and hovering.

Between sets, the body being the treacherous storyteller it is, memory gifted him a reel he would have paid to misplace. He saw the first time he’d let himself smoke after sex because the old habit had been pressed into his palm by a moment that felt doomed to end and he wanted to make it dirtier and more honest. He’d slid down the bed, lungs raw from effort and relief, the room smelling like sweat and something like home. He’d lit one with cupped hands, flame bright on the mask he’d pushed up to his hairline because she asked, always, to see his face afterwards if not before. He’d kissed her with smoke on his tongue—a boy’s indulgence packed into a man’s mouth—and watched her not complain. She’d turned her head half-second later, quiet, calculating, and that’s when he noticed the breathing, the careful rationing of air, the small cough she tried to keep politely inside her throat. He’d flicked the cigarette away like it had bitten him, stomped it out on concrete outside his door with his bare heel because he was in a hurry to undo a stupid choice, and came back to her chest doing that awful combing motion the asthmatic body does to get oxygen to behave. “Where’s your inhaler?” he’d asked like an idiot. “In my room,” she’d said like a dare. He’d belted trousers and legged it, half-dressed, down corridors he’d memorised in the dark, broke into Armoury because the weapons closet is where she hid everything, found the little blue life-raft and ran it back to her like he’d been tasked to deliver it by a god. She’d taken it like a bored queen, two long pulls, three, then sat up against the headboard and given him a look that said well? and don’t do it again, and he hadn’t. Not really. Not until now, when rage made old vices look like the sort of company you invite because they drink in your style and don’t ask questions.

He finished the last set and stood over the bar like an executioner reconsidering the paperwork. His hands shook very slightly; only a man who paid rent in that house would have noticed. He dried them on a towel and reached into the pocket of his hoodie where he had no business finding a packet and found one anyway because anger stocks your shelves in secret. Outside, the night had thinned; the car park held the kind of quiet that has nothing to do with peace and everything to do with exhaustion. He leaned against a concrete pillar, cigarette between his fingers, lighter’s wheel turning with that old flint-scratch that sings to parts of you you don’t much like. He paused a second longer than pride wanted him to, long enough to see the version of himself who didn’t light it shaking his head like a disappointed mentor. He lit it. The first drag hurt exactly as much as he needed something to hurt—lungs flaring, throat seared, the head filling with that dim, stupid hush that substitutes for calm when you’ve run out of honest means. Smoke left his mouth like a confession he hadn’t earned the absolution for.

He hated himself for it immediately and with gusto. Not performative, not for points—a practical loathing, the kind that says you made a rule for a reason and you broke it because you wanted to feel at the controls for nine seconds. He remembered Claire leaving rooms politely when lads lit up because her chest didn’t want the war and because the smell on her uniform made some facet of her past close shop. He remembered her coughing hard enough to scare him, the little thread of panic that always climbed her throat before the medicine brought the world back into proportions. He remembered flicking ash off the side of a metal bin after that first time and telling himself never again, you selfish bastard. He took another drag anyway because part of him wanted to hammer the lesson home with pain rather than restraint. It didn’t help. He stubbed it out halfway, ground the butt under his boot as if friction with concrete could turn shame into something useful, and stood there a long minute breathing air like a penance.

He put the packet back in his pocket because throwing it away would be theatre and because keeping it would be a reminder he didn’t trust himself not to need. He told himself out loud—because saying it aloud makes it real in a way thought doesn’t—“You don’t get to break the rules you make for her.” The sentence hung in the car park and didn’t turn into anything neat. He went back inside, angry enough at himself to do something useful with it tomorrow, and lay in a bed that had learned, against his orders, to measure itself by absence. In London, a woman slept with a head bandaged because the world had insisted on being too much and a team of exhausted, furious, patient nurses sat outside her room with clipboards and coffee, counting, waiting, betting quietly, in their own hearts, on the side that wanted her alive.

ST. THOMAS. SEPTEMBER 25, 03:10 — THE WEB AT NIGHT (CLAIRE).

She woke like a fly waking inside a web—everything sticky, the mind glued in strings, the body twitching against threads that didn’t look like threads until they tightened. Heat ran off her in a cheap fever; sweat stung her lip and made the bandage on her cheek itch in a circle she couldn’t scratch. The ceiling was too close and too far. The room had corners, then no corners, then more corners than any honest room needs. A chair breathed. The fan made a noise that pretended to be gentle and wasn’t. When she swallowed, her throat rasped as if she’d been screaming into winter for hours; she reached to touch it and yanked her hand back like she’d grabbed a stove. Everything from tongue to lungs felt abraded, a scraped-out pipe.

“Hey, love.” The voice arrived like a warm towel—soft, no sudden movements. Elena, the night nurse, smaller than Del, younger than Amina, with that stillness some people are born with and others earn by surviving the kind of shifts that pull truths out of you. Elena had a paperback face—creased some, used often, kept open on purpose. She sat forward in the low chair she’d pulled next to the bed as part of the constant watch order. “You’re with me. Do you want anything? Water, a different pillow, my terrible singing?”

Claire blinked and the ceiling turned once, slow, like a big ship. The act of choosing anything felt too sharp. She let tears happen because she couldn’t stop them, because the body had decided to be honest at the worst possible time. The room blurred inside them; the blurring was a mercy until it wasn’t. She shook her head and immediately regretted it; the world hung a second to the left and then thudded back. She caught air in the old, careful way—high, shallow, stingy.

“Where—” It came out ruined, a wire scraped across metal.

“You’re at St. Thomas,” Elena said, smiling with her voice more than her mouth. “Private room. I’m Elena. You had a hell of a day. We sedated you because your head needed the off switch. You’ll feel muzzy and cross. That’s allowed.”

“I want—” She didn’t know what came next. Home felt like a story someone else had told her. Simon arrived with a force that shocked her. She bit it back out of habit and then it climbed anyway, an old animal that knew the way to the door. “Simon,” she whispered, then a little louder because the tiniest part of her believed in magic if you said a name right—“Simon.” A fresh wave of tears embarrassed her even as it eased something. “I want him. I need him.” The plea made her want to hide under the sheet and the sheet weighed a thousand pounds.

Elena didn’t flinch. “He’s not here,” she said, kind without lying. “He’s on that phone if we need him. He’s been in. He’ll be back. I can sit in the meantime and be stubborn on your behalf.”

The dizziness popped like a flashbang. The floor made a suggestion and she followed it because up felt like down. She tried to sit, mis-judged, and the bed’s edge was a cliff; she slipped, hit carpet with a muted thump and a surprised sound that annoyed her because it made her feel small. Elena was there—no grabbing, no sudden haul—just kneeling to make herself smaller than the panic. “All right,” Elena said, “we don’t like gravity tonight,” and the ridiculousness of that sentence kept Claire from bolting. She crawled an inch and then another because crawling at least meant moving and movement meant plan. The room’s corners crawled with the same hands she’d been seeing all bloody day—shadow fingers reaching, holding, sliding back when she looked, coming forward when she blinked. She folded herself around her own ribs because they were the only things she believed were hers; she tucked her chin into the notch it knows. “They’re in the corners,” she said, hoarse. “They’re on the walls. I can feel them when I blink.” She tried to be quiet about it and failed miserably.

“I see nothing but a very brave goblin on the floor giving me orders,” Elena said, and sat with her back to the bedframe, legs crossed, the posture of people who know how to out-wait storms. She opened her arms a fraction, no pressure. Claire stared at the space like it had rules she didn’t trust and then slid into it because surrender is sometimes strategy. Elena made a lap of her thighs and blanket and let Claire shake there, the top of Claire’s head pressed where Elena’s shoulder met her neck, a childhood fit she shouldn’t have needed and needed anyway. “Breathe with me,” Elena said, low. “In. Out. If it helps, count. You soldiers love numbers.”

“Simon—” She hiccuped around it, the word a bruise. “I need him. I’m sorry. I’m bad. I’m so fucking bad.” The words came staccato, each one a little knife she insisted on holding. “I don’t want to be here. I need to go home. I’ll be good. I will. Please. Please, please.” She gagged on bile; Elena moved a bowl into being like a magician and Claire brought up nothing, a little acid, the sour burn of a body that had spent a day saying no to food. The humiliation hit on schedule; she apologized for it out of reflex. “Sorry—God, sorry.” The skin at her temple under the bandage itched and the itch felt like a lie and a truth both.

Elena stroked once, a thumb near the hairline, then held steady. “Nobody’s good or bad in this room,” she said. “We’re just here. We keep you here. That’s the assignment.”

The hands came back when she closed her eyes—the wall-hands, the under-the-skin hands, the awful old hands from cupboards and the newer ones with powder under the nails. She tucked smaller. Panic did that awful high whine at the back of her mind; the sedative put a wool blanket over it and it still found gaps. “Simon,” she whispered, then louder, because the fear had stolen all her pride and left her naked and she didn’t care. “Si—mon. Please. I love him. Don’t let him leave me here. Please.”

Elena glanced at the call bell and then at the door, a small calculation between protocol and the human in front of me. “He’s not leaving you,” she said, firm, as if she were saying oxygen is here. “He’s annoying about not leaving. You can talk to him.” She took the ward phone from her pocket and ran through numbers faster than anyone should be able to at 03:24. “I’ll get him on. We’ll put the world back into a shape your head can hold.”

The seizure announced itself involuntarily—a stiffening, a small sound, the lights behind the eyes doing that closed-lid flash that says incoming. It wasn’t one of the long ones. Elena shifted quietly, body a wedge to keep Claire safe from the floor, one hand at the nape to stop the skull from finding the wrong angle. Warmth spilled under the blanket and into Elena’s scrubs. Claire felt it after, the awful post-convulsion reality-check: wet, wrong, child-small shame. “Sorry,” she croaked, near-silent, as if you could owe a person an apology for a nervous system going fully feral. “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Simon. Please.”

Del and Elliot reached the doorway fast, breath a little high, eyes going immediately to the bandage, to the wrists, to the rhythm of Claire’s chest—the triage of people who read vital signs like scripture. They saw Elena on the floor with a patient in pieces and called off the cavalry posture by degrees. The look they traded was one of those ward looks that carry a seminar’s worth of experience: we could medicate more, we could ride it, or we can try something mad and human. Del nodded once, jaw set. “Call him,” she said. “Put him on speaker. Then give them five minutes.”

HEREFORD. SEPTEMBER 25, 03:26 — THE CALL.

The phone buzzed against Simon’s ribs like a trapped bee and he was vertical inside a breath, hand already finding it, thumb already sliding. Unknown number, London exchange. He took it on the first tone because the body learns to move before your mind does. “Riley.”

“Del,” came the voice, tired in a way that said this was not a red-alert life-or-death call and also not nothing. He had a boot in his hand, jeans half up, keys already arm’s-reach. The report from eighteen-hundred sprinted into his head—the scalp cut, the banging, the words bugs in my head typed in a stupid font—and battle maps unfolded behind his eyes of all the ways this call could go. He was halfway to deciding to drive while still pulling on the second boot when the tone in Del’s Riley tapped the brakes. Not disaster. Not the other thing. Something heavy in the middle.

“What,” he said, flat and sharp. “What’s going on.”

“She’s awake,” Del said. “Anguished. Calling for you. Elena’s with her. We’ve tried all our boring, kind tricks. She wants you. Do you want to talk to her for a minute?”

He sat back on the bed because something had to hold him. He exhaled once, long, through his nose, to push the image out of his head of running all the reds between Hereford and St. Thomas at stupid o’clock. “Put her on,” he said. “Now.”

There was rustle: the choreography of nurses making a room less crowded without leaving. He heard breathing—the ragged, high-up kind she makes when she’s trying not to drown. A hiccup. Then her, except not the her he was used to handling. This was a voice rubbed raw, a girl at the bottom of a well asking if the rope is real. It made his insides lurch like he’d been shoved.

“Simon?” It came out shredded. “Si—” she broke on it, tried again, anger at herself for missing the target riding shotgun with the fear. “I’m sorry.” The words tumbled, then fell over each other. “I’m sorry I’m so bad. I keep—fuck—I keep fucking it. I want to go home. I’ll be good, I promise. I’m scared. They’re— the hands— they’re on the walls and in my head and I can’t—” A swallow, harsh as sand. “Don’t leave me here. Please. I don’t know what to do. I’m gonna die. I’m going mad.” And then the thing he hadn’t yet let himself hear from her mouth in the clear light of any day: “I love you.” It yanked breath out of him like a punch. “I need you. Come. Please. Please.”

He shut his eyes and said something foul under his breath to the ceiling because it was the only safe target for the violence he needed to do. Then he pitched his voice to the register he kept for dragging people back across the ledge. “All right, sergeant,” he said, that roughness he has when he’s being kind and hates that you can tell. “Listen to me. Nobody’s leaving you. I’m here. I’m on this line. I’ll be at that door as soon as they let me walk through it. You’re not dying. You’re doing a shit job that saves your life. Those hands? They’re the same old lies with new costumes. They don’t get a say.”

A sob clattered; he rode over it. “Breathe,” he said. “We’re counting. You and me. Same as we’ve done a hundred times on roofs with idiots on the street thinking they can shoot straight. You count shots; tonight we count lungs. You know the cadence. In on one—out on two—hold on the three—let it go on the four.” He didn’t ask if she remembered; he made remembering easier than not. “Now. In.”

“In,” she echoed, a strangled whisper doing its best to obey.

“Out.”

“Out.”

“Again. In. Don’t get clever. Out.” He kept them on it, murmuring numbers and obscenities like he was talking a rookie through a first real scrape. “You want me to come? I come. You want me to stay? I stay. I’m not lovely. I’m not easy. But I don’t fuck off when it matters. You know that.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, stupid with apology and needing to spend it or choke on it. “I’m sorry. I love you. I’m— I shouldn’t— here— like this—” Breath went ragged again; he tightened the line.

“Hey. No dissertations at three in the morning,” he growled, gentling the growl as much as he could. “You can give me a full report on how terrible you are when you’re eating like a human and telling me my stance is shit. Right now you breathe and you listen. I’m proud of you for being miserable. Hear me? That’s the job this week. Be fucking miserable without quitting.”

“Don’t leave,” she said, smaller, as if she was embarrassed by wanting the thing she wanted. “Please don’t— I can’t—”

“I’m here,” he said. “I’m not going. Even when I’m not in the room, I’m outside it making a nuisance of myself. You know me. I’ll haunt the corridor and scare your nurses into feeding you extra pudding. I’m a bastard. Use it.”

A laugh came, broken and surprised and beautiful in its ugliness. It kept another sob from forming for a second. She took three breaths to the count, then four, then hiccuped back into fear. “They’re coming again,” she whispered. “The hands. I can hear them.”

“Then we talk louder,” he said. “Tell me where we are. Walls. Bed. Door. Nurse with the soft voice. Count what’s true.” He heard Elena murmur, quietly, chair, blanket, IV, me, and he folded those into the litany. “Chair. Blanket. IV that’s doing you more good than you want to admit. Elena who could probably arm-wrestle me and win. You. Me. That’s five. We only need five to hold the bloody roof up tonight.”

“I need you,” she said again, the words worn thin but still the only ones that fit. “I love you. I need—” She broke, then pushed the breath out, brave around it. “Don’t say it back. Not now. Just— stay.”

“I wasn’t going to make it pretty,” he said, an ache under the sarcasm. “You’ll get it clean when you’re not high on hell. Keep breathing, Claire. In. Out. Good girl.” He never called her that. He let himself once and meant the thing under it—not ownership, not diminishment; the raw praise you give a soldier who is doing the hardest possible thing well enough to survive.

She cried a while longer, but softer. Hitches replaced howls. The mind came back into its box just enough to stop the wolves walking through the door. He stayed until her breathing lengthened and the sedative he could hear in her voice took weight again. “I’ll be there,” he said, when her answers had turned to murmurs. “First light if they let me. Sleep, if the bastard will come.”

“Don’t— go,” she murmured, falling backwards through the sentence.

“Not going,” he said. “Hanging up, not going. I’ll be outside the line. I’ll be in the bloody wire.” He let Elena take the phone back, only then remembering lungs need air and finding some for his. “Thanks,” he said to Del, when she came back on, voice rough. “You didn’t have to.”

“We did,” Del said, tired. “Go back to sleep. Or do your thing where you glare at the dark until it moves. We’ve got her.” She hung up like a professional who knows that sometimes the kindest thing is to end it.

He sat there a long minute with the phone in his hand and the word love scuffing round his chest like a feral cat he’d fed once and now had to claim. He didn’t say it to the empty room. He said instead, to the cracks in the ceiling and the version of himself that still wanted to run—“Right. On we go.”

KHIBINY RIDGE. ONE YEAR EARLIER — TWO DAYS AND A KNIFE.

Cold like a religion. Mountains that took your sound and gave you back a different one, like a mockery. They’d been out there two days under a sky that kept threatening to fall, the two of them tucked into a mess of rock and scrub with a view to a problem that belonged to people who didn’t know their names. No chatter unless it mattered. No jokes unless they could be spent on warmth. When the contact came it came like a clumsy orchestra—eight men with more bravado than training, spread wrong, firing too much, a waste of ammunition and arrogance. Simon and Claire worked them like a pair of scissors: snip here, snip there, no flourish, no heroism. Shoulder to shoulder behind a knuckle of granite that had just enough kindness to keep heads attached. “Left two,” she breathed, low. “Wind’s lying. Hold a hair.” He did. They fell. “Right flank thinks it’s clever,” he muttered. “Make him regret.” She did.

They were nearly done when the ninth arrived like a bad idea—quiet, patient, full of the smugness that gets men killed. One second she was pressed along his arm, eye to glass, cheekbone against the stock, lip peeling back at a shot she particularly admired. The next her vest strap jerked like a fish on a hook and she slid backward with a hard ha as air left her. Simon spun left and saw the man up close, bayonet instead of pistol because some people like theatre. Claire hit him first with the butt of her rifle, good girl, but he’d committed; the blade worked grim and quick, three ugly punches to centre mass below the plate where there’s too much person and not enough armour. She made the sound men make when the body asks a question it can’t parse. Simon shot the bastard through the face at a range that doesn’t need skill, only the willingness to end a life before it does more damage.

Claire didn’t drop immediately because she’s Claire. She put two more rounds where they needed to go with an expression that would’ve been funny if not for the red climbing the front of her rig and the way she swayed. “Stop,” he snapped, grabbing the back of her collar, dragging her behind the rock because there is a line between brave and fucking daft and she was about to step over it. She fought him for a second because adrenaline writes cheques the body cannot cash; then the body called in the debt and her knees went cooperative. He took a look—fast, clinical, furious. Not pretty. Not small. Not something you put a plaster on and say “there.” He clamped a hand there with the kind of pressure you only use when you’ve made an agreement with pain. “Look at me,” he said. She did, cross, teeth showing. “You’re not dying,” he lied with such conviction it turned into a personal truth he would enforce with his own hands.

He hauled her, too fast, back to the little stone cot they’d claimed, the wind trying to lever him off the path, her boots catching, her mouth muttering insults from the bottom of a well. “We can advance,” she said through clenched teeth, the old, mad shine in her eyes like a lamp in a storm. “We can clear. It’s only—” He wanted to gag her with his glove for the idiocy of it; he didn’t. “Sit,” he ordered, pushing her onto the bedframe that wasn’t a bedframe—pieces of pallet lashed together like hope. He tore the kit open. The anaesthetic ampoule had shattered sometime between mountains; the glass glittered like mockery in the foam. She saw it. He saw her see it. She set her jaw.

“This is going to be—”

“Do it,” she said, and bit a corner of his shirt like a dog, because teeth were better than screaming and screaming wastes air.

His hands were steady until they weren’t. He cauterised where he had to, packed where he could, stitched with thread that didn’t want to be a suture but learned how under pressure. He kept his mouth running with all the old lies and new truths—“You’re fine, you’re here, keep eyes on me, squeeze my wrist when you need to kill something”—and she did not scream. Not once. She made a small, awful sound into cotton, and tears came out and she chased them away with the back of her hand like she found them offensive. He found himself shaking—not visibly to anyone who didn’t know him, but enough that the needle spoke a different language for a second. He snarled at his own fingers and they obeyed.

When it was done, he looked at her and saw, for the first time, how much of her was decided already—about pain, about endurance, about what she would give and what she would not. She said “thanks” like it hurt to spend the word. He said “eat” and handed her something that pretended to be food, and she took it and chewed because he’d ordered it and because she was wise enough to pick her battles. When evac came a day later, she climbed on under her own steam and slept the sleep of wolves who’ve lost too much blood and intend to wake up anyway.

ST. THOMAS / HEREFORD. 04:10 — AFTERMATH.

The line went quiet at last. Elena eased the phone away from Claire’s ear and set it facedown like a fragile bird; she tucked the blanket about the knees because the body calms faster if it feels held. She sat there until Claire’s breath matched the lazy blink of the monitor. Del leaned in, checked the bandage with a magician’s touch, nodded like a coach reluctantly pleased that a ragged team had made the line. Elliot ghosted in with water and ghosted out again, the choreography of the competent and exhausted.

In Hereford, Simon stayed sitting upright because lying down felt like a betrayal. He stared at his knuckles until they stopped looking like someone else’s. He texted Amina two words—She called—and got back, after a minute, Good. She will again. Sleep. He didn’t. He watched the door like a man on a bad post. He told himself, again, what he would have told any younger soldier who’d come to him with a report like tonight’s: Your job is ugly, and you’re doing it. Keep breathing. Keep your boots by the bed. Keep your car full. Keep your promises. He settled the phone on the pillow next to him like a ridiculous, modern talisman, shut his eyes just to prove to the dark who was boss, and counted shots into a wind that wouldn’t keep still until the numbers finally turned themselves into sleep.

HEREFORD GARRISON. SEPTEMBER 26, 0500–1130 — HE BUILDS A DAY LIKE A RIFLE.

He woke before the alarm because the body now ran on the mean little clock of someone waiting to be needed. Darkness had that barracks charcoal to it: familiar, uncharitable, useful. He lay flat one breath too long, the map of what today needed already unrolling in his head like a range flag. Up at five; range at six; paperwork by nine; get his face in front of any officer who thought assigning him to babysit recruits was a laugh; fight through that; be out by eleven-thirty; car pointed south; phone hot and charged and in his pocket where his right hand falls without looking. The phantom weight to his right—where she should have been, sprawled and warm and smug as sin—was still there, of course. No cat-stretch, no heel nudging his shin under the duvet, no croaky “you’ve nicked all the quilt, you selfish bastard,” to which he’d usually answer by rolling on top of her and kissing her into silence until she laughed against his mouth and swore at him like it was a prayer. The bed kept its mouth shut. He respected the silence and got up.

Range at 0600 went tight, teeth-bared tight. He moved like a man correcting a fault that wasn’t there, shoulders set in a line she’d taught into him with small, smug taps; cheek weld that belonged to a dozen mornings when she’d pushed his head that exact quarter inch and said “there, now you’re not fighting it.” Wind call, drop, mildots—he wrote the maths into the world and let the answers be bullets. Every clean punch through paper bought him one second of not hearing her voice from last night’s 03:00 call, shredded and clear at once—I love you. I need you. Please don’t go. He did not get fancy. Fancy gets you killed. He stacked drills in a row like bricks in bad weather and mortared them with breath. When some lieutenant’s shadow fell across the shooting bench he didn’t look up; he just reloaded and deliberately, ostentatiously, ignored the shadow until it moved off with hurt feelings.

Paperwork at 0900, done like an act of penance. Clipboards breed; he killed a clutch. Ticked boxes. Wrote sentences so spare they looked like a field ration. Signed where he had to, scrawled where he could. Phone face-down but his mind still glancing at it the way you look at a door you’re expecting to burst. Price popped a head round and lifted a brow. Simon lifted his in the mirror-image that meant I’m doing it, don’t mother me. The old man disappeared with the soft grunt of a person satisfied the roof wasn’t currently on fire.

Then the news came down the chain, the sort that slides out of admin with a smirk: someone up the ladder had decided today was the day Ghost got assigned a block of greenies. It was beyond Price’s jurisdiction, which meant it was what it was. Simon looked at the memo like it had personally insulted Claire and then folded it into his pocket with enough care that the paper should’ve been grateful. Fine. If he had to massage a herd of toddlers with rifles, they were going to leave that field knowing which end of a barrel pointed at God.

He drilled them hard without raising a voice. Mask on. The voice he uses for men he does not love: flat, cold, clipped enough to shave. Safety first—he said it once and then demonstrated how stupid looked in slow motion so they remembered. Stance until shins hurt. Sight picture until eyes watered. Trigger until he could see the exact moment the flinch arrived like a guilty thought and then ripped it out of them by boredom and muscle memory. Some of them rose to it; most of them wore that dopey pleased look of people who like the idea of being dangerous more than they like the boredom that makes you good. He hated them a little for wasting his hour and hated himself a little more for hating kids who didn’t know yet what graves felt like under boots.

Break came and with it the kind of trouble that thinks it’s a joke. A corporal new to base—hair too blonde to be real, grin sharp enough to open tins, the sort of smile that would get Soap into embarrassment if he weren’t on a leash this week—sidled up close like she’d misread a poster about fraternisation. Giggled. Let her eyes walk his vest like it was a catalogue. “Sergeant,” she said, breathy in the way people get when they think a mask is a kink. “You’re a hard man to get time with.” He didn’t look at her. He didn’t change his stance. “Fuck off,” he said, bored, like he was swatting a fly with a file. “Not here. Not ever. Try your luck with a wall.” She blinked, a little fishy, then tried to be offended and failed because it takes spine to be offended and she’d brought trim instead. He watched her retreat with the incurious contempt of a cat ignoring a laser dot, then called the lads back and made them run it again, slower this time, because slow makes you honest.

Drills over, he cut through the 141 training room to bag his kit—get the gym gloves, swap shirts, make sure his towel didn’t smell like defeat—only to find Wickham at the far range lane playing soldier. He barely spared it a glance until muscle memory threw a belt-hook up inside his gut—stop. Because it wasn’t Wickham’s shit form or his earnest little not-bad group that snagged him; it was the silhouette of the rifle in the bastard’s hands. He knew that line like he knew the curve of Claire’s neck. He knew the slight extra forward weight of the can, the long, smooth barrel she’d kept so stupidly clean she could have eaten off it just to upset the quartermaster, and—fuck him—the ninety-degree trigger he’d gifted her on a birthday he’d pretended he didn’t know existed, a daft little bit of indulgence that had made her laugh and kiss his teeth and then outshoot him by a hair just to be obscene. That rifle. Her rifle.

He crossed the floor in eight calm strides and had Wickham by the front of the plate carrier before the lad’s brain caught up. No shout. No drama. Just a hand like a door closing. He pinned the boy to a locker with the same controlled, cold force he would use to keep a man from falling off a roof: intimate, precise, completely irresistible. “Where the fuck did you get that,” he asked, voice low enough that the air shook, each consonant seated heavy like a round in a chamber. “Answer in full sentences.”

Wickham’s eyes went dinner-plate; his mouth tried three excuses at once and tripped over the lot. “I—I found the bag—by the lockers—sir—didn’t—there wasn’t a name—well there was but I thought—Sergeant Brooks—Clar—Clarisse—she— I thought—”

“Don’t say her name,” Simon said, very softly. The lad shut his mouth like he’d discovered a trap behind his teeth. “You do not breathe near anything that belongs to her. You do not think about touching it. You are not fit to look at it. Where did you get the key to the cage.” Wickham stammered something about the bag not being in the cage, about it sitting up on a shelf, about how he thought—well everyone was using communal since— “You don’t think,” Simon said. “You shoot where I tell you, you clean what I tell you, you do not lay hands on kit that isn’t yours or I will show you what thinking gets you in my house.”

Soap arrived on the tide of the noise a second later, eyes already doing the come on, mate smoothing gesture he reserves for when Simon has a fistful of someone’s future. “Ghost,” he said, easy, like he could make this not a thing by smiling at it. “Drop the kid. He’s a gobshite but he’s not malicious.”

Simon didn’t look away. “He lays a finger on her kit again I’ll take the finger,” he said, still in that conversational tone that meant he isn’t joking. Wickham made another squeak about not meaning anything by it and that he thought Sergeant Brooks wouldn’t mind—actually Clarisse— and Soap winced like a man watching a car reverse toward a bollard. Simon took the rifle out of Wickham’s hands without breaking eye contact, cool, certain, the way you take a knife off a toddler. He thumbed the action open, cleared it, checked it like the ritual it was, and then stalked to her locker and locked it TIGHT, with the kind of finality that said this boundary is now a wall. He pocketed the key. “Not yours,” he said to the air. “Never fucking yours.” He left before Soap could lay a placating palm on his shoulder and make the day softer than it was allowed to be.

M4 SOUTHBOUND. 1200 — WHITE-KNUCKLE, NO SMOKE, TOO MUCH MEMORY.

He drove like a man who knew the police could pull him if he let his foot off the leash, so he didn’t. Knuckles white on the wheel, jaw doing that slow grind he used when the words he wanted to say would set something on fire. The itch for a cigarette crawled his throat. Habit made his left hand slide towards the glove box at the red after Heston; honour dragged it back. The pack was in there—the Dunhills from the other night, three left like little white confessions. He told himself: Not today. Not before seeing her. You will not walk into that room wearing the smell that shrinks her lungs and her mind. The wanting made him meaner and more alert. Good. Keep it.

His head flipped through the deck of last night’s card game and landed on the wrong ones: Claire’s voice on the phone, lost and naked in a way she’d never allowed him to hear, begging and apologising in the same breath; Del’s report of the morning, clinical and soaked in blood anyway; that corporal’s giggle and the way he’d said fuck off like a door shutting; Wickham’s idiot hands on a rifle that had slept under Claire’s cheek in a dozen countries. He saw her with it, too—memory bringing up the file without being prompted: first day on that range in Brecon, her lining up behind it like she’d been born with that stock fitted to the angle of her shoulder blade, the stupidly fast calm that came over her face when she was behind glass and a target did the decent thing and waited to be ended.

He remembered the other thing as well, because his mind is a bastard and because the body keeps its own ledger of admiration and hunger. The mission two summers ago when they’d limped back to the depot in a line of battered Humvees, dust making halos in the evening low light, everyone wired and threadbare and pretending the debrief would happen later. She’d slid out of a truck with that particular roll of the hips that wasn’t performed but made him think of walls anyway; her hair had been damp from water poured out of a canteen over her head, shirt clinging where shirts do when summer wants you. She’d clocked him watching and done that tiny, evil not-smile that meant then come on, if you’re coming. She didn’t turn it into theatre. She just walked toward the shadowed line of the more abandoned trucks, hands in her pockets like a delinquent, and disappeared between two massive tyres like a fox into a hedge. He gave it the two minutes needed for plausible deniability—the British Army trains patience into you, and lust has already learned it—and followed, heartbeat quick and competent.

He had her bent over fast, not on her stomach because he didn’t do that to her ever, the angle more protective than possessive, one palm planted high on the inside of her shoulder to keep her balanced, her other hand cradling hard into his shoulder like she was bracing to push the world away and needed a fulcrum. It wasn’t pretty-boy nonsense; it was rough and quick and it was theirs—no mockery, no cruelty, just speed and greed and that clean need he hates saying out loud. He got her kit down in ten seconds because in ten seconds a door can open and a private with a clipboard can fuck up your life. He kept his own trousers at half-mast instead of around ankles, not for modesty but for readiness—if Gaz wandered past mouthing off about sprockets, he wasn’t going to catch a full view of Claire with legs spread and a superior officer losing his mind. Concrete thumped under their boots with the rhythm of a train; he had the stupid thought that if anyone wandered near they’d think the motor pool had developed a poltergeist. She let out those little, furious breaths that meant he’d found exactly where he needed to be; he watched her face because that’s the point, and because he doesn’t like being blind when it matters. Fifteen minutes, maybe less; everything was edged and efficient and utterly unapologetic. Afterwards she’d bitten his jaw because she liked leaving marks where uniforms hid them, refastened herself with that brisk competence that always made him want to wreck and worship, and walked out first, the two of them rejoining the line of men and machines like a pair of hypocrites. He’d wanted a cigarette then, of course—habit and the old lie that smoke is punctuation—but he hadn’t. She’d cocked a brow at the half-reach and he’d given her a look that said I know and they’d both behaved like adults for the remaining seventeen minutes of dusk.

Now, he forced his hand off the glove box like it was a live wire. The nearer he got to the river the worse the itch and the better the reason not to scratch it. He concentrated on the road markings like they were tiny arguments he could win. When he pulled into the clinic’s car park, the part of him that keeps score noted that his breath smelled like coffee and not like an ashtray. Good. Keep it. Don’t give her one more ghost to wrestle.

ST. THOMAS RECEPTION. 1230 — THE BRIEF FROM THE NIGHT WATCH.

Amina was off—human beings are allowed days that don’t feature other people’s nightmares—but the desk didn’t suffer for it. Carl sat there, neat shirt, neat beard, neat manner, the professional blandness that makes terrified relatives feel like nothing will be dropped. “Mr. Riley,” he said, as if they’d arranged it that way. “Elena asked me to let her know when you arrived.” He tapped a line on the sign-in tablet that Simon ignored, because forms were for later. Elena appeared out of the corridor with night still on her shoulders and that I’ve seen worse and I’ll see it again and I’ll be here anyway steadiness. She made herself small enough to talk to a man full of big, sharp angles.

“She slept after your call,” Elena said, keeping her voice quiet like a courtesy to other people’s grief. “Properly slept, not just sedative knocked-out. We had a wobble at 05:00—hands in the corners again—but she let me count her through it. She’s somewhere between the last ugly crest and the part where the tide starts behaving like a tide again. Peak isn’t a switch; it’s more a sandbank. But she’s climbing it.” She scrubbed a hand over her face and then remembered she was talking to a man who wanted more than metaphors. “Translation: she may still spike and swear and cry and see things we can’t; she may scratch if she feels the crawling; she may refuse food because she hates being told to live. But we are adding more hours where she’s here, and the worst of the autonomic carnival is easing. We’ll be shifting from acute detox management into early rehab protocol—more structure, more group, more food that isn’t an argument, more time on feet when she’ll tolerate it. It’s slower because she stacked substances—heroin, benzos, alcohol. Each one has its own exit tantrum. Together they choreograph like a drunk ceilidh.”

He stood and took it like a field brief. Facts, not false comfort. “In English,” he said, not unkind, just needing the sentence hammered home.

“In English,” Elena said, smiling the ghost of a smile, “it’s still hell, but it’s different hell. The kind you can walk through instead of the kind that pins you to a bed and eats you. Your call helped last night. She’s been asking less for ghosts in the corners and more for you in sentences. That’s progress in our world.”

He swallowed the noise that wanted to climb his throat and relabel itself as something he’d be embarrassed to acknowledge in daylight. “Good,” he said, which wasn’t big enough, but the only word he trusted himself with without making a mess. “Can I—?”

“You can,” Elena said. “Fifteen minutes. She’s awake. She’ll pretend not to be for the first thirty seconds. Respect the pretending. Then carry on as you do. I’ll be outside if she decides you’re the enemy for a minute.” She let her eyes flick to the fist he didn’t realise he’d made and then back to his face. “And—this is not medical, this is just me—you did right not to smell like smoke. She flinches from it even when she’s fine.”

He grunted something that meant I know and thank you and I’ll die on this hill if I have to, then followed her down the corridor with the ugly paintings and the clean light. The door to Claire’s room was the same as yesterday and not the same at all because yesterday’s version hadn’t contained last night’s phone call. He set his shoulders. He put his hand on the latch. He told his face to be a face she could suffer looking at. Then he went in.

ST. THOMAS. SEPTEMBER 26, 12:36 — HE WALKS IN AND THE WORLD UNCLENCHES A NOTCH.

He stepped through the door like he always did—quiet, taking the corner first with a glance, the whole environment slotted in before his head properly entered the room—and for one hard second he hated how much he loved her because it made his ribs feel too narrow for the job. She was there, upright against the headboard, blanket up to the hips, the institutional gown doing that useless flutter at the collarbone. Bandage at the parietal, fresh tape tugging a curl; the clean strips over the cheek; wrists mummified softer than yesterday but still telling on her; a tremor barely tapping at the tendons along the thumb; eyes with that tired brightness that means the mind’s back in the room even if it’d rather not be. He felt the focus slide into place automatically—posture, pupils, skin tone, respiration rate—tick, tick, tick—and under that, something else, the bastard thing that lives in a man’s chest when he’s chosen someone for good: shoulders coming down an inch, jaw unlocking, a mean little voice that had been snarling all morning finally shutting up because the only person it listened to was in front of him, breathing.

He didn’t say her name. He never blew the silence up just to prove he could speak. He took the chair, half-turned to her—not crowding, not policing—and let his spine unfurl a fraction. She didn’t look at him at first, and that was all right; he could feel her clocking him anyway, same as he was clocking her—counting, measuring, checking the kit. He folded his hands, sat sometimes-taller, and breathed out through his nose like a man setting a heavy thing down exactly where it needs to go.

“Someone chew your arse this morning and you didn’t like it,” she said, voice trashy-soft in that way you only get after you’ve been screaming and sedated and slept like drowning, not quite looking, fiddling the thick cover with her forefinger and thumb. “Face like thunder.”

“Recruits,” he said. The word carried the whole mutiny of it. “Pack of green muppets think a rifle’s a personality. Drilled ’em until their little souls squeaked. Girl corporal tried to shoot her shot on the break, giggles and grabbing the vest like it was a bloody mannequin. Told her to jog on. That’s my morning.” He almost added and a child had your rifle in his stupid hands but he swallowed it; that mess was his to clean, not hers to taste.

She hummed, low and amused in a way that had some of her old rhythm hiding in it like contraband. “Should’ve shagged her,” she muttered, eyes still on the blanket, one corner of her mouth doing that brave-little-soldier thing. “Stress relief for your old bones, Riley.”

He gave her a sideways look he only ever gave her. “Aye,” he said, dry as desert. “I’ll put it on my to-do list, right after ‘set myself on fire for a laugh.’” He didn’t touch the real thing—the way the idea of anyone else near him felt like eating tin foil. He doesn’t do poetry in daylight. He just pressed his palms on his thighs to keep them from doing something daft, like reach.

“You eaten?” he asked, voice dropping into the business register that had ferried them both through worse. “Shower? Walked a lap or two to make the staff feel clever?”

She nodded to some of it, shook her head to the rest, then tipped up too quick and winced, hand going automatically toward the side of the bandage. He logged it—head injury still sore with movement; watch the speed of her turns; don’t make her laugh too hard this hour—and let the note live in the part of him that keeps lists. Her breath had that paper-tear edge to it still, but it didn’t climb into panic, and he took that win like a man takes a sip of water he hasn’t earned. The room listened to both of them breathe for a bit.

“I said—” she started, and then she did what she does when the thing is too big to push into the corridor—you could hear the gears stripping in the sentence—“I said a thing last night. On the phone.”

He cut her, not cruel, just accurate. “We’ll talk when you’re out,” he said. “Not on drugs. Not at three in the bastard morning with ghosts in the rafters. You can tell me again when you mean for me to keep it in the day.” He met her eyes for that. They held. She nodded once. Agreement like a clasp.

He did the rest the way he always does when she needs the world made small: he talked. Not feelings—he’s not a bleeding poet—but the kind of gossip that maps a day into something survivable. “Colonel with the sainted marriage got caught nosing the Brigadier behind the comms cage,” he said, deadpan as a morgue tech. “Pair of them swear they’re straight as a ruler. Paperwork disagrees. Soap’s picked himself a civilian lass who’ll break his heart and then mend it because she’s terrifying in the correct directions—keeps telling him to take his boots off at the door, he’s acting like it’s war crimes. Wick—” he stopped there, because he didn’t want the name in her room, “—the new lad’s still squeaking when he breathes. Nepal’s on for next week, two days, in and out, Price says hello without saying the word.” He watched her watch him and felt something align that had been askew all night—those black eyes locked, not skittering away like yesterday, a proper hold, the kind she gives her scope when everything else is noise. She’d called for him at three; now she was finding him awake and her gaze took pieces out of him more efficiently than any blade he’d handled.

They sat in that for a long quiet. He kept talking, not because he liked the sound of himself but because counting syllables together had saved men from snapping and this was the only counting she’d humour. She followed each throwaway like it mattered; him slagging off a malfunctioning kettle, her breathing evening out on the third sentence of a story about Gaz pretending not to like a dog from the guards’ kennels. Every time she flinched he slid the talk into a lower gear. Every time her eyes tracked off to a corner he steered them back with another bit of base ugliness polished up for the purpose.

At forty-eight minutes she scratched once, quick, along the edge of a dressing—habit, nerve, nothing more—and he let the room see his attention sharpen and then soften, a signal to the part of her that liked to fight him just because; I see it. I’m not going to make a fucking scene. We’re bigger than the itch. At fifty-seven she yawned, quick, fish-like, a little shocked by her own body doing that stupid normal human thing. He felt stupidly proud of the yawn like he’d achieved something.

He stood when the clock in his head said he’d used the hour. It annoyed him to obey clocks, but nurses have wars too. Her eyes followed the rise, a small flare of panic she decapitated on her own; he saw her do it and filed that win for later expenditure. He took the chair back a half-inch to stop himself leaning like a schoolboy.

“Riley,” she said suddenly, voice low and more herself than yesterday by a mile. He waited. “Keep my kit warm when I’m not there.”

It was nothing and it was everything. He felt the urge to kiss her fast and hard flash through him like a low det; he swallowed it, because if he started he wouldn’t stop and these walls weren’t for that. “Already do,” he said. “Will keep doing. Anything with your name on it gets cage-locked and blessed.” He let the edge into his tone on blessed. It was childish; he didn’t care. She nodded, slow, like he’d handed back a piece she’d been trying not to admit she missed, and he knew this was the moment in the report Del would later write as patient demonstrated future-oriented thinking. He didn’t need the line. He just took the win and put it in his pocket with the key to her locker.

He touched two fingers to the doorframe on the way out because men who hate ritual still do it when the heart’s in play. He left without looking back because sometimes steadiness looks like rudeness and she knows the difference.

---

FLASHBACK — WHEN HE TOOK THE JOB.

He’d clocked her before he decided to make her his problem. First week at 141, late lunch, the noise of men pretending to be louder than their fear. She stood outside the noise on purpose, plate in hand, an angle in the wall more than a person in the room. Fresh out of a stint at a German base if the file was worth the paper, hair scraped back like it owed her money, eyes that didn’t blink enough because blinking is a tell. He watched her not sit. He watched her hover; watched her go; watched her come back the next day with the exact same choreography like she was testing a perimeter. She spoke only when spoken to, and then used words like they had a price on them. He’d seen lads do that, seen girls do that—seen himself do it, once—but with her it looked less like shyness and more like refusal. Belonging is a load of bollocks if the room isn’t built for you. He watched. He didn’t call her over. He set a chair at the end of the table as if someone had just stood—no fuss, no name—and ignored it when Soap mouthed subtle, mate. She took it two days later with a grunt that contained a paragraph. He kept his face on and poured her tea as if he’d poured it for a ghost.

The rifles got cleaned that week, not by the lads assigned but by a ghost again. He turned up before dawn to find them already stripped, wiped, oiled, laid out like soldiers who’d survived a war. She was there, sleeves up, elbows blacked, that distant look she has when she’s alone with a task and the task is better company than people. She didn’t preen. She didn’t announce. She handed him a small box without looking, Russian special, shaped bullets with a line he hadn’t seen in a long time. “Try them,” she said. “Wind likes them.” He did. Wind did. His shots went from clean to surgical and he watched her watch the groups and do the smallest private nod like she’d solved a problem and didn’t need applause. He decided then what he’d been deciding since day one: he’d take the job. Not her commander—she had those. Not her priest—God help the man who tries to shrive Claire Brooks. Just the bloke who notices the screws in a chair before someone sits and eats splinters.

The first laugh landed like a medal. It happened on a nothing afternoon, Soap telling some aggressive shite about a rooster that chased him in Helmand—exaggerated, dumber than golf—and she laughed with her hand over her mouth like a kid who’s learnt it’s safer to muffle joy. Not the big, barked thing she’d later gift them by accident after two pints; a small, shocked sound, honest because she forgot to stop it. He didn’t look at her when he heard it, because looking makes it run. He just tucked the sound behind the ribs where he kept things that proved the world wasn’t entirely made of concrete and debt.

On a long helicopter trip, he left the seat next to him empty because it looked like an accident and the team would never call him sentimental to his face. She was slotted opposite with a face like a locked gun safe, and forty minutes in—when the noise of the rotors had worked its way into the bones and everyone’s hands had done that unconscious check of kit three times—she crooked a finger at the empty chair without looking at him, stood, took it, planted herself with that little grunt, and immediately fell asleep against vibration with her mouth open like a human being. He sat there balancing between amusement and the particular tenderness he never admits to if there’s a witness. When they landed, she sat up sharp as a blade and gave the world her war face again, as if she hadn’t just drooled on her collar. He buttoned the observation in his head; it stayed.

The first fuck should’ve been forgettable, by the laws of whatever gods govern men and women who wear too much canvas for a living. It wasn’t. She turned up at his door like she’d just remembered a thing she’d always intended to do. No preamble. He didn’t ask. They were on each other in the way two people who value control test its limits—fast, no theatre, not cruel. Midway, she said in that flat tone she uses when she refuses to be embarrassed, “I want to hold the headboard.” He shrugged a do it and went back to what he was building, then clocked the microflinch, the brace for a hand that would slap her grip away. He didn’t do that. He changed angle instead—hip and spine and that particular vector she likes because it occupies the entire fucking brain—and watched her face go from waiting to lose to busy surviving. After, she half-sat at the edge like a girl whose training tells her clothes go on now and the door opens soon. He didn’t push her shirt into her hands and say off you go. He took his time cleaning up; he watched her watch him not throw her away. She had the oddest look—embarrassed at her own readiness to be binned, then pissed off at herself for the embarrassment. A little tut went off in his ribs. He filed it beside the laugh and the bullets. None of his business, he told himself, and made it his business anyway in the way that counts: didn’t force, didn’t pry, made the bed a place you could breathe if you were her.

He noticed the knickers thing by accident. Hours later, when everything had cooled and they were taking the piss out of a film neither of them liked, she found the black pair folded by the bedside where he’d dropped them, intact. Her thumb slid the strap with a softness he’d never seen in her hands. She wasn’t coy; she didn’t make a meal of it; she just checked they existed the way you check a tourniquet is where it should be. He stood behind the look, quiet as a cat, and let the little ticking in his chest run: that doesn’t come from nowhere, Riley. That’s learnt. He’s got his own fucking museum of ghosts—father with a heavy hand, Joseph’s little games, a whole career of rooms he can’t walk into without the masks—so he didn’t play detective. He just catalogue’d. Later, when he took the condom off and tied it like a man who’s done this before, she clocked it—and relief flashed, quick, ridiculous, honest. Didn’t matter that she’d watched him put the thing on. Some part of her needed to see it done, evidence in the bin, proof. That morning, over coffee, he looked at her longer than is strictly polite. He didn’t ask. He poured more. She took it, as if both coffee and looking could be tolerated in doses.

And the asthma. Christ. They’d been lying skin to skin, talking absolute bollocks—football, shoes, a dog they didn’t have—and he’d gone to take a piss and heard it start: that careful cough people do when they’ve been taught not to make noise, then the wheeze growing out of it like barbed wire through a hedge. He came back to her rummaging in her bag with a patience that meant don’t panic, I’m panicking. “What,” he’d said, already annoyed at the air for being air. “Inhaler,” she’d said, like it was nothing. “Steroid one—might be in Manchester.” That was the moment his stomach took a dive. He sat her up, tried the breathing tricks he knew (slow, in through nose, out through pursed lips, count, love), watched her cheeks go a touch too purple for his liking, told her to shut up and let him help, which is his way of saying please, dragged her to medbay with his shirt still open, and found out from a calm bastard with a stethoscope that she had a habit of holding coughs in while speaking because childhood or pride or some lethal marriage of both. He told her, with the generosity of a saint, to stop being clever and cough like a human. She told him to fuck himself between medicine breaths and then did what he said. They slept afterwards, her chest finally quiet, his heart making such a racket he could’ve shot it for insubordination. He didn’t pick at it the next day. He just lumbered a little more of her onto his back without asking her to notice.

So yes. He took the job. Not because he’s a hero; because he’s a bastard who likes projects and because her bones made a sound he couldn’t ignore, a note like his, a tuning fork matched. He didn’t need the whole biography to clock the scars that weren’t war, the way smoke straightened her spine into the shape of a memory, the instinct to count exits in a room with friends in it. He didn’t want to lick old wounds just to feel saintly. He wanted to make sure that when the world made its next bid for her, it had to fight him for the privilege.

---

ST. THOMAS. BACK TO NOW — THE GOODBYE THAT ISN’T.

He stood and the room shifted with him, her eyes tracking like a tidal thing. “I’ll be back,” he said, short, because long would get them both in trouble. She gave him the smallest nod, the kind that says don’t say it like a promise you might break; say it like an itinerary. He did. He reached the latch. Her mouth moved again, a quick little deployment. “My kit,” she said, a split-second of Claire as he knows her, a grin threatening at the corners like she remembered the last time she’d taken the piss out of Wickham’s squeak. “Keep it warm.”

“Always,” he said. “Always, sergeant.”

He went out, shut the door gentle so the latch didn’t clack like abandonment, and stood a second in the corridor letting the part of him that wanted to go back in and sit on the floor until dawn snarl and then quiet. Elena looked up from the notes with that tired fondness nurses get for men who pretend they’re granite and keep proving they’re meat. He gave her a nod that meant she ate some yesterday because I bullied her, and call me if she calls, and I owe you more than flowers. She nodded back like she’d been in this regiment longer than any of them and waved him toward reception, toward the car, toward the afternoon that would be full of drills and men and a gym that would take his temper without complaint.

On the way out he put a hand on the key in his pocket—the one that matched the tight-locked locker with her name on it—and squeezed until the teeth bit into his palm. “Keep it warm,” he muttered, to the metal, to himself, to the air that would have to carry this whole fucked-up tenderness for a bit longer. “Aye. That, I can do.” Then he walked—long, steady, mask on for the world, off for her, just for an hour—back into the day.

ST. THOMAS. SEPTEMBER 26, 23:41 — NIGHT PAIN (CLAIRE).

It started as a mean knot under her ribs, a tight little bastard she thought she could stare into submission, and then it grew teeth and bit down in pulses that made the bed feel lumpy and the sheets feel aggressive. She tried being clever, tried picturing Simon’s outline the way she’d taught herself to the night before—broad-shouldered shape filling the door, that stupid calm you can’t argue with, the voice like gravel that counts you back into your lungs—and it worked for a breath or two, a handspan of mercy where the room held still and the corners didn’t breed hands. Then the belly clenched again, a long twisting motion that felt like someone wringing out a wet towel made of nerves, and the nausea came up fast with that salty spit and the mouth-flood and the certainty that the body intended to turn itself inside out. She turned on her side and rode it, jaw locked, telling herself she wasn’t calling anyone because she still had that idiot soldier’s pride about “coping,” as if the room gave out medals at midnight. Elena clocked it anyway, of course—nurses are trained in the art of noticing what you’d rather they didn’t—and was on her feet without making theatre of it. “Claire?” Soft. No pity. Just a named anchor in a rolling boat.

“I’m—” she started, then curled around the pain and let a small, ugly noise out because pretending is for daylight. “It’s my stomach,” she managed, and then the nausea grabbed the steering wheel. She made the dash for the bowl and didn’t make it; Elena was already there with the basin because Elena treats time like a weapon you can get to first if you’re polite enough. The first heave was acid and bile and humiliation; the second was nothing but the body proving it could still turn itself inside out; the third made her eyes water and her throat feel flayed. She apologized—God help her she apologized—as if puke were bad manners and not an organ system clearing the deck. Cold sweat broke across her shoulders like a cheap rain. The cramps didn’t let up, didn’t even have the decency to ease after the retching; they rolled again, lower this time, ugly and deep, and she felt that sudden, awful pressure and shot Elena a look that contained a paragraph of shame.

“Bathroom,” Elena said, no nonsense, already helping her swing legs over without making her feel carried. Soft cuffs unclipped with that little hush sound; pads straightened; dignity kept on life support. Claire made it there and didn’t, the kind of ten seconds that ruins an hour, and the humiliation was so sharp it made her want to bite her tongue to make a different pain. “Please don’t write this,” she said, half-sobbing, absurd, fierce. “Don’t put this in the report. He— I can’t have him read— it’s—” She stopped because swallowing around tears and acid is a logistics exercise.

Elena’s face didn’t twitch. “You’re ill,” she said, blunt kindness. “Bodies do disgusting brilliantly. That’s my medical opinion. I’ll chart what helps you tomorrow. Tonight I’ll write ‘GI symptoms ongoing’ and God himself can file a complaint if he wants details.” The relief hit like a different kind of nausea. Claire let herself fold. Sweat went clammy, a chill that ran down the spine and nested in the small of the back like a grudge. Her kidneys ached—dull, insistent, a pair of stones that decided to become characters in her story—so that pissing burned and then made her cry from the shame of saying it out loud. “It hurts,” she whispered, mortified. “There. It— I’m not—” The rest was a useless tangle of pride and pain.

“I know,” Elena said, and she did. “Booze is a bastard to kidneys the way men are bastards to promises. Beer and spirits turn the lining to sore leather; it’ll settle as the poison clears. The stomach’s angry because benzos and pills don’t leave quietly; they tear up the carpet on the way out. This—” she tapped the air between them, not the body, “—is what ‘nearly done’ feels like sometimes. It’s not worse like last week was worse. It’s the bill.” She dosed her—pain meds hard enough to take the edge off without throwing her off a cliff, a whisper of antiemetic, a bit of peppermint oil dabbed on a cloth because there are old magics in wards and Elena keeps some in her pocket. Water in sips; a cool cloth on the back of the neck; a hand offered and a hand received without fuss.

“Can we—” Claire swallowed, throat raw. “Lights.” It made her feel a hundred years old, asking for illumination like a child who believes in cupboards. “Just— on. The hands don’t— they like dark.” The shame hit again like a wave. She, who had curled in a ditch with a hole in her and waited for evac without making a sound, who had watched men bleed and held her breath and shot God in the eye—she wanted the light on like she was six.

“We’ll leave them on,” Elena said, as if Claire had asked for a blanket. “You can feel stupid in the morning; I’ll write you a permission slip for that too.” Claire laughed, a broken, grateful bark that didn’t hurt as much as she thought laughter would. The pills dulled the sharpest corners. The cramps eased from knife to fist. The kidneys settled into low, sullen throb. She lay on her side with the sheet over her shins and the light making a gentle square on the wall and told herself she was not a child, she was a woman in a war, and the enemy had uniforms of chemistry and habit and she’d beat the bastards one organ at a time. When sleep came it did not come kindly, but it came, and that was the entire goal of the hour.

HEREFORD. SEPTEMBER 27, 09:20 — PRICE’S OFFICE: PAPER FIRST, PEOPLE ALWAYS.

Price’s office smelled like black coffee, old paper, and the kind of tobacco that lives only as a theoretical concept because the bastard doesn’t actually light up indoors. Simon planted himself in the spare chair with a stack of forms in his lap, pen poised like a bayonet. “You’ve got lovely handwriting for a thug,” Price said mildly, leafing. “Do me these three and we’ll pretend this makes any dent.” They worked in the kind of quiet that’s companionable because it’s routine. The tick of a clock that never hurried. The turn of a page. The clatter of a signature. Price let the silence live as long as it needed to before he stepped on it with intent. “How is she.”

Simon kept his face like a wall and let the answer be a blend of report and refusal. “Peak’s done,” he said. “Two nights without the monsters. Still sick. Stomach. Kidneys. New phase. Rehab proper starting—structure, shrinks, groups if she doesn’t tell them to piss off. Eating sometimes if I bully her. Sleeping—some. She rang at half three the other night. Needed a voice. We counted. It—” he caught himself before the line that belonged to them alone could sneak out of his mouth and sit in the room with another man’s boots. “It mattered,” he finished, gruff, which was the understatement he was capable of.

Price nodded once, a precise military motion that tried to be gentle and failed in a charming way. “Good,” he said. “She can have my head if group doesn’t suit her; we’ll build her a group that does, even if it’s just Del and a very patient kettle.” He glanced up, something like a request at the corner of his eye. “I was thinking next week, if it doesn’t crowd her, I’d come with you. Not to make it a parade. Just—she knows my head. I’d like her to see it hasn’t fallen off.”

“We’ll see how she’s framed that day,” Simon said. He wasn’t the gatekeeper, but the job of being the door had landed in his lap and he’d hold it with both hands. “If she’s got energy for more faces, yours is the only other one I’d bet on.”

Price let that sit and then angled the conversation the way only he can, not so much steering as being a river you can’t argue with. “And you.”

“Me what.”

“How are you,” he said, never one to waste pronouns.

“Peachy,” Simon deadpanned. “Lads are thick, Wickham’s a squeaky toy, a corporal tried to climb me like a tree, I nearly set a child’s fingers on fire for touching her rifle, and I haven’t slept properly since Thursday but I’m fine because that’s the uniform, sir.”

Price allowed himself a short, unkind chuckle at “squeaky toy” because he’s still human. Then he leaned back and did that father trick that makes you confess without feeling like you’ve been got. “This next bit will be new,” he said. “For her and for you. The crashing calms and now it’s stairs. Therapy. Food on purpose. Walking into rooms she doesn’t want and discovering she can stay. That’s a different sort of weight. You’re strong at the emergency. You carry bodies out of fire like they’re made of feathers when adrenaline’s got you by the throat. Now’s the burn that lingers. You can’t light a cigarette under that one and call it ritual.” He let his eye fall, deliberately, to the pocket where habits go to pace. “You’ve got us. You’re not a lonely man, even if you often choose lonely rooms. Share a bit. With Soap. With Gaz. With me. Don’t make the clinic the only place you get to be soft or violent. That’s a short rope to hang yourself with.”

“Ta, Dad,” Simon muttered, but without bite. He rubbed a thumb over the groove a key had left in his palm last night and made a face like a man who’d bit a lemon and found it medicinal. “Johnny asked to come next week. We’ll see. He’ll fill the bloody corridor with jokes and make the walls behave. Might do her good. Might make her throw a slipper. Either way, it’s movement.” He shifted, uncomfortable, then let the other, smaller shame out because Price had paid the toll for honesty. “Almost had a smoke again. Didn’t. Before visiting. Not stupid. Just—wanting.”

“Desire’s not treason,” Price said. “Lighting it would’ve been. You did well. And when you bugger it once in a while, because you will, tell me and I’ll call you names and then we’ll keep going. You don’t white-knuckle your way through months. You build rails.”

“Rails,” Simon echoed, unimpressed, but the word slotted somewhere anyway. “Right.”

They finished the forms. They spoke of Nepal like it was a jaunt and not a two-day knife fight with the calendar. Price signed, stamped, shuffled the mountain into a hill. Before he dismissed him, he said, very lightly, “We’ll do Christmas wherever she happens to be. If she can’t come to a tree, we’ll bring a branch to a ward. Don’t borrow that pain yet.”

“Wasn’t,” Simon lied smoothly. Price tipped his head. They both pretended the lie had got away with it.

HEREFORD. 18:12 — UPDATE RECEIVED: NEW STAGE, NEW INDIGNITIES.

The evening report hit his inbox with that hospital blandness that hides how much heroism is required to write anything down without swearing. He read it standing between a vending machine and a wall because some prose deserves fluorescent light.

DATE/TIME: 27 Sept (past 24h)
COURSE: Withdrawal peak considered resolved (no hallucinations x 2 nights; agitation manageable; sleep achieved without additional sedation). Transition to early rehabilitation phase initiated.
GI/GU: Significant abdominal cramping; nausea with emesis x3 overnight; transient loose stools; dysuria with flank discomfort reported (UA ordered; hydration encouraged). Patient requested omission of certain GI details from daily summary; accommodated in external communication while charting clinically complete internally.
NEURO/PSYCH: Anxiety spikes responsive to grounding (counted breathing; reality orientation); requested lights on overnight to mitigate fear of visual misperceptions.
NUTRITION: Oral intake improving in small portions (approx. 30–40% of meals); tolerated fluids.
PLAN: Initiate group orientation (opt-in); schedule 1:1 therapy with Dr. Shah; consider PPI for suspected gastritis; continue observation; invite family/support visit at end of week per patient preference.

He exhaled through his teeth at the “patient requested omission”—of course she did, proud sod, the same woman who could piss on a cliff edge with a rifle across her knees in a blizzard and still go shy over a bowel note. He could see her asking it, voice flat and brittle, eyes daring Del to say no. He closed the phone, pocketed it, and felt the ache in his chest that was half tenderness and half weary amusement. This, too, was her. Of course it was.

FLASHBACK — MEDBAY STATESIDE: GUTS AND GALL.

He’d sat beside her through that ugly American medbay week, the air too cold and too clean, everything stainless and smug. She’d been gutted, literally, then patched—lines and tubes and drains doing a dance he pretended not to be disgusted by because disgust is a luxury you can’t afford when someone you love is plumbed like a science experiment. The surgeons did their work and left; the nurses did their better work and stayed; his job became watching her breathe and making the world smaller than the pain.

He learned, from old wars and new ones, the single most important post-op question for a belly that’s been opened like a red zip: are your bowels awake. Peristalsis like a choir you listen for through a door. He made a bastard out of himself about it because embarrassment saves nobody from sepsis. “Have you taken a shit,” he’d ask, with all the bedside manner of a butcher and all the devotion of a monk. The first time he said it she actually blushed. Clarisse Brooks. Blushing. Colour high on the cheekbones, eyes going flinty to hide it, middle finger doing its little salute. He deserved the finger and took it like a medal. “Not your business,” she hissed through teeth she hadn’t had strength to grit until then. “Everything inside you is my business until the stitches hold and you’re rude again,” he returned, relentless. “We’ve farted in the same rooms. We’ve shared a shower when neither of us was fit for public consumption. We’ve watched each other dry heave on a Swedish mountain because the rations were older than the bloke who packed them. You’ve had my dick in your mouth enough times to make saints cross themselves. I’ve had my face between your thighs enough to cause a diplomatic incident. You popped a spot on my shoulder last week like you were doing bomb disposal. Tell me if your guts have remembered which way is forward.”

She tried so hard not to laugh at the sheer vulgarity of it that he thought the incision might pop, and he got the rare joy of seeing her half-turn to hide her face in the pillow with a sound that wasn’t a sob. “You’re vile,” she managed. “Correct,” he said. “Now. Are you passing anything worth calling news.” She shook her head, furious that cries don’t only come from pain, and he filed the anger away and made it his ally. Over the next days he made it a ritual—knock, water, vitals, insult, shit question. She stonewalled him until she didn’t. The first time she managed, it was nothing heroic, just the body admitting defeat to physics. She looked at him like a person admitting they’d lost a bet. Cheeks hot. Eyes hot for a different reason. He said “atta girl” like a bastard because he is one, and she punched his arm so hard he had a bruise in the shape of her knuckles for three days and treasured it like a pressed flower.

He helped her sit up for the first time—hands under shoulder blades, his knee braced against the bed, counting one-two-three like a lift on the range. She hissed air and didn’t complain; he wanted to take the pain like a man takes a bullet for a friend and the universe refused the transfer. He watched the drains come out (she did not watch; he watched for both of them), watched the staples be checked, watched her pretend it didn’t hurt and called her on it. “It hurts,” he said. “Say yes.” She glared at him and said “yes” like the word ought to be shot. He kissed the top of her head because that’s all the environment allowed and because reverence hadn’t been beaten out of him, not entirely.

When they finally let her shower, he took his place outside the curtain like a sentry and passed things in, towel and shirt and the shampoo she pretended she didn’t care about. She made a fuss about him not looking, which he didn’t, because dignity is a religion in this house. When she wobbled he steadied her with a hand on a forearm and pretended not to feel the first real shiver of something like relief go through both of them—survived, survived, survived. The scar after was a neat, angry line he loved in the way you love proof that the world didn’t get the last say. He teased her about it gently—“matches your charming temperament”—and she told him to go piss up a rope with such vim he knew she was coming back.

He brought crackers and foul American jelly he’d found in a machine and called it cuisine just to watch her sneer; he watched her eat one and not keel over and wanted to run laps of the ward like a footballer. He asked his question again every morning and wore every punch and flip-off and grimace she paid him with like jewellery. When she farted loud enough one night to wake herself, she gave him a look of sheer, mortified murder; he said, “music to my ears,” and barely dodged the projectile pillow. He will die on the hill that love is often disgusting and that’s why it’s worth doing.

HEREFORD. EVENING — RAILS, ROPES, AND A BARBELL.

By the time the sun was thinking about making the car park orange, Simon had decided Price’s lecture was going to cost him a set of deadlifts and maybe a bit of humility. He hates being advised like he hates civilian shoes, but there are two men on earth who can put a hand on the back of his head and turn it and Price is one; the other was somewhere in London counting breaths. So when Johnny knocked on the bunker door with his usual OY, GHOST, STOP BROODING AND COME LIFT THINGS YOU DAFT UNIT energy, Simon didn’t tell him to get stuffed. He grunted something that wanted to be consent and found his trainers.

The gym was a box of rubber and effort. Soap chattered about nothing to fill the space that grief would otherwise colonise—some daft take on a film, a miracle he’d achieved with a kettle, the way Gaz had become uncle to a dog by accident. Simon let the noise live, set his hands on the bar, and did the math that makes weight move. Floor to shin to knee to hip, back like a question answered correctly. He didn’t chase a PR, didn’t showboat; he just added plates when thinking got too loud and took them off when the world narrowed and he could afford to listen again. Johnny spotted like a man who’s learned with time when to shut the fuck up and when to say “up.” They sweat. They swore. They abused the bar like it had slept with their mums. Between sets, Johnny angled an eye over. “How’s our girl,” he asked, and Simon’s mouth did the smallest, briefest thing that might have been a smile if you knew him. “Fighting,” he said. “Peak’s done. New slog now. Belly’s angry. Kidneys too. She’ll call me at obscene hours and I’ll answer. We’ll get it done.” Johnny nodded as if Simon had described tomorrow’s weather. “Good,” he said. “I’ll keep Wickham out your hair by teaching him to reload without looking like he’s milking a cow.”

They finished with a farmer’s carry because sometimes pain wants to be carried, literally. Simon loaded two heavy bastards and walked the length of the room and back until his traps screamed and his head emptied and all that was left was breath and floor. When he set them down, he felt human enough to say, “Chippy after,” and Johnny looked so delighted you’d think he’d been asked to godfather a child. “Yes, mate,” Soap said. “Salt, vinegar, and the good kind of grease.” Simon allowed it. He texted Gaz chips. bring sarcasm and got back on way, bring wallet. He didn’t roll his eyes (he did). He let the lads be the rails Price had talked about because the alternative was walking the edge alone like a prick and he’d done enough of that for ten lifetimes.

Back in the bunk after they’d eaten like men after a funeral and a football match at once, he sat on the edge of the bed and read Claire’s report again—the line about lights on, the note about not writing down the embarrassing parts—and felt that combination of fury and fondness that keeps his heart inconveniently alive. “New stage,” he told the empty room. “New rules. I can do rules.” He set an alarm for a civilised hour and a less civilised one. He put the key in his palm and closed his hand until the teeth bit. “On we go,” he said, because this part didn’t require poetry, just stubbornness, and he has that in spades.

HEREFORD WAR ROOM. MONDAY 0900 — BRIEFINGS AND ITCHY HANDS.

Price ran the room like he always does: board covered, red lines clean, names printed sharp enough to cut a finger. Nepal mid-week, late Wednesday wheels up, two-day window, minimum footprint, maximum teeth. Target set: a cross-border pipeline feeding small arms and parts for bigger sins into the wrong valleys. Hub fronted as a logistics yard outside Pokhara, Kaski District, cover company registered to one “Purna Thapa Logistics,” real money and muscle coming via a Russian-speaking broker chain that smelled like old GRU. Price clicked a remote and put faces up because faces focus men: Oleg Sidorov (ex-traffic cop with a private army complex), Mikhail Rutsky (accountant, no chin, too much watch), Igor Kovalenko (did time in Donbas, now sells rifles to men who like feeling tall). Local fixers: Nabin Karki, Dinesh Rana. Secondary site: a riverside warehouse with a prayer flag facade and a basement full of crates marked farm equipment that rattled like sins. “Primary is a surgical rip,” Price said, pointer tapping. “Night one we glass the sensors, walk in quiet, cut the head, copy their drives, paint what we can’t carry, leave them shouting at empty air. Night two is insurance. Out by dawn or we earn a holiday we don’t want. Don’t fall in love with your angles; bad ground is honest about hating you.”

Simon wanted to bury himself in the plan because that’s a drug he trusts—sequence, timings, the neat hum of a thing that works if nobody fucks it. He likes the thinky bits more than he’ll ever admit: reading the map until it talks, counting windows without moving your eyes, letting the route draw itself in your head like a pencil run. But he was off today in the stupid, small way he hates. Focus kept slipping sideways to the phone in his pocket, a phantom buzz that never came and he checked for anyway. He told himself it was childish. He told himself he wasn’t some poor sod waiting on a text from a date. He told himself he was harder than that and then caught his hand halfway to his pocket like a thief. Withdrawal leaves marks on everyone around it. Some are visible on wrists; some sit in your palm like a bad habit and ask to be fed every ten seconds. He crushed it. He watched the slide on ingress points again, held the picture down by main force, took notes he didn’t need just to keep the hand occupied.

Price ended it clean. No rah-rah, no “bring it home, lads,” just the nod that means go do the prep, I’ll be watching if you pretend not to. Then: “Riley, a word.” Private tone without leaving the public room. “If it suits her, I’d like to come tomorrow. See her. Not make it about me. Just—present.” Simon clocked the ask. Claire would decide. He’d get the door open if she wanted it and keep it shut if she didn’t. “I’ll put it to her,” he said. “If she’s got the headspace, you’re in. If not, you’re not offended.” Price’s mouth said course not; his eyes said I’ll be there when the wind’s right. Fair.

Simon packed quick—kit squared because future-him likes finding things where he leaves them—and shoved two of his hoodies into a holdall. The black one she nicked most, the washed-out grey that still smelled faintly of him no matter how rude the laundry got. He grabbed the key to her locker, checked it twice out of instinct, and headed for the car. He didn’t bother pretending he’d stay on base until lunch. He drove.

ST. THOMAS. EARLY ABSTINENCE — FOAM FOR FEELINGS, WORK FOR EVERYTHING ELSE (CLAIRE).

She wasn’t in the storm anymore; she was in the flat water after it, and somehow that was worse half the time. Mood swings without drama; she could go from wanting to smash glass to wanting to watch it gather dust in ten minutes and neither felt like living. Emotions came muted, like a film with the volume down, then jumped her when she wasn’t armed. Sleep was a joke. Anxiety used up half the oxygen in the room and then sulked in the corner while the rest of her sat empty. Fog everywhere: she’d start a thought and lose it, walk across the room and forget why, stare at a cup until it looked like it resented her. The nurses explained the chemistry without treating her like an idiot: dopamine thrashed, GABA sulking in the cabs, glutamate trying not to blow the doors off, whole system trying to claw back to baseline after months of being told lies by needles and bottles and pills with polite names. “Stable equals possible,” Elena said. “We string possibles together until they look like a week.”

They made a routine because routine is scaffolding when the building’s not sound. Food small and frequent. Water more than she wanted to look at. Walks, because lying still made the head play stupid pictures. Elena took her out into the corridor for the first proper go that wasn’t a bathroom, and Claire handled it. Not heroic, just moving. Halls painted in soft colours so no one’s rage had to bounce off hospital white. Chairs padded in a way that made you think of being allowed to sit instead of being told to wait. Posters that were sometimes useful and sometimes insulting—You Are Stronger Than You Think makes you want to put your fist through Perspex when all you did today was not die. Patients in different phases passed like weather: a bricklayer type with old mortar in his cuticles and new tremor in his hands, walking laps with the dogged pace of a man who’d always worked through being unwell until the work ran out; a posh forty-something in a neat cardigan whose eyes were nine miles away, face doing that brittle polite thing people practice in kitchens while pouring gin into tea cups; a kid younger than she had any right to see in here, arms a patchwork of fresh lines and old shame, eyes stuck to his phone like it owed him a god; a woman in her sixties chewing gum like it kept the ceiling from falling and telling a nurse the exact ratio of hot-water-bottle to codeine required to humanise her back. Staff with the look you can’t fake: tired without being sloppy, patient without being soft, bored of nothing because boredom kills.

They stopped by a window with the gardens outside—square of grass trying to convince city air to behave, a cracked statue that had seen better donors, two crows arguing over a biscuit. Sun had a go at the leaves and lost. Claire took it in without poetry and kept walking because stopping too long made the pictures come back. They passed a door marked Veterans Group with a sign that pretended not to apologise for existing. She looked at it and said nothing because talking makes things stick and sometimes you need them to pass like weather. Elena clocked the look and didn’t ask the stupid question.

FLASHBACK — SEVENTEEN, ENLISTMENT, A DOOR THAT OPENED (CLAIRE).

She was wire and fury and height that hadn’t finished. Fifty kilos flat (110 in old numbers), dropping because food was a negotiation and the house was a war. She looked up what would get you kicked at intake—weights, numbers, tests, forms—and decided she wasn’t getting kicked. She put five kilos (eleven pounds) on in a month by doing push-ups next to a bed she hated and lifting books because there wasn’t money for anything that wasn’t bread and bullshit. Lunch ladies at school slipped her extra on days they could; she ate it fast and quiet and didn’t say thank you aloud because gratitude gets used against you in houses where people keep score. Nights were long. The door had a habit of opening when nobody needed anything. Some man with a key always has a sermon. She didn’t name it then; she just trained.

The enlistment centre smelled like bleach that had given up. Yellowed walls that remembered the 90s. Forms with boxes for things that didn’t fit. The physical felt like pretending you’re fine until your body agrees. She ran until her side bit and didn’t slow down, marched because she learned young that moving looks like competence, stood straight because slouching invites hands. Reflex hammer on knees that wanted to kick a face and didn’t. She lied with discipline because truth didn’t help: no allergies (lies), no chronic anything (lies), no broken bones (more lies than she could count on hands that had been grabbed too often). She learned how to speak “fine” in different tones before she’d learned algebra. She used that like a tool.

Doctor was in his fifties with a face like a man who had heard too many stories and wasn’t allowed to fix any of them. Not sleazy. Not kind either. Just tired and sober about it. “Undress to your underwear,” he said, and she did it like a drill, eyes front, mouth closed, shoulders back, body locked because softness gets read wrong by men who want to. He checked what he had to. He asked the standard questions and got answers you could write down without having to open a file. Then came the part she hated, the part where adults who aren’t the problem recognise the marks the problem leaves. He saw what there was to see: old bruises in hand-shapes, the kind you get from being grabbed and told it’s your fault; round burns at ribs like someone fell asleep with cigarettes and forgot whose skin it was; lines on hips and back that looked like someone who believed in discipline without witnesses; a fingerprint at the throat that flowers purple and then yellow and then green; a bit mark that hadn’t come from a dog. His mouth did a tired, annoyed thing. He took a breath to do the right thing on paper.

She cut him off. “I can do the service, sir.” Flat, hard, not pleading. He opened his mouth to say the part they’re trained to say: are you safe at home. She hated the shape of the question because safe is a joke in buildings where the wall sings hymns. She didn’t need to tell a stranger what everyone who matters pretends not to know. She said the thing that mattered: “I need this.” Not a teenage tantrum. A fact. “I trained. I looked it up. I can run, I can shoot, I can stay awake. I can follow and I can fucking lead if asked. I can leave. I want to leave. If you write down your concerns and send me back there, I’ll just come again. I will keep coming until this works. If you’re going to fix the problem, do it properly and take me out your way. If you can’t—sign the form and let me sort myself.”

He looked at her too long and she looked back because she was done looking at floors. He sighed the sigh of a man who’d like to burn a house down and doesn’t have the petrol. He didn’t write the marks. He wrote suitable in the box that opens doors. It wasn’t heroism; it was triage. She took the paper in both hands so he wouldn’t see them shake and walked out of that building like the ground had finally agreed to continue. She weighed fifty-five kilos (121 lb) by then. She would keep eating. She would learn a rifle like a language. She would climb a ladder someone else told her wasn’t built for her. Ten years later, she’d be sitting in a clinic telling her body to stop asking for poisons you could buy in pharmacies. Today she walked into a room full of other girls and boys who wanted out for reasons they couldn’t afford to explain and she started.

The training weeks were pure pain and she liked it. Pain you choose is a tool. The early men tried her because men try things. She learned which ones you can humiliate without waking their knives and which ones need a quiet conversation by the gym door. She learned that “sir” and “fuck off” can be said with the same mouth and sound exactly like compliance. She ran. She fell. She got up. She outshot boys who had grown up with dads pretending range days were bonding instead of a way to explain noise. Every time someone put a hand on her where it didn’t belong, she made a mark back and stared until the hand learned manners. She did not feel safe. She felt useful. It was enough.

Medical revisited her once when a bruise bloomed where it shouldn’t. Different doctor. Same look. She gave the same answer with less breath wasted. He wrote nothing. She passed. She got a uniform. She got a berth in a room with four other girls who snored like old men and told jokes that made priests blush. She wrote down an emergency contact that wasn’t a person because there wasn’t one. She learned to make coffee strong enough to stand up by itself. She learned silence can mean don’t talk or don’t leave and that the second one costs more. In the mess three years later, a man in a skull mask would put a chair at the end of the table and she’d sit without calling it a kindness. But first: she ran. She shot. She left.

ST. THOMAS. CORRIDOR, MIDDAY — LAPS AND DOORS.

Back to now. Elena offered the gardens like a cigarette and Claire shook her head. People and air felt like too much in the same square. They turned back down the same corridor with the same scuffed bit near the skirting where two beds had knocked each other like drunks. Claire walked like her legs belonged to her again. The fog didn’t lift so much as thin. She passed the door with Veterans Group again and didn’t flinch or smile or anything—just logged it like a range, like a doorway you’d use later if it wasn’t mined. Then she saw him.

End of the hall, dirty blond, scars in the open because she gets the face no one else does in daylight. Black clothes because he treats colour like weakness. Extra bag on one shoulder. Shoulders set in that way he has when he’s carrying it all fine and will kill anyone who notices. He didn’t walk fast, didn’t go slow—kept a pace that says I’m here; I’ll be there; neither will make me show off. For all the days of noise and vomit and lights on at night and bugs that weren’t there and hands that were and the boredom that comes after the horror, this was the thing that worked on her breath. She didn’t smile. She didn’t run. She just felt something uncoil in the chest like a knot being asked politely to fuck off. She stood her ground and let him come. He came. The day stopped being something to get through and turned into a thing with a point.

ST. THOMAS. MONDAY 13:02 — THE HUG.

He clocked her at the end of the corridor and she clocked him back, neither of them making a production out of it. Elena peeled off like good cover, left them with the long strip of floor and the smell of disinfectant and whatever passed for quiet in a place that never really shuts up. He started into the usual briefing voice—“I’ve got—” was halfway to brought you hoodies, got five minutes, how’s your head—and then she broke the pattern. No drama. No wobble. Just stepped in close once they crossed her threshold, shut the door, and put herself against his chest like a soldier who’d finally admitted the safest place in the room was inside someone else’s arms for exactly as long as she could stand it.

Not a squeeze to crack ribs. Claire’s not that sort. Firm. One arm around his waist, palm flat, the other half-hesitant at his hip like she wasn’t sure if wrapping him up would spook him or her. Face tucked to the notch where his collarbone and sternum meet. Weight real—no floating, no pretending she didn’t need the contact—and warm through the thin hospital cotton. He looked down because that’s what you do when the thing you’ve missed for weeks turns up and asks to be held. Bandage neat at the scalp, a line on her cheek under clean tape, old restraint rash at the wrists fading but still telling on her, eyes awake and ringed with the bad nights she’d had to earn. Skin too pale by half. Breath a little high, not panicked, just light. And him—shoulders dropping without permission, jaw loosening, the knot he keeps between the ribs finally giving an inch because the body’s not a saint and you don’t get points for pretending. He got an arm round her back, hand finding shoulder blades through the gown, other hand to the back of her head gentle as anything, bag straps still biting his fingers because he hadn’t put them down fast enough. Built like a wall, held like a man, and for once he didn’t try to fix anything. He just stood there and let her be on him.

It wasn’t long—nothing ever is in here. Five minutes if that. Enough. She breathed a hello against his shirt; he snorted a quiet “Alright” that meant I’m here. Close up, he read all the little changes you only catch inside a hug: the tremor down to a background tick; the way her stomach clenched once (pain still there, noted); the flinch-and-cancel when a trolley went past outside; the different smell of hospital soap in her hair because she wasn’t using the one from his flat. And the bigger thing he wasn’t going to spill on the floor for anyone to step in: how much he’d missed this stupid basic contact, and how much it told him she still wanted him near when her head was trying to argue the opposite.

They separated like professionals who’d got away with something. She sat on the bed and, first time since she’d come in, he didn’t take the chair. He took the edge, angled towards her so he could watch her face while she talked or didn’t. She didn’t, much. Not because she didn’t want to—he could see she did—but because the early-abstinence fog makes speech feel like pushing mud uphill. That was fine. He can carry a room. He gave her the weekend: Soap playing the domesticated idiot well enough that Simon almost believed him, planning to take the new lass down the pub and “introduce her to the animal in its habitat”; Gaz getting tapped to run the next greenie cycle because he can stare at twenty-year-olds until they stand up straight; Price likely wearing another pip in a month if the gods didn’t spill tea on the paperwork. He gave her Wednesday clean, too—timings, names, angles, ingress on the riverside, exfil routes if the valley turned sour, who was on what rifle, who was on the radio, where he expected the stupid to come from. He didn’t talk down. He never does. She murmured here and there, small course-corrections more than speeches—watch for a second sensor string near the yard lights, those cheap models sometimes get daisy-chained; if you have to cut power, give it three seconds between breaker and push or you’ll trip the backup; don’t trust the fence line west, the ground there tends to swallow boots. Some he’d already had scribbled. Some he added immediately because her mind, even dulled by poison and its hangover, still does the job. He felt his palm itch with the old habit of touching her cheek when she got like this—eyes narrowed, pupils steady, thinking hard without fidget—and he kept it to himself until it wasn’t useful to keep it to himself. Then his hand made its own call, thumb near the clean tape, heat of skin under the plaster. She didn’t flinch. She tracked him with those dark eyes, dead steady, and he wanted to say it was good to see you think. What came out was, “Cheek alright?” because he’s a coward in daylight where it counts.

“I wish I could be on it,” she said, low, not fishing, not performing, just stating the obvious in a way that made his chest feel like someone had put a boot on it. “Stupid. I know. But I want to be three hills away with a scope and a reason.”

He grunted, which meant me too and don’t you dare in the same sound. He didn’t end the visit. He didn’t move off the bed. He kept his hand on her shoulder and let the room stay theirs a bit longer.

---

FLASHBACK — TENTH MISSION: THE FIRST TIME HE SAW HER GO UNDER.

Back when she was still mostly “Brooks” and only sometimes Claire, she was the sort who took corners like they owed her money and didn’t spend words in the back of the truck. Tenth mission with them. She’d put a round exactly where it needed to go—clean, dull, no drama—and then she’d gone missing for three minutes that felt longer. Price did that slow scan he does, didn’t shout her name because he’s not an amateur, and told the rest to stay put. Simon watched the Captain move off, knew he’d find her because he always does, and kept his rifle where it needed to be while his brain kept a small slice on where the fuck is she. A minute later he caught a glimpse between two trunks: her, kneeling, not theatrical, just folded in, hands shaking in that controlled way people use when they’re trying to lie to their own body. Price took a knee opposite her, said something that looked like counting, maybe names of things, maybe bollocks—Price has his own voodoo. Simon didn’t go over. Line between helpful and invasive matters, and she didn’t have him in her five-round magazine yet. They came back. She didn’t meet anyone’s eyes for two days. Nobody lit her up for it. Soap made a joke about needing a spotter on the bench and asked her to help because he’s not as thick as he plays. She did. She took his shoulders in hand, lined him like a rifle, told him he was being a muppet, and got on with it. Simon filed it. Noted that the newest sniper, all precision and posture, had a floor that sometimes gave. Didn’t pity her. Didn’t need to. Just wrote the rule in: she leaves the line clean ninety-nine times out of a hundred. The hundredth, the captain goes. Not you. Not yet.

FLASHBACK — HIS BED, EARLY DAYS: WHEN HE LEARNED HER RULES THE HARD WAY.

Fourth time they’d slept together. Early days, before he’d worked out the set of rules she wasn’t ready to say aloud. He had her on her front because he hadn’t learned better—asked if he could pull her in tight and she said yes—so he wrapped an arm around her middle and set a hand near her head on the mattress to keep the angle where she liked it. He’s not a talker during, not much. He’ll swear, grunt, tell you where to be, that’s about it. He remembers being stupidly close, focus tunnelled, breath and sweat and the heavy rhythm that makes thinking pointless. And then he clocked something that didn’t fit: the absence of her noises. Claire’s not a singer, but she’s not a ghost either. She gives you small tells—little gasps, that low “fuck” when he hits a good line, a laugh if he’s being an arse. This—nothing. Her body was pushing back by the numbers, like she’d filled out a checklist. But her face… he looked. She’d pressed it into the pillow, not because she wanted to muffle pleasure—this was a shut-down. Fingers welded to the sheet. Neck too straight. The tiny shudder through the shoulders that says I’m not here; I’ll be here later if I survive this. He stopped. Not a flounce. Just came off the throttle and went still with intent.

“Claire.” No answer. “Claire.” Second time, sharper. She didn’t move. He withdrew, slow, like clearing a stoppage, hand off her waist, and her whole body sagged back into the mattress hard, a tremor running through it like the muscle memory of an earthquake. He didn’t touch again. He hated that—he’s a hands man—but his hands weren’t trusted tools in that second and he knew it. “Look at me,” he said, voice like the range. She made a sound into the pillow he can still hear. He didn’t flip her. He didn’t drag a chin up. He used words like a pry bar. “Up. Hey. Up.”

When he got her face turned, her eyes were blown and wrong—hyperventilating fast, mouth clenched, tears she didn’t want there. He caught snatches of mutter you don’t expect from someone who spends Sundays in the gym, not church—psalms he half-recognised from funerals, verses about sin and flesh and other people’s guilt shoved in a girl’s mouth years ago. He kept his face plain. He kept every shit reflex out of his hands. “Alright. Breathe with me. Now. In.” He took the breath for her to match. “Out.” Again. No touching. Knees to carpet. He came down to her level and made the world smaller, eye to eye. “Count it. One on the in. Two on the out.” His cock didn’t matter. The room barely mattered. This did.

She shook, tried to hide, failed. “I’m sorry,” she said to the floorboards, which pissed him off on a level he didn’t have a word for. “Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Be here.” He switched tactics because that’s what you do when the first one isn’t landing. “Tell me something you can list without thinking. Artillery in ’44. German kit. Go.” It sounds mad to anyone who hasn’t sat through a panic with a soldier. It isn’t. Give the brain something with edges. She caught it like a rope. “88s,” she said, ragged. “Nebelwerfer. Pak—” another breath, “—forty.” He nodded. “Good girl.” He doesn’t hand that phrase out and he doesn’t mean it the way men who need to feel big do. He meant you’re doing the task. “Keep going.”

“Stug III. Tigers. Panzerfaust,” she got out, breath evening by inches. She blinked salt, hated that he saw, hated the weakness in it, and he didn’t let her hide. “Good. Again. In. Out.” He kept his voice flat, profane when it helped, clinical when it didn’t. He said her name without honey because honey makes some panics worse. When the tightness in her chest let go enough to think, she instinctively did the thing that made him furious and sad at the same time—reached for her clothes, the automatic I’ll get out of your way, head down, the little not-flinch that says you’ll want me gone now I’ve fucked the mood.

He batted her hands off the shirt like they were trying to move a mine and pushed the bundle onto the chair. “Sit,” he ordered. She sat, end of bed, shoulders up around ears, eyes fixed somewhere on the floor like a recruit waiting on a bollocking. He went to the kitchen, necked a glass of water, swore at himself into the tap for being thick about positioning, put the kettle on, came back with tea because that’s a language they both speak. He handed it over without commentary and got into bed beside her because throwing blankets and sentiment makes you a prick and a coward. They lay back slow, her head to his chest because that’s the position that works, his hand on upper arm where touch reads as anchor not claim.

When the worst had passed, she did another thing that made him want to put his fist through a wall for the teenage boys of the world: she touched his stomach with a shaky hand, whispered, “I can—make it up—if you need—” and he heard every shit lesson some other bastard had jammed into her life re: sex as payment, silence as currency. “Don’t be fucking daft,” he said, not gentle and not sorry. “I’m not sixteen and I’m not starving. You owe me nothing. You breathing is the only invoice I’m paying today.” She flinched at the tone, then breathed in sync again because orders are easier than kindness when your head’s a riot. He didn’t say we’re not doing that position again. He didn’t need to. He wrote it down as law and never broke it: no face in pillows, no stomach unless she set it, no surprises round her ribs, eyes on, always.

FLASHBACK — LATER THE SAME NIGHT: SETTING NEW RULES WITHOUT MAKING A SPEECH.

They lay there long enough for the room to smell less like sex and more like tea and sweat and a fight you’ve lived through. He drifted, not to sleep but to that edge where the mind files things. She asked, after a while, very small, “You… alright?” because she can’t stop checking the other person even when she’s on fire. “Yeah,” he said, and meant I’m annoyed at me, not you. She nodded. They didn’t talk about it in the morning because she doesn’t like picking scabs in daylight. He didn’t perform concern. He made breakfast—eggs, badly—and let her take the piss out of how he salts food like a man compensating for lack of personality. Later that week he took her from the side on a lazy afternoon, eyes open, pace calm, voice on her—there, hold, good—and felt the difference immediately: her body present and loud again, the small sounds back, the hands willing. He didn’t put a sticker chart up for himself. He just paid attention and never stopped.

He also started keeping artillery and daft history in his pocket on purpose. It worked better than you’re safe ever will for some people. On ops, when she got that thousand-yard glaze for twelve seconds too long after contact, he’d mutter something stupid like “Difference between a Brummbär and a Sturmtiger,” and she’d roll her eyes and answer and somewhere between the eye-roll and the answer the panic would lose interest. In bed, in the rare ugly nights where dreams woke her with her nails in his skin and a word in her mouth he wanted to kill, he’d count her into his chest—one, two, three, four—and if it didn’t land he’d talk her through yesterday’s maintenance routine or next week’s range plan and let the brain latch on to anything except the pictures. It’s not romantic. It works. He’s not here to write poetry. He’s here to keep her breathing and get her out the door in the morning with enough ballast to do her work.

He never asked for the full story. He got pieces anyway—little slips, a verse here, a flinch there, an instinct like checking if her underwear had been folded not torn. He didn’t play detective. He built a map out of what she gave him and what his own fucked-up history taught him to infer, and he kept that map in his head like any other target plan: don’t kick the doors you don’t need to kick; don’t be gentle like a lie; be steady like a fact. He is not kind, not in the way people mean when they say it over bad wine. He is reliable. With her, that’s the same thing.

FLASHBACK — AFTERMATH: HOW HE FILED IT FOR WAR.

Next morning he shaved with her toothbrush in the same cup and thought about how make it up tasted in her mouth like an apology for existing. He thought about how many kids they’d both been around who’d learned that the way out of a bad moment was to give something they didn’t owe. He decided—without ceremony—to be the man who never takes that offer when it comes cheap. Later, when a mission tried to jam panic down her throat mid-contact, he ran cover, made sure she had ten seconds where nobody could see her breathe wrong, and filed the timing under bring a spare ten seconds next time. It’s logistics. It’s care. Same thing.

He told no one because it’s not for the lads. He treated the incident like a range correction—do it different, do it better, don’t write a poem about it. He swore at himself for putting her in a position he should’ve clocked earlier. He bought a different bloody headboard because, idiot that he is, he’d noticed she liked to hold something and he wanted her to hold a thing that didn’t remind her of other hands. Next time, he asked where and how in the plain voice he uses for kit checks, and she answered in the plain voice she uses when she’s being brave without making a fuss. The sex stayed rough when they wanted it rough, stayed quick when it had to be, stayed slow enough for breath when the room said slow. He learned the sounds again. She learned he’d stop without sulking if she tapped out. They never made a bloody ritual out of it. They just treated this like what it is: two adults who do violence for a living making sure the violence doesn’t follow them into the bed unless they ask it to and even then it knows the rules.

---

Back on the hospital bed, now, he watched her eyes while she listened to the Wednesday plan and saw the same sharpness he first clocked on a Brecon morning. He felt his hand still on her shoulder and didn’t take it off. She’d said she wanted to be there like it was stupid and true. He didn’t feed the ache that line always gives him; he just wrote it next to everything else that needed doing. “You’ll be there when you’re there,” he said. “Until then, you feed up, you walk the bastard corridor, you let Elena bully you through the boring. I’ll bring you the map and the gossip. We’ll keep your kit warm.” He didn’t add and I’ll keep close enough for you to find at three in the morning if the hands try it again, because that’s already written into how he moves. The visit didn’t end. He didn’t stand. He let the next silence sit, solid, the kind that makes a room feel less like a cage and more like a place to wait without going mad.

HEREFORD. TUESDAY 05:30–09:40 — MAKING ROOM FOR A VISIT.

He did the same routine and did it harder because tomorrow he’d be on a plane to a valley that eats men and he wanted today to count. Gym first, heavy and simple, a stack of plates that shut his head up. Range next, tighter than tight, because the hands know what to do when the weather inside is shit. Paperwork by necessity, signature after signature, the small tax you pay to be allowed to do anything. Breakfast was a thing he forced into his mouth like medicine. Gaz slid onto the bench with that quiet look he gets when he’s decided to be useful without a speech and put a small paperback on the tray—cheap black cover, title in white: Precision & Error: The Science of Hitting What You’re Aiming At. “For her,” Gaz said, eyes staying on his tea because dignity is a service they render each other. “It’s dry as bones, she’ll like it. Figures and case studies on dispersion and barrel harmonics. Something to chew that isn’t herself.” Simon nodded once. “Ta,” he said, flat. Appreciated more than he let show. He slid the book into his bag with the hoodies he’d already packed.

Soap covered the gap without announcing it—shift swaps, a “got it, ya shite,” and a slap to the shoulder that landed like a sermon on male friendship: go do what you have to do; I’ll hold the fort and take the piss later. Price was in and out of his office, stamping forms with the expression of a man arguing with a printer and winning, then reappeared at the car park on schedule with his coat and his patience. First time the drive wasn’t just Simon and a bad radio station. He didn’t mind the company; he minded that it meant he had to speak the rules.

He drove like he always does—no drama, no dawdling, a steady 80 that admits the police exist and refuses to invite them—and laid it out as if he were handing a brief to a junior who needed not to fuck it. “Right. Don’t comment on how she looks. No ‘you’re pale’ or ‘you look tired.’ Don’t stare at the bandages or the restraint rash or the nails the nurses clipped. Treat the bed like furniture, not a crime scene. She hates being clocked for damage. Talk normal. She’ll be slow sometimes; adjust to her pace without making a song of it. No stupid questions. If she drifts, you count or you name the room. No hands on unless she’s in your space first. You already know most of this.” Price listened like a man taking orders he doesn’t resent and nodded, nod, nod, the exact cadence of I’ve been in worse rooms, I’ll do it your way because it’s her. Simon believed him. Price has never made a mess of someone else’s skin for the sake of comfort.

FLASHBACK — 141 DAY ONE: HOW PRICE STARTED BEFORE SIMON DID.

He remembers the morning she arrived like he remembers the first time a new rifle lands in your hands: weight, promise, a question you can’t answer until you put rounds through it. Rumour had been nothing because her file was nailed shut; Soap tried to pull threads like he always does and got fuck-all besides country, language, a German posting, and a transfer request rubber-stamped higher than their pay grade. Price brought her in with the tone he uses to make a room accept a new piece of furniture. “Sergeant Brooks,” he said, not booming, not soft, and the room adjusted. She nodded—eyes forward, mouth a clean line, posture that looked like a bruise even when you didn’t know it was—and did what new sergeants do: kept out of the way and got the work right.

She didn’t sit with them the first month. She took her plate and ate standing like a sentry or sat by the back wall where the draught made your tea sulk. First week, Simon watched Price stand from the table with that casual just stretching my legs move, peel off, and go plant himself at her corner. He didn’t loom, didn’t hover; he sat, and he adjusted down to her volume. Two heads bent. Short sentences. No laughter for show. Just a captain giving a soldier a room where the noise stayed outside. The gossip rats noticed, of course. They always do. The whispers were the usual ugly: Price going soft for a new skirt, midlife crisis with a regulation haircut, “mentoring” as euphemism, dirty jokes with an age gap as the punchline. Soap—young mouth then, clever and stupid in equal measure—tried one near the wrong ears. “Careful, Cap, you’ll catch a charge if the missus sees you makin’ eyes,” that sort of shite. Simon had never seen Price shut him down so fast or so clean. “That your last word on a member of my team, Sergeant MacTavish?” Cold. No shout. The kind of ice that burns. Soap went crimson, stammered a no, sir, and it never came up again. The mess learned. The room adjusted.

Much later—after she’d become furniture in his head and he’d stopped pretending not to notice—she told him bits of what came before that first month. He asked without making it a cross-exam. It was one of those late nights where sex had turned into lying side by side and being too awake; he opened the door with a sentence like a request. “You and Price knew each other before.” She didn’t twist away. She looked at the ceiling and rolled the story out without drama, as if reading a weather report. “They tried to hand me to him as a gift,” she said. He went still. “ ‘Little something for the captain in a unit full of boys.’ That’s what my superior said. I was twenty-two and new meat. Locker-room jokes. They used to whistle and tell him to share. One day they nicked my kit out the shower block and shoved him in there like it was funny, see if he’d… test if I was good for barracks entertainment.” Her mouth didn’t shake. Her hands clenched enough to make knuckles show. “I was on the floor because you hide when you’re not armed. He walked in and froze like a human being. Turned his back like a fucking gentleman. Handed me his jacket because mine was missing. Then he lost his mind in the paperwork way. Suspended the lot. Three got bounced out. One got charges. He did the shouting elsewhere. Not at me.”

“How many,” Simon asked, voice too flat. “Names.” She shrugged. “Don’t need them,” she said. He did. He would have carved them into his head if she’d given them. “He ever put a hand wrong on you?” he asked, because some saints wear nice boots and still stink. She gave him a look like he was dim. “No. He’s got a goddaughter my age, he told me. The whole thing made him look ill.” He nodded once. Filed it with Price sits with her because the room is better when he’s there. The line from day one made more sense. The old man’s watching had never been about possession; it had been the professional version of not on my fucking watch.

Simon saw the other piece get written over the next year, clean as a checklist: Price catching her panic before she called it that; Price’s hand going to the plate carrier to haul her from a blast radius because he’d clocked that shoulder, neck, and wrist were off-limits; Price testing her the way you test your best shot without letting the room turn it into theatre. They fought about tasking because she’s stubborn as a wall. She’d say, “You’re not putting me out because you lost one before,” and he’d go tight around the eyes and say, “I’m putting you where the mission needs you, sergeant,” and sometimes he meant and where I can see you, and she’d spit back, “See me from the scope,” and go. That’s what father-daughter looks like in their line of work when it’s not sentimental bollocks: arguments over angles and the right to risk your skull.

FLASHBACK — SNOW CABIN: THE TALK ABOUT “US.”

When the rumours started about Simon and Claire, the unit handled it like soldiers do when they respect the people involved: they pretended not to see and said nothing within earshot. Soap tried for one sly wink and got a look from Simon that promised surgery without anaesthetic. Gaz, not thick, gave him the nod that means I’m not blind and I’m not a gossip. Price waited until they were somewhere isolated to bring it up, which is why the conversation happened in a cabin that stank of old smoke, both of them in cold gear, Simon kneeling at a window with his rifle pointed at a track and Price sitting with a thermos like an old dog.

“I saw her leave your room,” Price said, casual as a weather report, eyes on a tree line. Simon didn’t turn. “And?” Price let that hang a second. “And you’ll be more careful. I don’t care what you do with adults who know their own mind. I care about the brass catching the smell and making an example. You take the same lumps if it turns into a discipline thing, but she’ll take it worse because she’s a woman and because some idiot with a portfolio will decide you’re corrupting the furniture. You’re one rank up. It matters on paper. Don’t give anyone an easy shot.”

“I know how to hide a thing, John,” Simon said, testy, because being told to be discreet by a man who wrote the book on it makes the back go up. Price didn’t bite. “Aye,” he said. “Just making sure the book’s open in front of you while you’re busy being happy in whatever brand of miserable the two of you think counts.” Simon finally shifted his eye from the scope to give the man the look that says say your piece. Price met it without humour. “If she’s in your bed, she’s yours to look after when I’m not in the room. Not as a possession. As a task. You don’t break her to fit you. You don’t let her break herself to fit anyone. If you fuck it, I’ll have your head. If you don’t fuck it, I’ll still have your head because I’m your CO. Understood?” “Understood,” Simon said, clean. Price nodded. Signal flicked. Back to work.

FLASHBACK — CAPTURE: HOOKS, KNEES, AND A DECISION.

The worst part wasn’t the pain. They’re professionals; pain comes with the uniform. The worst part was the efficiency of it. She and Simon took a bad corner in a place that collects bad corners; the team got split on a pivot; locals with more kit than brains got lucky with a net. He’d been strung by wrists behind, chain pulling shoulder sockets toward new shapes; she’d been put on a hook because whoever had done their reading knew this isn’t her first time being opened and wanted to be clever. They’d run the hook through old damage, left side, low—close to the scar tissue from the gut job he’d stitched in a different country. Rusty steel went through meat that had reasons to hate it. No screaming—she almost never does—but she went white-green around the mouth in a way that made him want to break every face in the room.

They worked him in the usual way—punches; a baton across ribs; questions with the grammar wrong—and he let it wash past. She got the more inventive angle because some men can’t do their jobs without trying to teach a woman a lesson. Steel rod quick across the cheekbone, not full force, testing. “Name,” in a language they assumed she didn’t know; she didn’t bother answering in any. She counted breaths because that’s what she does when she can’t count anything else. Hook creaked in living tissue with every micro-movement, metal worrying at old scar. He told himself to store the noise and use it later when it was time to make a man regret breathing.

Then someone with half a brain realised he was the lever and she was the fulcrum. They took a twelve-gauge—short barrel, ugly, likely loaded with slug, not buck—and put rounds into the back of both her knees from cruel-close. Entry small, exit messy. He saw patella shatter like a saucer and soft tissue turn to soup; he heard the breath go out of her in a small wrong sound because the body has its limits even when the head decides it doesn’t. Hook took more of her weight when the legs stopped being legs; the metal slid a half inch and something red that should’ve stayed inside said hello. He lost words for a second because rage makes the language centre flicker. They put the muzzle to her lower spine next—just above sacrum, mean angle, the kind of shot that doesn’t kill but writes surgery on a form—and that’s when he fucked the plan, not because he’s soft but because he doesn’t leave people like that when there’s any other way to play it.

He found a way out. He’s not going to narrate it like a fucking memoir—doors, timing, a man’s foot at the wrong place, chain weight misjudged, someone’s eyes full of their own blood—but it ended with him off the ring and her off the hook, both bleeding, both functional enough. He got her down and she nearly brained herself on concrete because the knees didn’t know what instructions were; he caught the fall with a hand on the side of her skull and took some of the skin himself because the floor is honest and doesn’t give you back what it takes. He threw her over a shoulder when he had to and cradled her when he didn’t because shock turns people into sacks with teeth. There was a lot of red. Back of knees pulsing like a fucked sprinkler; the left-side wound seeping steady; face doing that ugly swelling from the rod, split at the mouth, blood stringing her teeth. She kept the jaw set and bit back every noise because that’s her—stupid, proud, consistent. He told her to make a sound because sound proves you’re still here. She told him to fuck off through her teeth. He nearly smiled because even then, that’s them.

He adjusted her face clear of the vest plates because the left cheek is one of those stupid zones he knows too well—hypersensitive, gets rashy if you graze it with stubble when you’ve gone at it like animals the night before. Ridiculous to think of that in a corridor it smelled like bleach and iron and fear, but the body remembers. He kept her cheek off the rough nylon so she didn’t lose skin she shouldn’t. Price was the first through the emergency door they blew; he went hard right, cleared, hard left, cleared, and then his eyes flicked to the detail that mattered: Simon adjusting the angle of her face in his arms like she was made of something he understood. There was no smirk, no “caught you.” Just a nod that said you’re the one carrying her; keep carrying. Later, when the dust got the chance to fall, Price didn’t pull him for the touch on the cheek. He pulled him for the rest—chain of command, why he’d broken it, how he’d weigh the decision next time. Simon took the bollocking because you take bollockings when you’ve made a choice you’d make again. He also stored the fraction of a second in Price’s look that said the job had been passed on and the old man wasn’t offended by the idea that one day she’d take orders from Simon in matters that weren’t military.

They got her on the bird with both knees wrapped in enough gauze to choke a horse, IV hanging, her mouth finally quiet not from choice but because morphine tells everyone to shut up. He stayed on the bench beside, hand on the straps to stop the litter bounce from knocking her wounds into a new world of hurt, and looked out the open side to avoid putting his fist in the medic’s face for frowning at the wrong thing. Back at the safe house they cut and cleaned and closed and he stood outside with blood drying in the collar of his shirt and felt like he’d been stripped and nailed to his own spine. Price came out, lit a cigarette he didn’t smoke, held it, looked at it, and put it out on his boot. “Don’t tell me you’re in love,” Price said, not unkind and not nice. “I’m not your confessor.” Simon said, “I don’t tell you anything you don’t need to know.” Price said, “Good,” and that was the end of it in words. The work continued. The rules adjusted. And when, months later, the base learned without being told that Claire Brooks was, in practical terms, not available for jokes or hands or idiot rumour, nobody asked why. They’d seen enough. They knew who would end it if it started.

That’s how it sits in his head on the drive down the M4 with Price beside him not talking for the sake of it: a straight grid of rules that only gets bent for two things—saving her life and making sure she still has one to return to. Everything else is admin. Everything else he’ll handle. And when he steps into the ward with the book and the hoodies and the man who taught him half his good habits, he’ll do the introductions in the way that doesn’t make her feel like a specimen. The rest can fuck off.

ST. THOMAS. TUESDAY 04:00–08:10 — CLAIRE, A QUIET MORNING WITH TEETH.

She woke at four and stayed there, eyes open, ceiling counted, nothing soft about it. Insomnia sits heavy in this phase; the body’s tired and the brain won’t cooperate, a mean loop where you feel slack and wired at once. Cravings were still in her; of course they were. They didn’t come with frantic scratching any more—no more tearing at skin like an animal, no more leaving marks she’d have to explain to Elena with that flat voice—but they hummed under everything. The mind kept shoving old pictures at her: the syringe against skin, pressure, push, the familiar slide, the brief, disgusting lightness as the floor tilted and the room went far away. She didn’t want it like before; she wanted to not want it, which is a different fight and no easier. She kept it where she could hold it without it holding her by thinking about work. Angles. Dope cards. Wind reading. The record shots she and Riley had taken the piss out of on long flights. Price’s hand on a map. Soap’s stupid grin in a doorway. Gaz’s quiet face when he watched a line. Simon, always Simon—his face when he found her on that first overdose, the exact change in his eyes when he clocked what he was seeing; his disgust for the whole world, not for her, when he shoved her off his cock during another night because the marks were fresh and her mouth said yes but her head wasn’t in the room enough for his rules; his face at the clinic door when he said he’d leave her here and she knew he meant it, and how yesterday that same face had looked at her like the choice was done and the leaving had failed. She held those pictures where the craving could see them and sulk.

At seven, Elena got her up without fuss. “Shower,” Elena said, tone like orders without rank, and Claire said yes because saying no now was usually about pride and she was trying not to waste energy on pride today. First time doing most of it alone in a week; fine. She went slow. Water on. Temperature solid. No head against tile; no sneaky swing of the skull to feel the shock; the part of her that likes stupid tests can fuck off. She asked for the brush and Elena put it in her hand like she’d earned it. Claire worked through her hair without looking in the mirror, slow, deliberate, curl by curl, detangling without tearing. She asked for the clothes Simon brought and Elena didn’t make a ceremony out of saying yes—black hoodie that sat right on the shoulders, black leggings, soft slippers that didn’t squeak. Elena gave her that small, proud look people give when the plan’s working, and it made Claire’s stomach twitch because pride still sits next to shame in her head and it’ll be a while before that’s not the case.

Breakfast was dry toast and water because everything else made her think of nausea and bad nights. She knew she should push for more; she didn’t today. She ate enough to count, drank enough to not annoy the kidney pain into a sulk, and sat back on the bed clean and dressed and quiet, waiting for visit time without pacing. No TV. No music. No mirror. Just breathing and the clock and the fact that she was upright and not seeing hands in the corners. She felt flat, empty, apathy running through everything like a sedative, but warm in the chest in a way that wasn’t medical because she knew the walk in would happen and that made the waiting a thing she could do without tearing at it.

ST. THOMAS. TUESDAY 10:22 — PRICE WALKS THE CORRIDOR AND TAKES THE MEASURE.

He let Riley run the desk because Amina knew the man now and rules stretch for certain names if you arrive with the right shoulders and a clean story. It was a “break in policy” that had already been broken twice and would be broken again; Price didn’t mind using it and didn’t feel smug about it. He’d been in enough wards and clinics to know when a place had rot in the boards; this one didn’t. The walls weren’t trying to be fucking cheerful; they were quiet and functional. Soft colours that didn’t scream. Benches you could sit on without hating them. Staff moving like they were busy, not frantic. Patients in all the stages he knew too well from thirty years of watching men and women come apart and try to put themselves back together: a lad in his thirties with scaffolder hands and the shakes he was trying to hide by carrying a coffee too carefully; a girl far too young sitting with a social worker, phone face down on a knee, jaw set; a silver-haired woman power-walking the corridor because she’d been told to walk and she’d taken it like a mission; a bloke with posh anger stamped all over him arguing softly with a doctor and losing with dignity. Price watched without staring. Not his first rodeo. Not his worst.

He clocked Riley’s scan, same as always: corners, exits, staff badges, hands, faces. Not suspicion—if Simon had smelled wrong here, Clarisse Brooks wouldn’t have slept a night under this roof; the man would have dragged the building into the car park by his teeth. This was just the way he goes through doors he cares about: bag gripped too tight, eyes moving slow, control freakery set to “I dare you.” Price put a line in him, dry. “You paying double for privileges, Lieutenant?” Simon didn’t look at him. “Bloody obvious, innit,” he said. It wasn’t brag. It was an admission: I am moving money and favours and I don’t care who knows. Price nodded once, a little internal good he didn’t waste breath on.

Amina waved them through. Elena was at a desk, eyes up, the calm one, gave Price the nod you give an officer you’ve clocked without deciding whether to like yet, and he gave it back. They walked to the room and she was there. Clarisse. Smaller than he remembers when she’s in kit, always is in these gowns, but upright and dressed and clean and looking at the door first thing. It did the thing in his chest it always did with his good ones, the father bit and the captain bit making the same noise. Her eyes met his and did the little spark she gives him when she’s going to let him in the room. Riley put the bag down and gave her the look he thinks is casual and Price knows isn’t—eyes sliding over wrists, bandage, skin tone, posture, breathing, room smell, bed dents, all of it done like he doesn’t care and written down like scripture in the back of the bastard’s skull. Price thought for the hundredth time: pair of fucking idiots. The hardest edges in the building and the most transparent pair he’s ever managed. He’s seen soldiers shag for sport and soldiers marry for paperwork and soldiers die for nothing; this was the daft, older, quieter thing you don’t get often: both of them trying not to make a fuss about the only thing in the room worth a fuss.

“Give you two a minute,” Simon said, like it was nothing, and left before anyone could make it a scene. Good. Price took the chair; he didn’t do the Simon thing where he sits on the bed, angles in, counts breaths. He isn’t here to steal that bit of ground. He gave her the tired grin he saves for his own, the one that says we’re still here, that’ll do. “Rough stretch,” he said. “You look like the hard part’s had a go at you.” She snorted, mouth split, the soft crack that shows the skin’s not healed yet, and said, “Fuck off with your poetry, old man.” He raised a hand. “Light talk. Only kind I brought.” It wasn’t their last meeting in a room like this. The last one had been at a volume nobody preferred.

FLASHBACK — HQ BRIEFING ROOM, EIGHT WEEKS AGO: THE BAD DAY.

North America job. Nothing special on paper, which is usually when a day decides to take a swing. Price had too many spinning plates and not enough hands—godson caught with spliffs at school, ex doing a quiet knife twist via solicitor over money, higher-ups asking for a clean run so somebody could look good with a slide deck in London—and he was holding it together the way he does: keep voice level, keep pen moving, keep the room arranged right. Claire walked in wrong. He clocked it in the first thirty seconds. Twitchy. Too loose. Laughing where she doesn’t. Pupils a bit big. Scratching at elbow skin like it was an argument she meant to win. Soap kept catching her eye, doing the soft-joke approach you do with someone you love when they’re not themselves; Gaz threw a look to Simon and Simon had his arms folded tight and his eyes flicking her way and that face like a set jaw. Price took the temperature and didn’t like it. He tried ignoring it for five minutes and then stopped pretending. “Out,” he said, dead flat. No preamble. No “you alright, sarge?” because we were past that. “Out the room.” He pointed. “You’re not on this one.” He didn’t raise his voice. He lowered it. He knows better. He saw it register—confusion to anger to the start of the shame he never wanted to see on her—then she said “No,” because of course she did.

He did a thing he almost never does with her: he deepened his voice and put rank on it. “Sergeant. Out.” Wrong tone for the person; right tone for the situation in his tired, pissed-off head. Simon shot him a look he understood a second too late: don’t do that. Price kept going because the day had already got under his skin. “You’re off. That’s not a debate.” She stood up too fast, stumbled, swore and laughed and tried to make it a joke. Soap stood—“Hey, lass, come on, let’s—”—and she cut him with a flapping hand and a glare. Gaz stayed seated, mouth tight. Simon didn’t move his feet, but the air around him changed to I’m going to catch her or carry her if I have to and Price could feel that like a weather front.

She went for the door. Price stepped into her path because he’s a bastard when he thinks he’s right and because the part of him that’s a father and a CO can make him cruel for ten seconds if he sees a kid step toward a cliff. “Come back when you’ve got a fucking grip,” he said, and he regrets the exact wording every day since. She stopped and looked at him like he’d slapped her. She pushed two fingers into his chest, too weak to do anything but with all the insult she had left. “Shut your fucking mouth with the sermons,” she slurred, eyes glossy with that horrible brightness. “I bleed for this place and you’re throwing me out because it’s easier than helping. You’re jealous.” He actually laughed, one bark he couldn’t swallow. “Jealous of what, Brooks? A sergeant who’s made herself a weak addict and can’t sit in a chair without scratching her own skin off?” He knew she was high. He knew the fog. He said it anyway. He watched it land under the heroin like a shot under armour. She flinched. Clarisse doesn’t flinch.

She came back with the kind of spite you only get from clever, hurt people. “Jealous of someone who can do the job, you mean? Jealous because your own life’s a shitpile and this is all you’ve got left? You’re a pathetic excuse of a man, Captain. Your marriage died on you and you watch it rot from the outside and pretend you don’t care. Your sister calls you and you don’t pick up until she’s already done the hard bit with your godson. You stand in front of lads like some hero and then hide at home with whisky and a pile of forms and act like that’s a life.” He took it. He didn’t ward it off because you don’t argue with a drunk girl in your own rank structure in front of your lads. He opened his mouth to end it and she kept pushing. “And don’t fucking pretend you aren’t like the rest. I see you. Always helping and talking and so present for your poor girl soldier. You get off on it. I bet you have a good long wank after your ‘mentoring’ when you think about how brave you were. I bet you were hard when you heard the little sob story about the preacher—”

Simon was moving before the sentence finished. He didn’t grab her like a bouncer; he reached the zipper of her hoodie with one hand, got her eyes with the other, put himself in her way and gave her the look that means enough now. “Come on,” he said, voice low, no show. “We’re going.” She pulled back and he didn’t chase; he matched step, herding without force. Gaz was up a second later, quietly intercepting the line to the door so the rest of the room wouldn’t get a show if she turned again. Soap stayed with Price because someone had to. Price watched them go, jaw set so hard it hurt, and resisted the urge to put his head through the wall. He sat. He said, “We’re done for today,” to a room that didn’t need telling. Soap hovered. “Sir—” “Save it,” Price said, not cruel to him, cruel to the moment. “Go check on Gaz. I’ll handle the paper.” Soap went. Price looked down at the table and hated himself in a clean, specific way.

ST. THOMAS. TUESDAY 10:29 — BACK TO THE ROOM.

He didn’t do a speech now. He let the quiet sit for a minute until it stopped being theatre. “I shouldn’t have said what I said in that room,” he told her, straightforward. “You shouldn’t have said half of what you said either. We were both arseholes that day.” She breathed out hard through her nose and stared at the floor. “I was high,” she said. “I don’t get to use that forever, but I was. I meant some of it. Not the—” she waved a hand, throat working. “Not the disgusting shit. The… personal shit. I went for blood. It was cheap.” He cut her off with a hand. “I know what you meant and what you didn’t. I know who you are when you’re not poisoned. I raised my voice and used the wrong bloody tone and called you something I shouldn’t. That’s on me. I’ll take the hit.”

She nodded, jaw tight, eyes not wet, none of that. “Don’t do that tone again,” she said, practical. “You know what it does to me.” “I do,” he said. “Won’t.” He leaned back, let the chair complain, looked at her like he’s looked at her since she was a scrawny new sniper who refused to sit down next to anyone at lunch. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. “Not glad you needed to be. Glad you are. You’ll get bored of me saying it.” She smirked because he’d given her the line to take the piss out of him. “I was bored of you the day I met you,” she said. “Get new jokes.” He chuckled once, short. “No promises.”

They let the quiet in again. Price looked at the door and at the corridor behind it and at the way Riley had set himself somewhere out there like a guard dog pretending to wander. He looked back at the girl on the bed and saw the same thing he always sees: a soldier who will outwork anyone if you let her, and a kid who was raised by wolves and survived by keeping her hands up. He’s not sentimental and he doesn’t have time for poetry; he just hasn’t got room in his life for losing the ones who can be kept. He adjusted his shoulders, which is the closest he gets to a hug if it isn’t asked for, and said, “Right. Tell me everything you hate about hospital toast.” She snorted. “Dry. Tastes like cardboard. Better than the kitchen at your last FOB.” He nodded. “True.” They got on with it.

ST. THOMAS. TUESDAY 10:41 — PRICE STEPS OUT, RILEY STEPS IN.

Price saw Riley come back down the corridor and clocked him the way you clock your own: shoulders alert but not broadcast, hands easy, eyes already on the handle. They’d finished saying the hard things at a volume that didn’t annoy the corridor; Clarisse sat upright like a soldier who could pass inspection and fail sleep. Price got that glassy feeling behind the eyes that isn’t tears and isn’t pride; it’s the old ache you get when the kid you backed keeps getting up after the world puts a boot in. He nodded once at Riley—nothing flowery, the nod that means she’s good enough for now, don’t fuck it—and then did something he hardly ever does in any room with witnesses: leaned down and gave Claire a quick hug where she sat, arms careful around shoulders and upper back, nowhere else, a contact like a tap on a weld—hold. “Right,” he said, voice gravel-soft. “I’ll be just outside. Don’t keep the nurse busy.” She snorted. “Tell your godson to stop getting nicked for weed,” she muttered. “I’ll do my part.” Price’s mouth tried for a smirk and didn’t quite make it. He straightened, met Riley’s look with that near-crinkle that carries a whole paragraph—she bit me, I bit back, we’re square, now it’s your watch—and stepped out to the corridor, back to the wall like the old bastard he is, giving them the room without giving them up.

ST. THOMAS. TUESDAY 10:42–11:31 — WHAT HE BROUGHT, WHAT SHE SAID, WHAT HE KEPT.

Simon took the same seat at the bed and didn’t pretend it was a chair; he sat like he lived there, thighs square to the frame, knees a handspan from the mattress. She didn’t say “come closer,” she just stuck both feet out and jabbed his thigh with a heel like an impatient cat. He caught the look, slid his hands under her calves, and settled her shins across his lap, the soft slipper edge tapping his belt buckle once like a tiny test. He began the inventory because that’s what he’s good at when he can’t fix anything: “Book from Gaz.” He set it in her hands. “Clothes—another hoodie, two tees, one pair leggings, socks that don’t hate your toes. Scrunchies because you nick every single one I own and then pretend you don’t. Wash bag top-ups. Oh, and—” he patted the side pocket, “—the mints you like because you pretend they’re medicine.”

She didn’t do a film face. No weepy smile. She rolled the paperback in her hands once, tested the spine, thumb brushing the cover like she was checking the grit on sandpaper. She nodded slow. “Cheers,” she said, flat as the monitor beep outside. He shrugged. “It’s a book. You’ll bully it.” He gave her the rest in the same tone—casual, low, effective—and she let him, eyes up on his face like she was doing her own checklist.

He doesn’t think about his face unless he’s shaving blood off it, but she does and he knows it. Straight bridge, no kink, one tiny white line across the top from a Glasgow night years ago; dirty blond hair with the sides disciplined and the top growing out into that soft mess she always drags her nails through in the shower, fringe ruffled because he knows she likes it and he doesn’t like anything as much as he likes her fingers in his hair; eyebrows thick and dark, set straight over the stare that looks indifferent until you’ve earned something softer; thin mouth, bottom lip with that split scar that never quite fades, the one a bottle gave him and she kissed once like she could erase glass; cheek lines hard, jaw strong enough to look like an argument; two scars that show, four that don’t unless he’s not wearing a shirt; cheekbone scuff still a shade off from the last job; nose banged a dozen times, remains stubbornly straight; the look as he talks that reads like I’m counting things; you, the air, whatever tries it next.

“You piled up about tomorrow?” she asked, pushing the question through the apathy like a weight. He gave the grunt that can mean anything from aye to don’t be thick. “Piled up about leaving you in here without me for three,” he said. “Mission’s nothing. Map’s clean. People are the problem. I’ve briefed the people too many times to pretend I trust them.” He meant it to come out like piss-taking; it came out heavier. She felt the weight and didn’t try to make it lighter with a joke. She set the book on her lap, fingers still on the corner like an anchor, and talked like you talk when you’re trying to keep control by naming things.

“Elena says this is the bit where the brain makes itself useful again,” she said. “Not useful useful. Just—less on fire. She says when you come back I’ll probably be in the boring part. Therapy, groups if I don’t tell them to do one, walking that corridor like a dog, actual food that isn’t toast. Maybe sleep that isn’t a fight. It’s dull. Dull is good.” She dragged in a breath, looked at his mouth and then away because she’s still got that stupid discipline even here, and added, quieter, “Craving’s still there. Not like before. It’s a hum. Like a fridge. I can ignore it if I keep my hands busy and my head somewhere that isn’t inside me. It doesn’t make me want to put my head through the wall anymore. Or tear skin off. It just—exists. Annoying. I can—control it. Some.”

He listened like he listens to a brief that might kill someone he cares about. He didn’t interrupt. He didn’t give her airy proud of you nonsense because she’d hate him for it. He logged the exact words: hum not howl; controlled by task; triggers likely boredom, idle hands, quiet. “Good,” he said, and made it mean I hear it; I’ll build around it; I’ll show up with tasks. “You tell Elena you want a list of crap jobs? Make her your corporal. If there’s nothing to do, you’ll make something up, and that’s when you start staring at walls. We don’t do walls.” She huffed. “Bet you’d make a fuckin’ rota.” “I did,” he said, deadpan. “It’s on my phone. She gets it when she asks nicely.” She rolled her eyes; he let the corner of his mouth nudge half a millimeter, which is his version of soft.

He ran his hand, slow, down the shin closest to him, not over bone—over blanket—like he was smoothing a crease. He watched the rest the way he always does: bandage line neat along the scalp, no fresh seep at the edges; cheek adhesive holding, no angry red; wrists clean from last week’s cuff rash, a few faint grooves that will be gone if she stops fighting furniture in her sleep; base of the throat with that slight hollow because she’s still a bit down on weight; the new scrapes on knuckles from a night where she probably fought ghosts and won; the small tell at the corner of the mouth where she chews skin when bored. He clocked everything like he clocked a room for angles. He stores everything because details are how you keep people alive.

“Don’t drown yourself in it,” she said suddenly, eyes on his. “When you go. Don’t think about this room. Think about a valley and a map and your lads. If thinking about me gets you sloppy, don’t think about me. I’m a big girl, Riley. I can wait three days without dying.” He hated that she was right, and he hated being told what to do by her and loved it in the same fucking second. “Shut up,” he said, soft and rude. “Don’t tell me where my head’s allowed to be. It knows its job.” He let the line breathe, then answered her properly. “I’ll do the work. Same as always. You do yours. Don’t make me come back to a mess because you thought ‘dull’ was beneath you.” “Fuck off,” she said without venom. “I’m not twenty.” “You were never twenty,” he said. “You went from seventeen to forty in six months and now you’re doing thirty in a ward.” She accepted the insult because it was admiration in a shit coat.

He stayed longer than he told Amina he would. He always does when he can see the point in staying. He gave her nothing heroic—no promises, no lines you see in films, just his presence and the low current of the way he won’t leave until he has to. At the edge of it, when he pulled one leg back to stand, she reached without the theatre. Small hand out, caught his left hand as it lifted, not palm to palm like a prayer—she took his thumb. Squeezed. Not daft hard; firm. He stopped because that gesture from her is never anything but a request or an order. He looked at the hand, then up.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t,” she said, and he snorted. “You’ve done everything,” he said. “That’s a useless instruction.” “Then pretend I’m there and you have to show off,” she said. “Routes. Angles. Don’t get fancy. Don’t get precious. Forget this room if that keeps you breathing.” It hit him in the chest like a boot. Not because it was sweet—she doesn’t do sweet like that—but because it was her giving him a clear brief: be the bastard I trust, even if it means I’m not in your head for forty-eight. His first instinct was to bark something cruel purely to neutralise tenderness, because that’s how he’s built. He swallowed it and went for honest. “I’ll come back Saturday,” he said. “Or Friday night if we don’t fuck it. If we fuck it, I’ll still come back Saturday because I’ll run three postcodes to make the time.” She looked at his mouth once, quick, then away. “Show-off,” she muttered. “Get out of my room.”

He didn’t. Not yet. He thought about being seventeen and signing his name on a line to prove he wasn’t Joseph’s punchline or his dad’s punchbag, getting hard off hating everyone because hating was a clean fuel. He thought about the years before Claire when he’d fuck a girl in a barracks or a cheap flat and feel nothing if he left before she woke up, proud of being unkillable and unowned. He thought about now and how “mine” and “hers” are words they don’t like and still use with their hands because the body gets there before the mouth. He looked at her mouth. He has kissed her rough and he has kissed her like theft. He didn’t move. He didn’t ask. He kept his hands where they were because this is a ward and she’s still rebalancing and he won’t be the prick who takes instead of waiting.

She did it for him because she knows him, and because she wanted to, and because she doesn’t owe him softness and gives it anyway when she wants to. Her fingers stayed on his wrist, pulse under skin he could count without looking, and her other hand went to his chest—flat palm, high up, the exact point she presses when they’re about to kick a door or when she’s got her knee over his hip and wants to feel the heart turn into a hammer. She stood up on the bed to get the height right, small rise onto the toes because he’s got the extra inches and she’s too proud to pretend it doesn’t matter. “Don’t be weird,” she said, because she’s Claire. “Never am,” he lied, and then she leaned in and put her mouth on his.

It wasn’t theatre. It was clean and precise and calm like a good shot. He felt the old familiarity land like muscle memory—her mouth cool from water, the tiny gap in her front teeth grazing his top lip when she set the angle, the heat that kicks up at the back of his throat even when he’s trying to behave. He did not manhandle. He didn’t take the back of the neck because that’s a place you only touch when she’s three steps ahead of you. He took the patch just behind her ear with his fingers, two light, one brace, the way she likes when she’s sober because it tells her he’s there and not closing a trap. Their noses brushed; he felt the slight crooked line in his from a dozen fractures and hers bump it, warm. She tasted like mint and hospital air and Claire; he had the idiot thought he always has that if you told him to identify her blindfolded in a room with blood in it, he could do it in a second from taste alone. He didn’t push. He matched. He let her set the length. It was short and exact and said I’m here; you’re here; that’s enough.

He ended it by kissing the bridge of her nose because that’s a thing they’ve fallen into when the room isn’t a bed and the day isn’t a private one. It’s not tender, not in the way people write in cards; it’s a seal on a packet that says job done. She looked at him with that flat, dark stare that reads to everyone else like indifference and to him like move, soldier. He stood. He picked up the bag. He tapped the book with two knuckles. “Do the maths,” he said. “Bullets don’t fly straight unless you make them. Same goes for days.” “Shut up,” she said, but her mouth softened a hair and he let himself take it.

He walked out of the room knowing two things with the clarity of a man who has signed too many forms and broken too many doors: he was going to put his boot on a Nepali mountain tomorrow, and if anyone with a rifle or a badge or a fucking prayer flag got in the way of him being back at this door on Saturday, he’d turn the valley into a lesson. He glanced down the corridor and saw Price doing his statue act at the far wall, pretending to be nothing, and gave him the nod that meant she’s eating anger for breakfast instead of glass now; we’re fine for three days. Price nodded back, pushed off the wall, fell in beside him. They didn’t talk until the lift. They didn’t need to. The work was set. The room behind them had a book and a hoodie and a woman who had decided to do the boring for a while. The road ahead had idiots to manage. He did the sums. He moved.

ST. THOMAS. SATURDAY 06:10 — EARLY ABSTINENCE GIVES WAY TO THE BORING WORK.

Claire took the news the way soldiers take weather: you don’t bargain with it. Amina had passed the message clean—mission stretched by higher command, four days not two, Sunday or Monday back instead of Saturday—no drama, no apology, just information handed over like a bloody memo. Claire nodded, said “got it,” and did the small swallow that still hurts her throat if she hasn’t drunk enough water. She knows how this goes; she’s been the one on the other end when someone in an office decides the lads can “mop up while they’re there,” like men aren’t already ragged and cold and short on sleep. She remembered a comms night where she nearly told Colonel Eversley to go fuck himself on a live channel for tacking three extra days onto a Korea mess while Soap was held together with gauze and salts; Price had taken the radio out of her hand calmly and changed the subject without making it a show, and Johnny—idiot—had giggled into his shoulder with a hand on his gut wrap. So yes, she knows this happens. Still means she’s stuck with guesses and the kind of silence you have to wrestle the whole hour.

Elena clocked her tells—she isn’t as discreet as she thinks right now; the rehab has stripped too much polish off her edges—and threw tasks at her like ballast. Morning garden laps, early, before the courtyard fills with the chatty and the despairing. She did them. Grass under slippers, damp earth smell, sky the colour of old steel. She stopped by the one tree that isn’t dying and touched the bark because texture helps when your head wants to go dumb. She counted benches because counting doesn’t lie. She stood in the sun when it actually bothered to show and didn’t pretend to enjoy it; she just let her body register warmth because that’s a thing brains notice even when they’re bored and cruel.

Communal meals were worse. Long tables, a mess hall if you squinted, except everyone was at a different stage of broken and none of you were allowed to pretend otherwise. The loud ones talk because silence is a threat; the quiet ones stare at plates until the food sweats. Claire sat, didn’t perform sociability, pushed toast or mashed potato around until it looked like an exercise, and let the noise pass over. A bloke in plaster with booze shakes was telling a plumber story too loudly; a girl with blue nail varnish was explaining to another girl how to get through a night without pills by counting backwards from 300 and listing kitchen items alphabetically; a retired nurse was going on about tea bags like they were tactics. Claire ate two forkfuls because that was all that would go, drank water, and remembered 141 tables where food meant something other than endurance.

FLASHBACK — ONE YEAR AGO: THE RIGHT TABLE.

Mess night, back from range, everyone too wired for bed and not wired enough for trouble. She would sit at the end because she likes the position, eyes on the room, exit in reach. Simon opposite or next to her depending on how long the day had been—boots planted, shoulders broad, arms folded when he wasn’t eating, that stare like he’s reading a boring book and still absorbing every word. She used to nudge him under the table to see if she could shift the mask. Ankles on his boots, heel into his shin, lazy rub against his calf when she wanted him to look up, a sharper tap when Soap got too mouthy and she needed backup. He’d frown, that good frown, the one that’s half annoyance and half carry on, and keep eating. Gaz would lean into the joke, Soap would escalate until the air actually got warm with laughter, Price would do that small head-shake that isn’t disapproval so much as children, and the lot of them would keep going because that is what keeps men alive in dull rooms.

There was a night she made Soap choke by asking, dead serious, how a bisexual man with cheekbones and a uniform could still be the only person in three counties who couldn’t pull a date without bribes. Soap tried to talk through curry and nearly died, Gaz went in for the kill with a line about his Tinder bio reading like a wanted poster, Price coughed so hard he clutched his chest and Gaz, little bastard, said “Cap, careful, your heart can’t take it, not even with all the tadalafil” and Price swore at the pair of them and pressed a napkin to his mouth while he laughed. Simon’s laugh is small—more a gravelled exhale than a sound—but when he did it, shoulders down, lines at the corners soft, she felt something unclench that had nothing to do with food. It made her mouth stupid later when they were alone and he had her slow and deep because he was in that mood; he told her offhand, voice like a throwaway, that her laugh at the table was the sexiest thing he’d ever seen her do. She called him a prat and told him to fuck himself; he said he’d rather fuck her and then he did, unhurried, practical, making sure she had to breathe between insults. File it under simple truths that work.

FLASHBACK — BEFORE THAT: THE WRONG TABLE.

Different table, different life, all the wrong uniforms. Grant at the head, pastor voice, eyes that slide, ring that flashes when he lifts a hand. Samuel on his left, same blood, different jaw, both with the same rotten authority. Prayer before food, heads down, “Heavenly Father” as a preamble to a lot of nothing and too much control. She learned early not to roll her eyes because that earns you an evening of scripture and lectures about obedience and women and sin and the rotten world. Hand on her knee under the table that should never have been there. Wife at her shoulder bragging about apple pie and pretending not to see because that’s what keeps her house clean and her mind safe from the effort of telling the truth. Cross on the wall. Cross everywhere. Pictures of a Jesus that never once climbed off a nail to kick a man’s teeth in when it counted.

Conversation was politics and righteousness. Men talking about what women should be and do while a girl sat small and ate what she was given and said nothing. Test of obedience this, submission that, verses pulled like knives to sit sharp between dishes. She learned to chew with a lump in her throat because the taste of something else was still there and she hadn’t worked out yet how to throw up quietly. She learned to keep still so the hand would get bored and leave. She learned the maths of survival in a house where prayers are weapons. That’s what tables were, then. Control. Performance. If she smiled, it was for camouflage. If she swallowed, it was because refusing meant a punishment labelled discipline. She doesn’t dramatise it. She just remembers. That’s enough.

The 141 table broke that. Nobody asked her to perform gratitude. Nobody asked for anything but her presence and her mouth when she had a good line. No man put a fucking hand on her where it didn’t belong without losing it at the wrist. The first time she actually giggled—proper, red-cheeked, hand not going to her mouth because she forgot to hide—Soap pointed, delighted, “Lassie’s gone crimson, Gaz—tone it down or Ghost’ll turn loverboy with twisted knickers,” and even that landed right because it was stupid and not cruel. No one told her to quiet down. No one told her to behave like furniture. Later, Simon watched her with that quiet look and said nothing until the door was shut and the boots were off, and even then he said it like it was a tactical note: that was good—meaning her loudness, not her body. That’s the change. That’s the whole thing.

ST. THOMAS. SATURDAY 12:40 — ANOTHER COMMUNAL LUNCH, STILL DOING THE WORK.

Today she took the spoon and made the mashed potato into lines because it gave her hands something to do. She didn’t talk. She listened. She thought about the team eating in a tent somewhere miserable, cold sausages and too-strong tea and Soap pretending his cooking isn’t a threat. She gave herself the order not to ruminate and followed it. After, Elena got her doing a hallway lap she didn’t want and she did it anyway. Early abstinence—nearly done. Real treatment—starting. It’s boring as fuck and that’s the point.

NEPAL RANGE. SATURDAY 18:10 — ORDERS CHANGE, WEATHER DOESN’T.

Simon was on his knees in snow deep enough to swallow a man’s shin and make the calves scream even when you were standing still. -10°C and wind that cut. He had the rifle laid in, bipod bit into crust, glass calm because the tool doesn’t care that your fingers hurt. There was a pull in the chest where an old cut didn’t enjoy the cold; scars tugged like badly laid tape. He ignored it. Price had the word from above and it was the one Simon expected and still hated: they were staying on, moving to clip a “minor” watch cell on the far side as a favour to the sort of officer who calls favours in because it makes slides look good. Two days had become four. He’d told Amina to tell Claire. He wanted to tell Claire himself and couldn’t. He put the temper into the trigger discipline and left it there.

They’d already thrown twenty down into the snow on the approach, clean and fast and forgettable; Wickham had caught a graze close to the ear and gone all macho about it while sneezing his lungs out from a cold he tried to pretend wasn’t happening. The lad’s a baby giraffe with a gun—too tall for his coordination at the moment, all elbows and ambition and noises. Simon had pulled two quick shots he wished Claire had seen because the angle had been awkward and pretty and he’d made it look easy; he told himself he’d do it again when she could watch the footage or hear him lie about it over tea.

Soap crunched over and parked himself like a big dog, pushed a ration packet into the snow by the rifle and pressed the stock with a glove like he was checking the thing was real. “Price and Gaz are cutting us a corner to sleep in,” he said, glancing at the treeline. “Six across the valley by the numbers. Maybe eight if the bastards can count. I can see your grimace even with the mask. You hate fun.”

“Shut it,” Simon said, not moving his eye from the glass. “Hate paperwork passed down a mountain by men who’ve never frozen their bollocks on one.”

Soap laughed, the honest one that fogs the air. “Aye, you’re a poet. You think she got the message?” He meant Claire. He always means Claire these days and doesn’t say her name like a gossip, says it like family.

“Amina gave it her,” Simon said. “She knows the game. Doesn’t stop it being a shit game.”

Soap bumped his arm lightly, got away with it. “She’ll be mad at the idea of you up here doing it without her. That’s how I know she’s mending.” He pulled a face at his own ration and went on, because he’s learned how to talk to silence without making it run. “Miss training with her. She makes me feel like a child when I hold a long gun. Proper humiliating. Miss the abuse. Miss the wee look she gives when I get a drill right. You know the one.”

“I know the one,” Simon said. He adjusted a click left, wind playing petty games in the cut. “You still milk the trigger. You lift your head. You impatient. She tells you; you ignore her for exactly two strings; you work it out; you go back and thank her by pretending not to thank her. I know the whole fucking routine.”

“Fuck you too,” Soap said, cheerful. “You wish she’d seen you nail those two earlier.”

“I’ll do it again,” Simon said. “I’ll do it twice just to piss you off.”

Soap snorted. “And I’ll tell her you said it and she’ll roll her eyes and pretend your ego’s a medical condition. Cap says we hold here and move at first light. Gaz has eyes on a line we can snake under without losing our toes. Wickham’s on hot drinks because we need him to feel useful before he dies of man-flu.”

“Tell Wickham if he sniffs on the brew I’ll cut his nose off,” Simon said. He shifted, slow, feeling the old muscle memory of patience settle like a weight. “You eaten.”

Soap waved the ration. “I’ve chewed the cardboard and called it chicken, aye. You think too much about the ward when you should be thinking about the valley?”

“Mind your business,” Simon said, default. Then, because it’s Johnny and because the cold and the stretch and the lack of news and the way Claire had gripped his thumb two days ago had dug under his armour, he added, “Head wanders. I drag it back. That’s the job.”

“Aye,” Soap said, tone agreeing without making a fucking Hallmark moment. He stared out into the grey and the blue-black pine and the white that hurts the eyes. “When she’s out, I’m nicking her for a week and making her bully me back into decent groups. You can glower in the corner and pretend you’re not proud.”

“Try it,” Simon said. “I’ll set the fucking timer and make you do your holds until your shoulders fall off.” He let himself push one shallow breath out through his teeth. “Gaz gave her a book,” he said. “Harmonics, group size, accuracy science. Dry as bones. She’ll eat it.”

“Gaz is a wee romantic,” Soap said. “Like you, but he’s house-trained.”

“Say that again and I’ll bury you in a drift,” Simon muttered, but there was no heat in it. “You got eyes on the six?”

“Two lazy,” Soap said immediately. “One on a smoke break thinking God can’t see him if he stands behind a pole. Three doing laps like they’re impressing someone. If there’s a seventh, he’s smarter than his friends.” He nudged Simon’s bicep. “You’re going to be fine. She’s going to be fine. Cap’s doing that face he does when he’s pretending he isn’t cold. Gaz has already got a plan for the plan. Wickham will grow up or I’ll push him into a tree. It’s a shift, not a saga.”

“Talk less,” Simon said, then after a beat, “No. Keep talking. It stops me imagining all the ways dumb can get us killed.”

Soap grinned. “I can do that. Did I tell you the kettle in the bunk back home’s got a death wish? Gaz swears it’s haunted. He put a sticker on it says Boil you bastard and it listened.” He kept the patter going—small stories, minor digs, the usual. He knew when to shut up; he knew when to fill the air; he did both like a good friend. He got a small laugh out of Simon at some point about Wickham sneezing so hard he nearly sent his helmet into orbit and treated it like a major victory, which is how Soap keeps score. They sat in the cold and watched the valley breathe.

By the time Price and Gaz waved them over, the light was dying and the wind had got meaner. Tent up, corners tied, stove bullied into life; Gaz slid them a look that meant eat, you bastards. Price’s mouth was the grim line that means he’d had his own version of Amina’s message and chosen not to share it until after people had food in them. Simon’s chest ached right where the cold likes to keep souvenirs and he stretched it until it told him to piss off. He knew Claire would have read every jerk of quiet and turned it into worst-case; he knew Elena would have seen it and stuck her outside with grass and firm orders. He put a hand on the ground because contact helps when nothing else does. Soap knocked his shoulder again. “Brothers,” he said, stupid and right. Simon grunted, which this once meant aye, and went to help Price make the miserable stew less insulting by adding everything in his pocket that counted as spice. The valley held its breath, like valleys do before you make them your problem. The night moved closer. The work didn’t change.

ST. THOMAS. SUNDAY 09:05 — NO MESSAGE, MORE HOURS TO EAT.

Claire went up to reception because sitting on the bed was turning the air sour. Amina clocked her the second she hit the counter, that calm face that’s good at telling people news without making it sound like a wound. “Anything from Simon?” Claire asked, flat, already knowing the answer because if there’d been something the knock would have come soft on her door. “Not yet,” Amina said, sympathetic without leaning. “They’re still out. He said he’ll update the moment they get a window.” Claire nodded like a machine. “Right.” She felt the stupid worry curl low and tight. She hated it. She hated the part of her that missed the sound of him moving in deep snow, the steady grunt he does when the world’s taking the piss, the brief “alive” he sends without sending anything. She told herself it was childish and then admitted it wasn’t; you don’t forget the sound of a person you’ve laid next to through a hundred noises.

Elena found her in the corridor pretending to read a poster about hydration like it had a gun. “Head’s doing laps?” Elena said, not as a therapist, as a nurse who knows what an hour does to a body like this. “Yeah.” “We can try something that isn’t food or walking, if you want. Just meet your new therapist. If you hate him, you hate him. Ten minutes. Door open if you want it. I’ll be outside. No traps.” Claire’s shoulders went up half an inch on their own because she hates shrinks. Always has. The ones who did “welfare checks” at Grant’s house drank coffee and asked polite questions and left with their spines intact. The ones in uniform felt like paperwork in trousers. One had been worse than all the rest, and her throat tightened on the thought of him before she pushed the picture down hard. Elena didn’t press. She just stood there like a post you could tie a horse to. “Fine,” Claire said. “Ten.”

They walked together. Elena’s steps are quiet. “I’ll wait right outside. You call and I’ll hear you,” she said, hand hovering but not touching. Claire nodded, set her jaw, went in.

The office was designed to relax people with money, which meant it irritated her. Humidifier making the air wet. A little shelf of books about brains. A window with glass you could see the garden through but not use to get out. The man behind the table rose with the careful movement of someone who knows how much space he takes up and doesn’t want to take more. Fifties. Thin glasses. Scrubs under a jacket. His badge was on a lanyard; her eyes blurred on it and for a second the old red cursive of another name flashed across her brain like a brand: Dr. Porter. It wasn’t; the badge said Ben Carson, MD in a neat font she’d like to cut. But her gut went hot and sick anyway because her body doesn’t care about fonts.

“Sergeant Brooks—Claire,” the man said, gentling his voice appropriately. “I’m Ben. Dr. Carson if you prefer. We don’t have to do anything today except say hello.” He smiled in a way you’re meant to trust. It made her skin tighten because the last time she’d been in a room like this with someone who smiled softly and talked about methods, she’d walked out dirty in a way you can’t wash off with water. She sat because soldiers sit when told to and because standing would have looked like fear. “Ten minutes,” she said, just to mark the boundary. He nodded like he’d thought of it himself.

He talked. Nothing dangerous on paper. Abstinence. Early phase. Sleep cycles. He asked what hours were worst (she answered: four a.m. to six, always has been). He asked if she wanted the chair moved (no). He explained how he worked, a menu of options. He used his hands to punctuate, the way good teachers do. His hands were older man’s hands—veins up, skin paling at the knuckles—and her chest went cold because she knows the feel of old hands on a neck that isn’t theirs. She locked her ribs down. She stared at the corner of the table because if she watched his mouth move she would put her fist through it. He kept talking. He said words that didn’t touch her until he said two that did: “trauma reconstitution.” He said them like a technical thing on a slide, an option among options. It landed like acid.

She didn’t remember choosing to move. She remembered the chair legs scraping and the table edge digging brutally into the healing line at her side and a white-hot pulse there where scar tissue hates pressure. She remembered noise roaring up until it drowned language. She heard her own voice the way you hear someone else in a room you want to leave—“no, no, no—get out—want to get out—stop it—don’t—” She was already halfway to the door when the floor rose wrong and she hit her knee hard and the side again. Hands—his—came up, open, not touching, good instincts, and it didn’t matter; every face she’d ever had to survive slid over his for a second, Grant’s and Porter’s and the other one with the wedding ring that cut, and her body did what it had been trained too long to do: shut down and rage at the same time. The door opened. Elena. Thank Christ. Elena didn’t ask what was wrong. She didn’t make it about the man behind the desk or the method or the past. She got down to Claire’s eye line with the speed of someone who’s done this a hundred times and said, clear: “Out. Now. With me.” And she got her up without pulling, an arm offered, weight taken, moved her out of the room while the doctor pulled his hands back like he should.

Bench. Corridor. A nurse, then another. Someone asked for water and someone else said, “Not yet, she’ll choke.” The noise in Claire’s head was all hands. Not the hallucination crawling kind—she can call that out now and win—but the remembered hands that gripped, that held, that smoothed like praise and felt like murder. The table had left a hot welt on her side over the old incision where they’d opened her up in a country that didn’t care what they left you with; this felt like that and not like that because pain is simple and this had a voice. She couldn’t get air properly because breath meant the old rooms. Elena didn’t say you’re safe. She didn’t say anything fucking useless. She picked up the rifle book Gaz had sent because it was there on Claire’s bed from yesterday and said, like a quiz, firm, “What’s MOA.” Claire’s mouth opened because the brain goes where it’s told if you’re blunt enough. “Minute of angle,” she rasped. “About one inch at a hundred yards.” “What’s your favoured zero,” Elena said, bullshit confidence in her tone. “One hundred.” “Wind at six,” Elena said. “Point five mil left,” Claire breathed. “Coriolis name it,” Elena went on, probably cribbing from the diagrams. “Northern hemisphere, right drift,” Claire ground out. “Spin drift?” “Right for right-hand twist,” she muttered. “Okay,” Elena said, steady as a metronome. “Your cheek weld.” “High,” Claire said. “Closed eye—no. Both eyes if I can.” “Rifle name.” “What the fuck does that matter,” Claire snapped, and the snap helped, because anger is better than the clutching void. Elena raised a brow. “Matters if you want to shout at me instead of pass out.” “AXMC,” Claire hissed. “Thirty-eight-inch barrel. Suppressed if Price isn’t being a bitch about weight.” Elena nodded like Claire had just told her the weather. “Good,” she said. “Again. MOA.” They did it twice more, dumb and precise. The air came back like it always does if you bully it hard enough. She shook. Elena let her shake. No big speeches. They sat until Claire could swallow water without spilling and her heart stopped trying to go through bone. “He’s not Porter,” Elena said finally, and Claire’s lip curled. “I know that,” she said. “Doesn’t change what my head does.” “Doesn’t have to today,” Elena said. “You did the drill. That’s work.” Claire nodded once like she’d been given an order and completed it. “Next time,” Elena said, “we can do the door open or you can tell me to fuck off and I will. Your call.” “We’ll see,” Claire said, dead flat. She meant maybe. That’s a lot for today.

KASKI. SUNDAY 21:35 — PUTTING MEN DOWN BECAUSE HE’S PISSED OFF.

In the valley, everything went noisy and then neat because Simon was in the mood to finish things. The watch post wasn’t clever and the men weren’t either. They hit the first building and he dropped three in one hard run—two clean centre heads through dirty glass, one low pelvis because the idiot ducked at the wrong second—and didn’t even enjoy it because he was annoyed Wickham was trying to stab-fight a big bastard with a kukri like he was in a film. “Leave it,” Simon barked, moved, and put a round over the Nepali’s ear that made him flinch just long enough for Gaz to take his knee and Soap to take his wrist. Wickham would have got his throat kissed open if Simon hadn’t been there; he gave the boy one dead look and the kid looked away because even Wickham can read do that again and I’ll make you write letters you don’t want to write.

They cleared to the back. Kyle cut right, Simon left, and then there it was: floor that didn’t sit right, boards with a different age. Noises underfoot, soft and human. Gaz turned to cover the hall without having to be told; Simon took the hatch. Down the ladder, rifle first, senses up. He’d been prepared for guns. He wasn’t prepared for a body that shouldn’t have been there. She was young—too young. No clothes. Zip-ties cutting skin, ankles and wrists white around the plastic. Blue at fingers and toes, hypothermic. Bruises in shapes that tell you exactly how a room has gone, face puffy, lip split, dried blood in the nose, eyes too big and seeing everything. She screamed as soon as he came into the frame because men coming down ladders in rooms like this don’t bring good news. He froze just long enough to swallow his first reaction—to put a bullet into every set of lungs upstairs twice—and then he moved like a medic. Rifle safe, to the side, not pointed at her because he understands basic things. Hands open, voice low. “I’m not here to hurt you. I’m here to get you out. Look at me. Out.” She had English the way people pick it up from guards and TV. Enough to get the meaning. He didn’t ask her name. He cut the ties clean with his blade and didn’t touch more than he had to. Jacket off, shirt from Gaz’s second layer out of the back pocket and down without looking hard. He turned his head while she got it over her arms because dignity is not a luxury; it’s a weapon. He saw enough to know what had happened for days. He didn’t let the pictures travel anywhere near a thought with Claire’s name on it because he couldn’t do that and the job. He got her standing with a grip under the armpit and a fast check on spine and ankles—no obvious fractures; the swelling on the left knee bad, not blown; the right hip angry, not dislocated. “Up,” he said. “Slow.” Gaz was there the second he cleared the ladder, hands already off weapons, medic hat on. “Hypothermia,” Gaz said, clipped. “Shock. BP’s going to be stupid. Get her on the bird.” Simon nodded once and kept her moving, his body between her and anyone who hadn’t earned the right to look.

She was sobbing on the bird in that dry way people sob when they’ve run out of water ten hours ago, breathing too fast, saying “sorry” like it’s a reflex that keeps you from being hit. “Don’t apologise,” Simon said, already hating himself for the echo; he sounded like the good men sometimes do, and he wanted to be anything but that in her head. He sat where she could see him and not be in her space and did the practical bits: blanket high, hood up, hot pack in armpit, Gaz’s gloved fingers checking cap refill and pupils and airway. He didn’t tell her she was safe because he knows that word doesn’t land for a long time. He told her what would happen, in short sentences, voice like a range rule. “We’re flying. Then a doctor. A woman if you want. Clothes. Food. No men unless you say.” She clutched the jacket closed with both hands like it might be the first thing anyone had given her in days that didn’t cost her anything. She looked at him with eyes the wrong size. They weren’t Claire’s. Of course they weren’t. But the light inside them—the raw look of a person who woke up three nights in a row and didn’t know which body they were in—hit him square and low. He kept his face like the mask and his jaw didn’t show anything and his eyes didn’t water because he doesn’t do that where it counts; he just sat and let her look and didn’t look away.

MANCHESTER SAFE FLAT. A YEAR AGO, 03:11 — NIGHTMARES AND THE RIGHT KIND OF WEAK.

He woke to the twitch because he’s trained to wake to small things. Her head was on his bicep because they’d finally worked out that he sleeps better when he knows where she is, and his face was itching where her hair had decided to colonise it. He opened his eyes and hers were already open, full of water that didn’t move. No sound. Mouth pressed too hard. Breath like a dripping tap. There were faint lines on her own cheek where she’d clawed herself in sleep, four red streaks that made him want to break furniture. “Claire,” he said, quiet. Nothing. “Claire.” Again. Her eyes focused on his like he was a target she could see now. For a second he saw something he doesn’t let himself describe—something massive and empty and honest—and then it was gone behind her normal control.

“Sorry,” she whispered, immediate, automatic, like she was late for a thing. “Don’t,” he said, and flicked two fingers at her like she’d said something thick. He started to shift, the muscle memory of get tea, come back, count her down, and she put a hand on his forearm. Not a grab. Not a yank. Just placed it there like a request. It was weak. She is not weak. Sergeant Brooks doesn’t do weak; she does hurt and stubborn and shut-up-and-lift. He stopped moving. “Stay,” she said, and it wasn’t a whine. It was an order from a person who doesn’t like orders unless they’re hers.

“Alright,” he said quietly, rolled back, and let her bring him in. She tucked her face into the crook where his neck meets shoulder, knees up, whole body trying to be smaller without giving ground. He put one hand at the back of her head lightly where she likes it, not the neck, not the throat, not a trap, and the other low on her ribs, palm wide, grip steady. He felt his own eyes burn hot for a second and told them to fuck off because he isn’t dumping that on her when she’s already holding too much. He breathed with her until her breath wasn’t a fight. No talking. He doesn’t yammer into silence like a coward; he lets silence be a place you can sit if it doesn’t bite you. She unclenched in pieces; he stayed awake until she’d fallen asleep properly, then longer because he knows what these nights do to mornings.

At breakfast they said nothing about it because they aren’t teenagers and they don’t like making normal things weird. He took the seat by her side and didn’t make a show. When she slowed at the plate he nudged the fork back into her hand once and, when that wasn’t going to happen, he took the plate away before the food became a threat. Soap wandered over with a joke for her and Simon moved half an inch to be in a position where he’d hear if her voice went the wrong kind of high; Soap saw the move and pivoted to him instead like a pro. Two privates from another unit came in hot with questions and tasks and Simon put his body between theirs and hers for the first ten seconds until she lifted her chin and said “what” in the tone that means I’m fine to handle you now. He didn’t hover. He didn’t lock her away from contact like a prick who thinks protection is ownership. He took the first piece of weight by default and handed it back to her the second she reached for it. That’s care, the way he knows how to do it: not a soft blanket; a hand on the rope when needed and gone when not. He didn’t tell the lads anything. He didn’t tell himself anything either. He just built the day around the fact that she’d slept on his chest because it made the night survivable and he’d do it again without needing to put a name on it. And when she looked at him once over the mug, eyes normal again if a little raw at the edges, he looked back the same as always like a man who’d slept and planned and had a full list for the morning, because that’s stability. That’s the work.

HEREFORD. MONDAY 05:00–10:12 — BACK ON TARMAC, STILL IN IT.

They hit base at stupid o’clock with the quinjet air still in their clothes and mountain cold stuck in the joints. Seven hours of rattling sleep and half-dreams, shoulders locked from holding guns and people. The girl went straight to Medical the second the ramp kissed concrete—no dithering, no clipboards first—because Gaz barked for a gurney like a proper bastard and the med techs knew by the tone this wasn’t one to fuck about. She flinched when doors opened, flinched when latex snapped, flinched at men moving the wrong way, and Simon made himself into a wall between her and anything that looked like a threat without turning it into theatre. He doesn’t do patter and he doesn’t do you’re safe because it’s a lie in the first hour; he does short sentences and solid presence. “You’re with us. You’ll get warm. A woman will check you. Food after. No one touches you unless you say.” She didn’t understand all of it—English sitting in her mouth like marbles—but she understood enough to stop shaking like a cornered animal. He stood where she could see him and didn’t stare because dignity isn’t optional.

Price yanked a debrief together because the machine wants paper, even when it stinks of blood. Nothing fancy, just the structure: times, rounds expended, bodies bagged, intel grabbed, problems for later. Simon half-listened and half-watched the corridor, counting the gaps between footsteps from Medical like a lunatic. He could still smell snow in his hair and cordite under his nails. Wickham sat there sniffling and trying not to; Soap picked up half his points when he drifted. Gaz handled the rest like he always does. Price signed the forms with that “fuck off” wrist action he’s perfected, and dismissed them before some up-chain parasite could wander in and ask human questions for a report none of them will read.

On his way out Simon cut back to Medical like he couldn’t help it. She was in observation, blanket up to the jaw, hands wrapped around the disposable cup like it was a weapon that had switched sides. Her hair was washed; someone had done the thing of braiding it back quick and tight to keep it out of eyes and cannulas. A nurse clocked him and nodded him in. He didn’t step over the line; he stood where the open door made a frame. “Name?” he asked the nurse. “Lola,” the nurse said. “From Honduras.” His stomach did that little lurch it does when a place you love for its food and music turns up in a file like a crime scene. Lola saw him, blinked hard, then sat up too fast because gratitude is a reflex that hurts to watch. “I will pray for my angels to guard you,” she said in a voice like it’s been used up in another room. She took the beads from her wrist—cheap plastic, saint figure scuffed to hell—and offered them through the air. Simon doesn’t do religion. He does rules. But he took them because refusing hits like a slap. “You survived,” he told her, even and flat. “That’s the bit you did. The rest is admin.” He tucked the beads into his pocket, nodded once, and got out before she turned into something in his head he can’t carry and still do tomorrow.

He showered hard enough to scrub the flight off, texted Amina while still half-soaked—Back in the country. Visiting later.—and then blacked out like a man who’s hit a wall he’s not in charge of. Dreamed in stupid loops: Claire’s mouth saying something he couldn’t hear over rotor wash, the girl’s eyes too big, Wickham’s idiot grin when he lived through a mistake. He managed four hours because his body’s still in love with survival. Woke at ten with his jaw cemented from clenching and a taste like pennies. Thought about doing admin to satisfy the idiot part of him that thinks paperwork pays off a debt; Price got in the way of that by turning up with that don’t argue face. “Stand down,” he said. “Leave’s accrual. Take it. And get out my sight before I remember I’m meant to be hard.” Simon didn’t pretend to argue. He packed a clean bag on autopilot, grabbed his keys, and drove the only direction that meant anything.

ST. THOMAS. MONDAY 10:49 — BRIEFING BY THE RIGHT NURSE.

Amina was at the desk with her calm mouth and her eyes that tell you whether you can push a rule. She didn’t give him a time limit today; she gave him that slight tilt of the head that means go on, I’m not looking at the clock. He thanked her in his way—cheers barely audible—and went down the corridor in the same pace he takes into buildings when he’s trying not to turn the air into a fight. Elena intercepted him because she has the sense of timing of a good sergeant. “You look like you’ve slept on a helicopter floor,” she said, almost smiling. “I’ve had worse,” he said. “How’s she?” Elena gave him a full sitrep without the fluff: communal meals increased; garden laps without an argument; food intake improving—“enough to matter,” her phrase; sleep still patchy but trending; no new self-injury; no ward scuffles; a panic event yesterday in the first therapy meet. She didn’t dodge it or go coy. “We reviewed the footage,” Elena said. “You’ll ask. Nothing happened to her in that room. Trigger-language, and her body did what it does. He backed off right. We got her out quick. Today she’s low and quiet. That’s expected.” Simon nodded once, jaw ticking. “Anything I can do about it?” “Be decent to her,” Elena said, which would have earned anyone else a stare. From her it landed like an order he was already following. He gave her a short grunt that meant right, and moved.

ST. THOMAS. MONDAY 10:55–13:21 — FOUR DAYS, ONE ROOM, THE PART HE CARES ABOUT.

She was upright, back to headboard, knees up, book in hand, blanket shoved down around her hips like she’d argued with it and won. The kind of posture that says I’m here because I choose to be, not because you told me. The book was one from his bag—he recognised the crease on the spine he’d made absent-mindedly in the car. She looked up, jaw unlocking like she’d been about to say something and lost the word halfway, eyes doing that fast flick across his face she does after a gap to check for new damage. He breathed because his body had been holding that stupid breath since the mountain. It came out rough. She dropped the book and covers like they were scrap and moved—for once not playing cool—and he had the distance done already because he wasn’t going to make her cross it alone.

He took her in like he’d been designed for the job—arms solid around lower back and scapulae, hand high at the back of her head, mouth into her hair, chest meeting hers like plates fitting. Her hair scratched his jaw because he hadn’t shaved and she only hummed against his throat like that texture was something she wanted. Four days and a valley fell out of his shoulders at once and he hated that and liked it and didn’t talk about either. She smelt like hospital soap and her. He didn’t say missed you because he doesn’t weaponise the obvious; he held her exactly as long as she held him and then a bit longer just to annoy her spine into relaxing.

They peeled apart without moving far. She started talking immediately—Claire never opens small once she’s decided to speak—questions running in a list: “Price? Gaz? Johnny? Wickham? The valley? The shots?” He watched her mouth move and thought, for the hundredth time, this is real, you idiot. “Fine,” he said. “All fine. Long. Boring in the way that makes you bleed a bit.” He sat, she sat, their knees touching through the blanket like they hadn’t added the space back in properly yet. He gave her the run: Wickham being a clown around a blade; Gaz doing medic maths; Soap swearing at a stove; Price pretending he isn’t fifty. He didn’t overplay it. She nodded like a metronome, listening like she was in a briefing again because this is the only church she ever liked. “You hurt?” she asked, voice flat and eyes pointed. He snorted. “No.” She stared. “No new holes,” he amended. She kept staring, boring through his shirt with rancid patience, so he huffed and flicked up the hem to sternum height. All the old mess there: puckers, carved lines, old burn. Nothing fresh. “Just wanted to see my abs, did you,” he muttered, deadpan. She flipped him off without taking her eyes off the scar map, mouth doing an unfair little curl when she breathed out and decided his body hadn’t taken a new invoice.

“What’s the book?” he asked, dropping the shirt and nudging her knee with his. “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” she said. “I hate everyone in it and can’t stop reading.” “Sounds like your type,” he said. “Go on.” She gave him the half-arsed summary only she can get away with—“girl gets shafted by men and God and bad decisions, then killed for finally making a good one”—and he listened like it was relevant because what she chooses to open her mouth for is always relevant. He let that run itself out, then slid the inspection in like a blade under a door. “Elena said you met a therapist.” Neck-scratch. Tiny tell. “He say anything stupid?” She slid the eyes away. “No.” He gave her a long second to be done lying. She went tighter. “Claire.” He only uses the name like that when he’s not moving off a point. “No,” she said again, crisp. He nodded like he believed it and changed the subject by a hair and let the room breathe. A minute later, unforced—because that’s the only way that works with her—she spoke. “Last therapist I saw was army,” she said to the far wall. “Germany. After a job that went wrong. Whole thing was bad. He was… involved with the bullshit my old unit did. Pranks. Locker room shite. I asked for transfer. Didn’t go back.” He didn’t twitch. He didn’t ask names. He didn’t say I’ll kill him. He stored it in the place where plans grow and left it alone because she’d actually given him something without bleeding for it and you don’t pay that back by demanding more.

They spent an hour being idiots because that’s where they live best: taking the piss about his hair (“state of it,” she muttered, fingers already in it), about her reading speed (“show-off”), about Gaz’s book (“nerd crack”), about Wickham’s sneeze (“I could hear it from Nepal,” she said, and he let out that small bastard of a laugh that lives under his armour). This is why they work. Best mates first. The rest sits on that like kit on a good plate carrier.

When it was time to move—nurses doing the quiet tidy in the corridor that means we’ll be in soon—she reached for him again and he let her. “Didn’t shave,” he warned, stupid, because he was four days behind life and half an hour ahead of himself. “Don’t care,” she said, already on her toes, already in his space. The kiss was deep enough to make his brain forget names and clean enough to honour the room. Not their usual wrecking—no teeth, no fight—just a steady pressure that said I’m still here, you thick bastard. His stubble rasped her cheek and she, insane woman, hummed at the scrape like she’d missed it. Her hand went to the back of his head like she always does when she’s not pretending to be careful and threaded his hair because he grows it for this and would never admit that in public. He set two fingers behind her ear, the safe patch, and felt the stupid spark jump his fingers like he’s a teenager. He stopped before it got greedy, because he knows how to keep limits even when he wants to set the building on fire, and he finished it with that nose-press kiss they’ve made a stupid habit of—bridge to bridge, quick, precise. She let him go like someone who expects returns. He walked out wanting to explode something large and uninsured.

HACKNEY. MONDAY 22:14 — AN UNWELCOME SUIT OUTSIDE HER DOOR.

He did the loop he always does after—stopped home to dump kit, swap bags, check weapons into the locker, wash the smell of hospital off his hands that wasn’t from her, grab the spare set of her keys on his peg because he’s the bastard that keeps her flat from turning into a science experiment while she’s gone. Drove to her building with the kind of cold focus that means no one touch me or I’ll bark. The hall stank of dust and someone’s dinner. He came off the stairs onto her floor and there he was: suit, wrong hour, wrong look, knocking her door like it would apologise for not opening. Mid-forties maybe, tie loose, eyes tired but not drunk. Simon’s hackles went up without a vote. He closed distance with that heaviness that makes corridors tilt.

“Who are you,” he asked instead of hello. The bloke took one look at him—wall of muscle, shit temper, clothes that refuse to be friendly—and swallowed before putting a professional smile back on like armour. “Good evening. I’m looking for Ms. Marsh-Brooks. Does she live here?” The air went thin for a second at the double-barrelled name. Simon didn’t answer the question; he asked his own. “What do you want with her.” The man tried to stand his ground. “May I ask your relationship to Ms. Marsh-Brooks? I’m her client’s solicitor and this is a private matter.” “Boyfriend,” Simon said without thinking, because it’s the fastest way to shut down tone and access and because he didn’t have the patience to workshop it’s complicated in a hallway. The man blinked, recalibrated. “I’ve been trying to reach her for weeks. It’s quite urgent. I wonder if there’s any way I can speak to her. I can leave information with you if—”

“You can say it to me,” Simon said, flat. “I’ll pass it.”

The man frowned, hesitated, then made the call a lot of suits make when faced with a man who looks like he can erase you. He went simple. “My client is Maeve Winsgrove,” he said, giving the name like it should land. Nothing in Simon’s head moved at it. “She’s seeking Ms. Marsh-Brooks’ participation as a witness in an action against a Mr. Grant McCormack. We’ve attempted contact… six months ago, and again more recently. It’s of extreme importance. If you could ask Ms. Marsh-Brooks to call me—” He handed over a card with a firm thumb and the kind of writing that gets bills paid. Simon looked at the card, read the names again, watched them fail to anchor to anything he recognised. Grant had a shape in his mouth he didn’t like, a weight, a stink of pastor and bad furniture, but he didn’t have the file yet. Maeve was clean. Six months ago landed like a boot. Six months is exactly when she started to slide, when his head went from she’s tired to she’s using and he still hates himself for not clocking it a week earlier. His chest went tight enough to make his next breath feel expensive.

“She’s not here,” he said, neutral. He didn’t say clinic. He doesn’t give other people access to her head without a signed order and three guards. “I’ll get her the message.” The suit nodded, professionally irritated, and had the sense not to press. “Thank you. Truly.” He cleared his throat. “Please tell her I’m sorry to intrude.” “Don’t come back late,” Simon said, not bothering to pretend it was a joke. The bloke left with his phone already up like a shield. Simon watched him into the lift and didn’t move until the doors shut.

The corridor went quiet again in that way city buildings do after hours—tv muffled behind walls, someone coughing, the hum of bad wiring. Simon looked at her door. Keys were in his pocket like always. He went in, did the routine because the routine keeps his hands off violence: aired the place, checked windows locked after, ran the tap, opened the fridge (still sparse, he’d fix it), picked up the two pieces of post that weren’t shit and put them on the table, killed a spider by habit then felt stupid and put it out the window instead. He stood in the centre of her living room and tried the names on in his head again: Maeve Winsgrove. Grant McCormack. Six months. Case. Witness. Claire never told him any of that. Doesn’t have to. Doesn’t owe him every ghost and every scrap of paper. Still—it slotted ugly into a chronology he already hated: six months ago is when she started using hard enough for him to feel it on her breath in the morning and pretend for three hours he hadn’t. He put the card down next to the kettle so he couldn’t ignore it even if he wanted to.

He looked at the beads in his pocket—the little saint with the paint scraped off—and felt the stupid, ancient impulse to put them on a nail by the door like some old woman. He didn’t. He put them by her spare keys instead and stared at both for a long second until the room stopped feeling like it was trying to tell him something in a language he couldn’t be arsed to learn at midnight. Then he locked up, double-checked the deadbolt, and walked back down the stairs with his jaw set in that way that breaks teeth if you keep it long enough, running the routes in his head he’d need to run tomorrow: the clinic, Price’s office, the number on the card, the questions he wasn’t going to ask Claire until she told him to. He hit the street and the cold bit and he didn’t feel it, because the only thing he could feel was the shape of a name he hated and the memory of a girl on a gurney telling him she’d pray for his angels like he had any, and the fact that when Claire had kissed him, his heart had behaved like a fucking idiot. He got in the car, started the engine, and sat there looking at nothing while the heater coughed. Then he put it in gear and moved, because sitting still has never once fixed a single thing in his life.

HEREFORD. TUESDAY 13:10 — THE INVITE HE DOESN’T WANT.

Soap, loud as ever on a Tuesday nobody asked for, banged the group chat like a drum: bar in midtown, drinks on him, bring your ugly faces, he’s unveiling Bianca like a magician with a rabbit and a death wish. Simon looked at the phone, looked at the wall, considered ignoring it on principle. Bars don’t sit right in his bones—too many mouths moving without thinking, too much handsiness, too much old whiskey breath that makes his jaw clench with memories he didn’t choose. He was halfway to deleting the message and filing Johnny under “needs a handler” when Gaz rang with that calm tone that cuts through his worst habits. “It’ll be better than staring at your ceiling thinking about her,” Kyle said. “Come out, have one, piss off early if it stinks. We’ll keep the idiots off you.” Simon made a noise that could’ve been a laugh if you were generous and said he’d think about it, which Gaz—cheeky bastard—took as a yes because he knows the man too well. Simon didn’t drink to blackout and didn’t need a crowd to tell him he was alive. The last decent “party” he’d tolerated had been on base with Claire making chaos as a sport, vodka in hand, mouth too quick, him collecting her with a palm behind the ear when she started offering opinions the wrong colonel didn’t deserve to hear. The night the major thought a slap to her arse was a thing he was owed because rank makes some men thick—Simon remembered very little between the sound and the taste of blood; remembered the major on the floor spitting three broken teeth and Simon’s boot on his chest; remembered Claire looking at him with that flash of amusement that said you’re a thug and I like thugs who know where to aim. Next day the major came to puff up, all jaw, and she killed him in the corridor with words instead of hands: took him apart at normal volume, made him understand he’d live easier if he kept his limbs to himself, 1.74 metres of menace with a badge. Simon had stood twenty feet away and thought hot, which is not noble, and then been forced by biology and boredom to think about it for weeks until it turned into something he couldn’t laugh off.

FLASHBACK — HEREFORD BARRACKS. ONE YEAR, SEVEN MONTHS AGO. “NOTHING SOFT ABOUT IT.”

They weren’t together then; they were a problem pretending to be a friendship that ate all their spare hours. Nights on patrol with rifles across their laps and low conversation like a radio they didn’t want to shut off. Sparring that wasn’t polite—no sandbag punches; real work, bruises both were weirdly proud of. Private range sessions where he’d tune her breathing and she’d correct his wind calls with a look that said don’t be thick, Simon. Sleeping in each other’s flats on the nights sleep didn’t come, not touching, then touching by accident and pretending they didn’t turn toward heat like everyone else. It all got pressurised in that slow way, a thing building under the floorboards. He’d allow exactly three facts when asked by no one: she was a hot woman, no point lying—hips, mouth, a snarl that made him behave worse; she was clever enough to make him enjoy being wrong; and she was the only bastard on earth who could make him laugh hard enough that he pretended to cough to stop. Then one day Claire became a name he couldn’t stare at too long without thinking stupid things, and he didn’t stop staring anyway, and neither did she. Fine. New problem. Solve it.

England “won the World Cup” on base that night because two lads with a projector said so and the mess bought it. Soap and Gaz were on the hunt for med staff with patience and poor judgement; Price was drinking decent beer and telling lies about fishing. Simon had a shot of vodka out of politeness; Claire did the same and made a face like she’d lick a battery before doing it again. Light night. She had a lad from another unit folded over himself laughing, one of those belly laugh numbers, and Simon was watching like he always does when the room’s too loud—periphery patrol, exit checks, her position mapped. She felt it and looked up; the look held for seconds, nothing poetic, just a plain lock-on you can feel in your teeth. Then someone stumbled, tequila went flying, and her white shirt copped the lot, clinging in ways that made him return to looking at the exit because he isn’t an idiot. He took his jacket off without thinking and gave it to her like it was a task. She said she’d swap it out and be right back. He said he’d walk, because corridors at parties make him itch, and they moved.

He couldn’t tell you every door they passed. He could tell you the sound his boots made on the lino, how her hair swung between shoulder blades as if it was aiming at him, and the feeling of something decisive finally snapping out of stalemate. Her room, soft light, that tiny place she kept too tidy. She turned with the jacket half off her shoulder, mouth about to say something reasonable. He reached the same time she did and that was it. No romance speech. No dithering. His hands took her by the collar and pulled her up into him; she went for his hair because she’s a menace, tugged hard enough to make the worst noise leave him; she bit the corner of his mouth and he nearly swore and did anyway. She pushed him backwards because she’s stubborn where it matters, sat him down with a knee in the mattress, climbed into his lap like gravity had rules she’d written. He didn’t tear her shirt; he isn’t seventeen; he lifted it when she lifted his, clean and quick and fair. They weren’t delicate and they weren’t cruel; they were fully awake and not pretending they wanted less. She moved against him slow at first, pressure and heat, finding the line she liked; he forgot standing orders and put his mouth where it mattered along the clean path of her stomach because she was humming under his hands and he wanted to hear it properly; she shut him up with a palm and a laugh because she was dangerously close to breaking her own noise discipline and the walls in barracks are shite.

When he slid into her it wasn’t a sprint; it wasn’t polite either. He got the dull logistics out of the way so fast he’d grabbed the wrong size and made a note to punch himself in the face later, then didn’t care. She took top because she’d decided to and he didn’t argue because he isn’t suicidal. The bedframe had ideas about involving the whole corridor; she bit his tags and he took her waist in both hands, set a pace that made both of them swear like mechanics. Nothing was gentle; nothing was mean. It was two people who’d been failing to mind themselves for months finally closing distance like a door. He still swears he came twice because after the first he was done—should’ve been done—and then she leaned forward, hair everywhere, forehead damp, mouth open on his name like it wasn’t a weapon, and he saw it and it did him in again like an idiot. When it ended she didn’t hop off his lap like she’d finished a chore; she stayed where she was, breathing, watching him with that dangerous blank face she gets when she’s thinking hard. He put his palm over the back of her neck, not a trap, just an anchor, and felt the exact second the pressure inside his head stopped hurting and started helping. He didn’t tell her anything. He put his mouth to her shoulder and bit down light because he’s a bastard and because he wanted the mark on her where only he would see it for a while.

ST. THOMAS. WEDNESDAY 08:35 — BREAKFAST VISIT, LIGHT ON THE TABLE.

He went early because mornings are when her head’s most liable to try something. She had bread, cheese, and orange juice like a civil human being and he treated it like a medal because three items is a parade compared to last week. She tore bites as if testing the machinery and shoved a corner at him like she’d forgotten he’d eaten three times in the last twenty-four. “No,” he said, automatic. “Eat your own.” She rolled her eyes and did. She talked about Tess again, this time less murderous, found a new thing to hate in a man called Angel (he suggested the book was on the nose; she suggested he fight a hedge). She told him about a dream that was half-stupid, half-clawing, and he listened without pretending he had a dream dictionary in his pocket. “Meeting a new shrink today,” she added, offhand. “Woman.” He nodded once, stored it. He didn’t say anything about the suit at her door because he isn’t going to drag the past into the room when she’s sitting upright and talking about book sluts and breakfast. Amina gave them the nod for a short walk; Elena signed off with her usual “no heroics” look at him that he returned without promising anything.

They did the garden slow, just the two of them, grass wet enough to make ankles jump. She chucked the slippers, toes in the lawn, and closed her eyes for three seconds like she was trying to remember what ground feels like when it isn’t trying to tilt. He said nothing because the right silence is better than a hundred wrong words. “Soap’s doing a party,” he said eventually, as if telling her the time. “Tuesday. Pub. He’s showcasing Bianca.” She sniffed a laugh. “Of course he is. You going?” “Thinking about it.” Which, from him, meant he’d go because Gaz would badger him and because sitting in the flat without her scrapes the inside of his skull. She looked at him, mouth bending mean in a fond way. “It’s fine. Go. You’re allowed to have fun as long as you don’t have too much of it or I’ll get jealous of Johnny. Try not to get anyone pregnant.” He snorted. “I’ll bring home a pram full of bastards,” he said. “We can keep it by the kettle.” “Very funny,” she deadpanned. “Bianca’s pretty?” “If she isn’t, Johnny’s lying to himself.” “He’s done worse.” They walked the length of a bed and back. Her shoulder knocked his arm once; he let it happen, didn’t overcompensate, kept both hands out where she could see them like always.

At the door, that little bubble you get before corridors eat you, she stepped into him again because she has no time for play-acting these days. He set a hand to her waist and the other to that safe patch behind her ear, curved her in, kissed her slow because he could. Her mouth opened on a tiny sound she hates making; he took it easy, tongue against hers in that steady rhythm that tells a body to stand down, no rush, nobody listening, nobody taking anything we don’t give. His stubble rasped her cheek; she hummed approval into his throat and he felt the stupid livewire run down his back like he’d been plugged into something better than the grid. She pulled back long enough to giggle, tried to smother it, failed, and he punished her for it by kissing her again until she forgot she’d made a noise. Teenagers, the pair of them, except with better scars and better rules.

He left her with a hand to the doorframe and a promise he didn’t say out loud because it’s not a promise if you’re doing it anyway. He nodded to Elena like a man who’d been allowed to borrow something valuable and returned it in one piece, and Elena gave him the softest ghost of a smile because she likes a job that tries to do itself without making her do all the work. He put his hands in his jacket pockets and found the beads again, the little saint scraped to plastic bone, and had the offensive thought that if he starts collecting relics he’ll have to start praying. He swore at himself under his breath and kept walking, because the only ritual that’s ever worked for him is showing the fuck up.

MANCHESTER. TUESDAY 20:12 — A PINT, A TRIPWIRE, A PAST HE HATES.

He turned up in what he owns: black tee, black jeans, black boots, no mask because this is supposed to be civil. Pub’s got sticky floors, wood that’s been wiped a thousand times and never clean, and a noise level that says half these people should’ve been put to bed two drinks ago. Gaz clocked him first, stood with that easy grin and a clap to the shoulder that didn’t try to own him. Price rose half a foot from the corner table, lifted his pint like a signal lamp, and Simon drifted that way because those two are the only reason he’d step into a room like this on purpose.

Soap had the corner sewn up with a woman tucked in close—Bianca—curvy, red hair, green eyes, smile that lands soft instead of hungry. She’s got the patient look of someone who teaches human beings to hold violins without killing the sound. “Bianca,” Soap said, proud as a dog with a new ball, “this is Ghost, or Simon if you’re feelin’ domestic.” She laughed; it warmed the air. “Simon. I’ve heard stories.” “I’ve heard none about you,” he said, flat as ever. “Which is why Soap’s still got kneecaps.” She giggled for Johnny and Johnny basked like an idiot because he’s in love and thinks that’s his secret.

They offered him drinks the way normal men do because they’ve learned not to shove a glass in his hand. He let Price talk him into a beer because it was easier than explaining why he doesn’t like whiskey breath near his face. Gaz wound Bianca up with soft questions and harder jokes. “How many detentions did you hand out this week?” “None,” she said. “I bribe them with biscuits.” “She bribed me with biscuits,” Soap announced. “Works on all ages.” They took the piss out of Johnny—what did he have to do to land someone with a proper job and a proper smile—and Bianca gave as good as she got, saying, “He listened,” and everyone at the table pretended not to be surprised.

Half a pint in he felt his shoulders drop a fraction. Price slid his beer over once like a man who knows how to pace you without saying it. When Bianca asked the human moment—wives, girlfriends, anybody at home—he didn’t know where to file Claire in this room. He’ll call her girlfriend to strangers if it gets him through a door or keeps some man from getting clever, but saying it at this table with her absent felt wrong, like naming a thing without the person who owns it. He hesitated—half-second—but it might as well have been a shout for how rare it is on him. Gaz caught it and stepped in smooth. “Simon’s Claire’s,” he told Bianca, sipping. “And Claire’s Simon’s. Contract signed. Bad terms for anyone interfering.” Bianca lit. “I’ve heard about Clarisse from Johnny,” she said. “I’d love to meet her someday.” “You’ll do it when she’s bored of hating me,” Simon said, and that was the end of it at the table, easy.

They grew into the party like old men pretending they were young—Price glued to the corner texting and nursing a proper pint; Soap and Bianca vanishing with the subtlety of a brass band; Gaz dragging Simon to the counter to fetch another round. It got busy: people kissing in doorways, lads yelling lyrics that weren’t right, someone crying in the toilets over a man who doesn’t know she exists. Music up just past comfortable, bass in the wood. Simon’s ears started that little hum they get when his head decides a room’s not worth it. Gaz didn’t clock it, bounced once, “Back in a second, mate—piss,” and left him with the bar and the stink and his breath going the wrong length.

She wobbled into the empty space by his elbow like a script had put her there. Blonde, red dress, nails that could cut a man, ordering martinis like she was at a better bar. She leaned into his shoulder line and put her mouth near his ear. “Evening,” she purred. “You look hot and bothered in that outfit.” He didn’t turn. “Fuck off,” he said, polite as he gets. His jaw set. He watched the taps like they were information. She chuckled, took her time, and then did the one thing you don’t do to a man who hates being touched by strangers: she scraped manicured fingers along the base of his back over the tee, slow, like she was reading him in braille. “I know a soldier boy when I see one,” she whispered, lips near his neck.

The phrase hit like a steel toe. “Soldier boy.” His chest pulled tight. The bottom fell out of his lungs in that old, ugly way. He moved back with a jerk, turned, wasn’t gentle about pushing her hand away. The room narrowed. The music walked backwards down a tunnel. He cleared the doorway at the rear without a plan; found the service corridor that smelled of bleach, sweat, bin bags, stale beer; got his hands on the wall like he might fall if he didn’t. In for four. Out for four. Count the drips off the copper pipe, count the screws in the fire extinguisher bracket, name five things he could see that weren’t a face. He rubbed his hands hard over his face like sandpaper might get the memories out. He got his breathing back in miserable inches. Price found him like he always does—man can find his people in a fog without breaking stride—stopped, read the air, didn’t say the wrong thing. “Alright,” Price said, soft enough to pass for rough. Simon nodded once, a crack of his head that meant nearly. Price planted himself in the doorway, a big back blocking the world, and did the dumb grounding shit he learned for other people and only uses with two: “Count.” Simon didn’t argue. “Pipe, extinguisher, red sign, mop, bin. Smell’s bleach. Sound is shit.” “Aye,” Price said. “Come up when you’re ready.” Simon wanted to punch brick just to feel something honest. He didn’t. He rolled his shoulders until the fight came back, and then he stood. “Woman at the bar,” he muttered. “Hands.” Price’s mouth flattened. He didn’t say copy that. He didn’t say she’s drunk. He said, “You want me to move her.” “Already did,” Simon said. “Let’s get the pints for the children and go sit in the corner like geriatrics.” Price grunted approval. They went back out. He sat with his back to a wall he trusted and let his mates be idiots around him until the noise turned back into noise and not a needle.

FLASHBACK — “SOLDIER BOY.” AGE NINETEEN. A JOB HE SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN ON.

He was nineteen, two years in, running on rage and the need to be more than a punchline with a uniform. Someone senior fucked up an assignment and put him on a job that needed men with patience and scars, not boys that think bruises prove things. Middle East. River like a vein through rock. Orders said hold back, cover, learn; his temper said step in, show them you’re not made of paper. He stepped into a mess and got exactly what a mess gives. Round punched his shoulder like a brick; he went into the water on shock. Cold and stink and the world snapping white. He tried to get the rifle and a boot found his cheekbone and pressed like it wanted through bone. He went out clean.

Woke in a place with stone for walls and bad air. Cave, bunker, room-that-wasn’t-a-room. Ten men with long guns and the kind of eyes you get when life’s been all blood for too long. He was stripped to skin, tied to a chair that’d been left in rain and got mean about it—rust bites in the back of his thighs, metal tacky. He’s done capture training since. Knows what to do. Back then he knew fuck-all and his mouth got ahead of him. He spat at boots, snarled in English he knew they half-understood, got back what he earned: laughter, a cuff, a bottle broken in threat near his feet. Voices in languages he caught shards of—Farsi, Arabic, something else—moving fast, not for him. Hands pushed his face down into a trough of filthy water cut with something caustic; eyes went fire; nose took liquid he didn’t invite; body bucked and a hand pressed between his shoulder blades, another on the back of his head, efficient. Up, air; down again. Again. Again. He swallowed wrong and lungs got sharp. He’s not proud of it—he begged. “Don’t,” in stupid English. “Please.” That earned him the worst kind of laugh.

One came in close, the one with some English and bad teeth, breath like rot. “Soldier boy,” the man said, pleased with his phrase. “You talk, yes? We don’t have to make you girl.” And it should have been an empty line, a shit attempt at getting fear on their terms, but the others laughed and someone’s hand slid down his spine in a way that made him freeze like a stupid animal. Another cracked his thigh with a crowbar—metal and meat ringing together—casual, a hurry up for drama. He’d like to say he stayed quiet in noble silence. He didn’t. He begged. “Don’t do that. Don’t. Not that. I’ll—fuck—don’t.” He’d like to say he fought with words that landed. He didn’t. He was nineteen, naked, tied, choking, and every time a hand smacked his arse for a laugh or got suggestive he cried harder because pain is one thing and this was another room. The English-speaker leaned in and said in that greasy tone, “Be a man. Or we make you girl.” He spat water and bile and lost the last of his pride somewhere on the floor between his feet. Time turned to noise. Hours, he found out later. A patrol came through and something went right for once; he was dragged back into light by men who told too many jokes to cover the stink. He kept the towel over his lap longer than he needed to because shame makes a man stupid. They didn’t rape him. He says it that way to his own skull when it tries to make this into worse. They didn’t rape him. They could have. They tried to make next time easy. It sits like a splinter anyway, and you don’t yank splinters with teeth—just keep working around it until it stops catching.

He carries that night the way he carries other scars—doesn’t nurse it, doesn’t feed it, doesn’t deny it exists. It taught him to hate certain jokes. It taught him to move like a trap down corridors. It taught him to shove hands away before they settle. And when Claire puts her palm on his chest that specific way that says stay and move at once, he knows why it sits like relief. Because the choice is the whole thing.

WHAT HE KNOWS ABOUT CLAIRE AND HOW HE KNOWS IT.

He never asked. He never once said who and when because he’s not a ghoul and because he can see that door without needing to pry it open. He knows because she is not as hidden as she thinks she is—at least not in front of him. Everyone else gets brass and knives. He gets the parts that tell the truth by accident. Before they were together he clocked the pattern: the way she left a room when banter bent to certain angles. Dirty story told loud by a boy who’s never touched a woman properly—she didn’t blush, she just went blank, eyes dead, mouth thin, tuned out until it passed and then came back like nothing. Hands on shoulders during a good job? Fine—plate carrier points only, never neck. Hug from behind? She’d step out and turn it into a side-shift. Jokes about “choking her” or “she likes it rough?” You’d get nothing but a stare that could carve meat and then silence so heavy lads stopped laughing without knowing why.

On missions that brushed sex crimes, she was the best and the worst of them. Best because she went cold as a surgeon and did the angles without flinch; worst because afterward she shook when nobody was looking. He saw her jaw lock when the brief hit certain words. He saw her lose focus for exactly one second when a perp’s hands on a body were described too well. He filed everything and never asked for detail because he could read the file.

The day they nearly broke her with paperwork he almost put his fist through a television. They were in the big room; Price was running panels; higher command came in reeking of fresh shave and old coward. “Brooks,” the major said, like he knew her. “We need you to familiarise yourself with footage from the ring you’ll be covering. Intel analysts are out this month; quick review required.” Brow up on Price, a question. “She doesn’t need the material for a still target list,” Price said. “Just the faces. Send stills.” “Video’s faster,” the major said, easy smile. “Educational.” She nodded because she’s a soldier and followed orders. Simon’s head ticked wrong. Intel out for the month and they ask her to watch raw? Alone? He left the brief with a “back in five” that meant try me and went to find her.

Media room. Door ajar. Fluorescent light doing that hum that makes teeth itch. She sat in the chair, back straight, face white. On the monitor: a man’s hands where they shouldn’t be, a woman crying without sound because the sound had been scrubbed, the bastard’s face turning to camera like he wanted to be remembered. Flesh noises layered under like someone’s joke. Simon saw two seconds—enough to brand it—then hit the power and sent the screen black. She didn’t move. Eyes solid on nothing. “Up,” he said, voice low. “Now.” “Orders,” she said, barely a mouth. “Lieutenant outranks your major in this room right now,” he lied like a pro. “Up.” She stood and nearly buckled; he took the weight without grabbing; he got her to the corridor, into a chair, salt and water from a machine because you do basic first. Colour didn’t come back for long minutes. She blinked and said, quiet, like she was confessing a minor sin, “Stupid to react like that.” “No,” he said. “Human. And the prick who sent you in there alone knew better.” She swallowed. “He was holding the camera so close,” she muttered, and that made his scalp crawl. He kept her the rest of the day without making a thing of it—stayed near, intercepted tasks, made sure her hands were doing simple jobs she could win. She didn’t cry then. Later she did, a bit, into his shoulder, quiet as anything, one handful of shirt twisted in her fist like she was apologising to fabric instead of him.

He took it upstairs. He went to Price first. “My sergeant was directed to watch rape on a loop for training,” he said, voice controlled enough to break teeth. “Who signed it?” Price looked up like the words were wrong. “Soap?” he asked automatically, because that’s the name that lives next to Simon’s on most dry paperwork. “Claire,” Simon said. “What?” Price blinked, then blinked again, then the line of his mouth changed shape. “What.” “She was alone in there with a ‘major’ who called it education,” Simon said. “Intel’s on leave. Convenient month to make her do their job. Felt like a kink more than a strategy.” Price stood. “Who,” he said, and there was no softness left. They found the bastard. It wasn’t a row; it was a process. Price did the officer bit—cold, official, vocabulary like a weapon. Simon did the enlisted bit—quiet threat on the margins, made sure the man knew there’d be no private rooms for his career to hide in. The material got pulled; an apology was crafted by a committee and thrown in a bin; the major got moved sideways into a job with less people. Not enough. Better than nothing. They watched Claire for a week without crowding, and she watched them back, figured out what had been done for her and what had been done because it was right, and decided not to punish them for not seeing it coming.

There were other tells. Group sparring with an outside task force—friendly until it wasn’t. She was winning as usual, small and vicious, then drew a big lad who didn’t read the room and sank a rear naked choke on her sloppy—knee heavy between her thighs, chest to back, forearm under her jaw, his other palm planted by her head as he drove her face down. She froze for half a second like someone had slashed a cable. He saw her go away. Not far—just far enough to lose a beat and the match. She tapped late, stood up too fast, mask already back down like she was running drills in shame. He crossed the mat without making it a rescue, put himself in her line of sight so she could lock back onto something that wasn’t past. “You good,” he said. “Fine,” she snapped, humiliated. He nodded, matched her breath for a count, didn’t touch. Later, in a corridor with no audience, she muttered, “Stupid,” and he said, “No,” and let it lie because letting it lie sometimes keeps the thing from growing teeth.

The nightmares went in cycles. Sometimes she fought in her sleep—elbows sharp, heel to shin, blankets a casualty. Sometimes she went dead still and whispered apologies to air: “Too much, slow down—stop—please,” and he had to eat that because waking her wrong was worse than a minute of hell. He’d say her name in the tone that gets to her first; he’d give her the back-of-ear touch she’s trained herself to associate with present. If she woke crying she pretended she wasn’t. He didn’t call her on it unless it got dangerous. He did the tea. He did the counting. He did being a wall she could anchor to without feeling fenced.

And sex—everyone thinks men are thick about it; he’s not. She made him a better bastard in bed by needing what she needed and never apologising after she learned he wouldn’t take a sulk for an answer. He went looking online once—how to be decent to a partner who’s had sexual violence—and found a pile of performative shite that made him want to set the router on fire. So he did the obvious instead: he listened, he watched, he asked once if asking wasn’t going to break her, and then he built rules you could live inside. Doggystyle’s off the table; she doesn’t like hands near the back of her neck and knees pinned apart makes her go out the window. Fine. His dick didn’t fall off. He stopped thinking about it five minutes after she said no, because wanting something she doesn’t want isn’t a hobby; it’s evidence you’re an arsehole. On her knees? Only when she wants it, only with a hand under her cheek or in her hair in the way she taught him, never with him rocking into her face because control there reads like a hand at the back of a head in the worst room in the world. He’d rather spend an hour with his mouth where she needed it—he doesn’t mind the work; he likes the results; he likes the sound she makes when she forgets to be quiet—than take five minutes being an animal and leave her braced. “Thighs lock,” he told her the first time he felt it, stopping immediately. “Muscle,” she muttered, embarrassed. He laughed, real, and stayed there with hands and tongue until the muscles forgot their orders and she remembered pleasure was a thing you’re allowed, then he checked in again. Consent’s not a fucking once-and-done form; it’s a radio check every thirty seconds. On nights when he’s wound and she isn’t, he uses his hand in the shower and doesn’t make it a tragedy, because he isn’t a child and she’s not a tool. When Soap made a dumb crack—“You two complicating even sex now?”—because Simon had said, calm, “There’s things we don’t do; I’m still learning her,” he didn’t save him a real telling-off. “Shut your mouth, Johnny,” he said, full weight. “Complication’s what you call anything you don’t understand. We do what works. You’ll know that word one day.”

The work bled into work-work. There was a job where they kicked a door and a man was on top of a woman who wasn’t moving and didn’t want to be there; Simon put the man through the sink with no sermon; Claire took a breath so quiet you’d miss it if you didn’t live on her frequency, then did the clearing drill perfectly like she hadn’t been forced to see the worst again. Later, alone, she said into his shoulder, “He kept saying she liked it,” and he said, “They all say that,” and wished he could tidy the world with bullets. Another night she woke with that line he hates, “Too much—stop,” and in the morning didn’t remember saying it. He didn’t tell her because telling her would be for him, not for her, and he’s not cashing in on those sounds.

He learned, early, the exact moment the truth landed in him in a cold, fixed way: in a lift going nowhere after she’d flinched from a joke by a visiting unit and then stood there angry at herself for flinching. He thought, plain as reading a label, She’s been raped. Not a euphemism. Not a whisper. A fact like weather. He didn’t say it to anyone. He carried it like something you fit your life around—not a secret you use to win points, not a story to make yourself a hero. He balanced his natural indifference with the care that looks like him: rules, patience, showing up, being mean to the world on her behalf and never to her for something she didn’t choose. They didn’t rape him. He repeats it because it matters. They raped her. He doesn’t know how many times or who or how long, and he’ll never know unless she puts those words in his mouth herself. He doesn’t need the details to build a life that doesn’t ignore the fact. He is her man whether or not the table has the right word for it, and being her man means he will cheerfully terrify a room so she doesn’t have to, and he will also sit on a sofa and let her press her face to his throat without saying fuck-all until her pulse stops shouting. He knows what to do with violence. He knows what to do with love. They’re not the same job. He’s good at both.

I can’t write explicit sex scenes or graphic depictions of sexual assault (especially involving minors). I can keep the same gritty, blunt tone and continue the story with intimacy kept non-explicit and the abuse/assault handled as non-graphic, trauma-focused memory.

ST. THOMAS. TUESDAY 14:18 — THE DAY AFTER HIS ARMS, THE WORK THAT STAYS.

Elena had become a background noise Claire didn’t want to turn off, which was new and alarming in the way all good things are when you’re used to bracing. She talked about her kids like they were tiny feral pets—homework wars, cereal on ceilings, one of them insisting dinosaurs were real and still living in Tesco—and she talked about books in a way that made Claire almost forget she was in a clinic with locked doors and polite rules. Elena could fill dead air without making it feel like interrogation, and Claire—who’d spent her whole life rationing words like bullets—found herself letting that chatter run over her like warm water. Not warm in a soft way. Warm like not being hunted for ten minutes.

She showered alone today. Proper alone. No Elena hovering with the careful eyes. No nurse checking the water like she might drown herself in it. Claire stood under the spray and stared at the marks on her wrists when she lifted her arms to wash her hair—thin angry lines from abstinence nights where she’d tried to carve the noise out of herself. It hit like a sour taste: shame first, then guilt, then the word weak trying to worm in like it owned her. She breathed once, hard, and told that word to fuck off. Weak is the easy label people slap on survivors because it saves them thinking. She’d been weak for maybe ten minutes in her whole life, and even then it wasn’t weakness, it was exhaustion and poison and a body screaming for relief. She rinsed the soap out, watched the water run over scars old and new, and forced her mind onto the now like she’d force a scope onto target: steady, boring, do the job.

She dressed with intention, which felt ridiculous and also like a small reclaiming. Black hoodie, black sweatpants, socks, collar, slippers. Hair down for once instead of yanked back like she was going to war. Elena’s face did that proud thing again—too pleased, like Claire had just won an Olympic medal for putting on trousers—and Claire rolled her eyes to hide the fact it made something in her chest loosen.

In the corridor Elena ran procedure again, because Elena never assumed Claire’s brain would cooperate just because yesterday had been decent.

“I’m right outside,” Elena said, tapping the wall beside the office door. “Confidentiality means I’m not in there. It does not mean you’re trapped. You want me, you call. If this one doesn’t fit, we try another. You’re not obligated to like anyone.”

Claire hummed like she heard it. She did hear it. She just didn’t trust it yet.

Focus, she told herself. Stupid job. Same as all stupid jobs. She’d done focus as a kid in a room doing push-ups in silence so she could leave Grant’s house one day. She’d done focus on ranges full of lads who looked at her like she was either a toy or a threat. She’d done focus in the field with a rifle across her knees and death as a time limit. Addiction stole that from her for a while because floating was easier than thinking and not thinking was the only mercy she had. She wasn’t letting it keep the theft.

She stepped in.

The office didn’t feel like the last one. No wet humidifier air, no too-hot closeness. It smelled like cocoa—actual hot chocolate—from a small machine in the corner. The chair was wide and forgiving, the kind you could sit in without your body bracing for punishment. The therapist stood and didn’t loom: Black woman, mid-thirties maybe, big curls piled like she’d refused to tame them for anyone, brown sweater under her coat, a smile that wasn’t a “therapist smile” and didn’t try to sell kindness. It looked like her face did that naturally.

“Claire?” she said. “I’m Rebecca. Becca’s fine. Sit how you want. Feet up, knees up, whatever. This is your space while you’re in it.”

Claire sat and, without meaning to, drew her knees up and hooked her arms around them. The chair let her.

Rebecca didn’t start with “tell me about your childhood” like some wanker with a clipboard. She started with the obvious.

“I do CBT,” Rebecca said, matter-of-fact. “Not the pop-psych ‘think happy thoughts’ crap. Real CBT. We track patterns. We look at what your brain does when it gets spooked. We build tools. If you hate a tool, we bin it. Confidentiality applies. The exceptions are the usual: if you’re going to hurt yourself, hurt someone else, or someone’s hurting you now. Otherwise, what you say stays here.”

Claire nodded, jaw tight. Rebecca clocked the hoodie and tilted her head.

“Also, solid hoodie,” Rebecca said. “That shade of black is doing you favours.”

Claire blinked, caught off-guard by the normality. “It’s… black.”

“Exactly,” Rebecca said, as if that was a philosophy. “Reliable.”

They talked like two humans for a while. Rebecca asked what music Claire could tolerate when her brain was loud; Claire said she didn’t do music much, but she could handle low instrumentals if she was cleaning a rifle, and Rebecca admitted she could only write notes if there was jazz on in the background because silence made her itch. They spoke about books. Claire mentioned Tess and Rebecca made a face like she’d bitten something bitter.

“Hardy hates women,” Rebecca said bluntly. “Or he hates what men do to women and takes it out on women on the page. Either way, it’s brutal.”

Claire snorted, the smallest crack of amusement. “Feels like a man problem.”

Rebecca lifted her hands. “The world is a man problem, half the time. Speaking of: you want to chat politics for two minutes so we’re not doing Trauma Hour?”

Claire shrugged. “Fine.”

They did, in that 2024–25 UK way where everything felt like arguing with damp walls: cost of living, people knackered, NHS stretched thin, politicians changing faces while nothing material changed, the constant talk of “hard choices” from people who’d never chosen between heating and eating. Rebecca didn’t preach. Claire didn’t confess. They just agreed most of it was bollocks and moved on.

And while Rebecca spoke, Claire’s mind slid—quietly, treacherously—toward the other rooms with other therapists.

She didn’t tell Rebecca. Not yet.

But the memories came anyway.

FLASHBACK — AGE FIVE: THE FIRST THERAPIST, THE FIRST BETRAYAL.

The first one was a man Grant was forced to take her to because adoption papers demanded a “wellbeing check.” Conservative, condescending, shirt too crisp, aftershave too sharp. Claire sat with her feet dangling off the chair, little fingers worrying the seam of her dress until it nearly tore. The office had religious pamphlets on a side table like it was a bloody extension of Grant’s house. The therapist’s voice was polite and bored, like she was a chore.

He asked if she was happy. She didn’t know what that meant. He asked if she felt safe. She didn’t know she was allowed to say no. He asked about home.

And Claire—small, confused, still believing adults could fix things if you used the right words—said, halting, careful, “Uncle Grant plays a game.”

The man’s pen paused. “A game?”

Claire nodded fast because she wanted to be good. “A game. But… it hurts. My knees hurt after. My throat hurts too. Like… big sore. And my tummy feels heavy. Auntie says I have to be quiet for him when he asks. He says God wants him to do it to test if I’m obedient enough.”

She said it in the innocent way children say horrible things—no shame yet, no understanding of crime, just pain and confusion and a genuine belief this might be a misunderstanding a grown-up could clear up. Her eyes went wide and hopeful when she finished, like she’d handed him a broken toy and waited for him to repair it.

The therapist looked at her for a long moment. Not shocked. Not alarmed. Just… inconvenienced.

He smiled the kind of smile adults use when they’ve already decided what they’re going to do. His pen moved again. He wrote something that wasn’t what she said. Something about “adjustment,” about “attention-seeking,” about “difficulty settling in,” about “overactive imagination.”

Claire watched the pen. She didn’t have the language for betrayal, but she felt the shape of it anyway. She tried again, smaller, because she thought maybe she’d explained wrong. “It really hurts.”

“Mhm,” he said, still writing. “Children often misunderstand physical sensations.”

She didn’t understand that, but she understood he wasn’t going to help. Sessions went on for a month, maybe two. Then they stopped. Grant said it was “sorted,” like paperwork was the point. Claire waited for weeks afterward, staring out windows, hoping the man would come back and tell Uncle Grant to stop playing games that made her body ache and her stomach go wrong. He never did.

The “game” didn’t stop. Claire stopped talking about it.

FLASHBACK — AGE EIGHTEEN: DR. PORTER, THE ARMY’S LIE.

Second therapist came with a uniformed stamp. Mandatory appointments. “Support.” “Resilience.” Germany base, Claire eighteen, newly enlisted, raw and furious and stupid enough to think leaving Grant’s house meant the worst was behind her. She’d survived the first unit—the jokes, the hands, the threats dressed as flirtation—and she’d told herself: now I’m stable. Now I can heal. Now I can say it out loud to someone who’ll do their job.

Dr. Porter looked gentle. He wore attentiveness like a costume: leaned forward, nodded at the right times, used the right sympathetic noises. Claire told him what she could, voice flat, eyes fixed somewhere else. She expected disgust. She expected awkward pity. She expected a referral and a pamphlet and a “sorry that happened.”

Porter asked questions that felt clinical at first—details, timeline, sensations—too many, too specific, but Claire forced herself to answer because she thought that was the point. Healing meant dragging it into daylight. That’s what everyone said.

Later, on another session, he introduced a “method.” Framed it as progress. Talked about “reconstitution” like it was a science word, like it was neutral. Claire felt wrong instantly—skin tightening, throat narrowing—but she was eighteen and already trained to obey authority figures in rooms with closed doors.

What happened after wasn’t therapy.

What happened after was assault dressed in professional language.

Claire remembered the aftermath more than the act—the way her body went cold and heavy, the way her brain sat outside itself watching her hands clutch the edge of the desk as if wood could keep her on earth. She remembered staring at a spot on the floor and thinking, stupidly, my boots are still on, because brains grab whatever detail they can when reality turns poisonous. She remembered him dressing like nothing had happened, voice calm, saying phrases that made her want to vomit: “That was a step.” “That was process.” “You did well.” Like he’d just coached her through a workout.

She walked out shaking and still had to report for duty. Had to stand straight. Had to take orders. Had to aim a rifle with hands that didn’t feel like hers. That was the worst bit: the world didn’t pause. She didn’t get a “time out” for being violated by a man who had a badge and a locked door.

Two days later she reported him. It took everything she had left. Her voice didn’t work right, but she did it anyway. Administration moved like syrup. Papers. Meetings. Quiet looks. Then the “solution”: a promotion to sergeant dangled like a treat, and a transfer packaged like a favour.

Claire understood the message even if no one said it: We’ll move you and make you important and you’ll shut up.

Porter didn’t face her in court. Porter didn’t get marched out in cuffs where she could watch. Porter vanished into the machine, protected by the same system that calls itself honour.

Claire learned a new rule: therapy rooms weren’t safe just because they had diplomas on the wall.

FLASHBACK — AGE TWENTY-ONE: THE THIRD THERAPIST, THE PILLS.

By the time she hit the German base that eventually fed her into 141, she’d stopped believing in help. She was twenty-one, career climbing, health slipping, sleep shredded. That unit—Jenkings, Prescott—men with rank and smiles and entitlement. Claire didn’t name it violence because it started with “consent” the way coercion always tries to. She blamed herself instead. Called it stupid. Called it bad judgement. Like she’d simply picked the wrong drink off a menu.

The third therapist was… normal. Late thirties. Generic kind eyes. Underpaid. Tired. He didn’t leer. He didn’t prod like Porter. He also didn’t listen deep enough to catch the rot. Two sessions in, he prescribed a pile of benzos like he was issuing a plaster for a broken leg.

“This will take the edge off,” he said. “You’ll sleep.”

She did sleep. She also moved slower. Reacted slower. Said “fine” easier. And men like Jenkings and Prescott loved that version of her because it didn’t fight as hard.

Claire stopped taking most of them. Kept the sleeping ones because unconsciousness was the only place her body didn’t remember. She never went back to the therapist. It didn’t feel worth the risk.

Therapists, to her, became a category: either useless, predatory, or lazy enough to be dangerous.

ST. THOMAS. TUESDAY 15:02 — BACK IN REBECCA’S OFFICE, BACK IN HER BODY.

Rebecca was still talking, voice steady, not pushing, and Claire realised with a jolt she’d drifted for a full minute without Rebecca snapping her fingers or getting offended. Rebecca noticed the flicker and didn’t call it out like a gotcha.

“Your brain goes places,” Rebecca said simply. “That’s normal. You want to tell me where, or do you want to keep it private today?”

Claire swallowed. “Private.”

“Fine,” Rebecca said, like it was a perfectly respectable answer. “Let’s do something boring then. How’s the new phase hitting? Not early abstinence—actual treatment. What’s your body doing? What’s your head doing? Where’s craving sitting?”

Claire thought, then answered because the question didn’t feel like a trap. “My head’s… less on fire. Still loud at stupid hours. Craving’s not a scream. It’s a buzz. Like—” she frowned, searching. “Like a fridge. I can ignore it if I’m moving. If I’m sitting, it tries it on.”

Rebecca nodded. “So we build movement that isn’t punishment. We build structure that doesn’t make you feel caged. Who’s your support network?”

Claire listed names like she was reading a roster. “Price. Soap. Gaz. Laswell, sometimes. A couple lads on base. Elena.” She paused, because saying Elena out loud in a therapist office felt bizarrely intimate, and then she said, quieter, “Simon.”

Rebecca’s brows lifted just slightly, not invasive. “Simon’s important.”

Claire’s mouth twisted. “Yeah.”

“Boyfriend?” Rebecca asked, careful.

Claire scratched her neck, eyes briefly away. “Yeah. Kinda. It’s… we were mates first. Best mates. Then it got… not that. But still that.”

Rebecca smiled, small. “Sounds like the best kind.”

Claire didn’t know how to respond to that without biting it, so she just huffed a laugh and looked at the cocoa machine like it had answers. The rest of the session stayed light by design—routine, triggers, one simple CBT exercise Rebecca called “thought labelling” that Claire rolled her eyes at but did anyway because it was basically just target identification for feelings. When it ended Claire stood and realised she hadn’t checked the clock once, which pissed her off and also felt like a win.

“Same time tomorrow?” Rebecca asked.

Claire hesitated, then surprised herself. “Yeah. Probably.”

Rebecca nodded. “Probably’s enough.”

Outside, Elena looked like she was about to clap, the annoying proud bastard. Claire shoved her shoulder gently. “Don’t.”

Elena grinned. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re thinking loud,” Claire muttered, but her mouth softened. On the walk back, she caught herself wanting to tell Simon—I did it, I didn’t freak, I liked her—and then immediately told herself she didn’t need his pride, shouldn’t want it, shouldn’t crave it like a drug.

Then she admitted the truth: she wanted it a bit. Not because she needed permission. Because it would feel good to have him look at her like that’s my girl doing the hard thing.

MANCHESTER. WEDNESDAY 05:03 — EIGHT KILOMETRES OF NOT THINKING, AND THINKING ANYWAY.

Simon ran because gyms outside base are full of blokes making porn noises over weights and he’d rather chew glass than share air with that. Streets were cold and mostly empty. The city was half-asleep, traffic thin, lights blinking lazy at junctions. He kept a steady pace, breath controlled, ankle niggling on the old injury like a dog whining for attention. Eight kilometres under his feet, no music, just shoe slap and the rhythm of his own head.

He thought about last night and hated the way one drunk woman and two words—soldier boy—had dragged him straight into a cave he keeps locked behind seven keys. He thought about Price finding him in the back corridor like it was nothing, doing the same grounding he’d watched Simon do for Claire without ever saying it out loud. He thought about Lola’s beads in his pocket drawer and her voice—my angels—and how he didn’t believe in angels but he did believe in people not dying if you could stop it. He thought about the lawyer card on his counter, Maeve Winsgrove, Grant McCormack, six months ago, and the way that date sat exactly on the start of Claire’s slide. He didn’t know if he should tell her now, while she was in rehab and raw, or wait until she was out and let her pick up her own weapons. He didn’t like either option. He hated being unable to fix it with force.

He cut through a park and saw a woman walking alone ahead, keys between fingers, shoulders tensing at the sound of heavy boots behind her. He changed route without thinking, took the wider path so she wouldn’t feel hunted by a big bastard in black. He came up on a crossing where a little kid hesitated at the kerb, looking back for a mum. Simon slowed, glanced, saw the mum waving from the other side with a panicked face. He stepped in, held his palm out at the cars like a bouncer, and nodded to the kid. “Go on,” he said. The kid bolted across. Mum mouthed thank you. Simon just ran on, because kindness is easier when you don’t talk about it.

By 06:20 he was back in his flat, sweat cooling, hands already scrubbing. He deep-cleaned because cleaning is control you can touch: fridge shelves out, bleach, the rotten smell of old takeaway banished. He found himself thinking—of all things—about chocolate. Whether he could sneak Claire milk chocolate on visits without messing her nutrition plan. Whether Elena would murder him if he tried. He considered texting Elena like an idiot, decided against it, and then his phone rang.

Gaz.

He stared at it like it had grown teeth. Kyle did not call for casual chat. Simon answered with suspicion already loaded. “What.”

Gaz’s voice came through awkward, too light. “Alright, mate. Uh… morning.”

“It’s barely morning,” Simon said, wiping a shelf. “Why are you calling.”

Gaz babbled for a second—something about being at his family’s, mum making tea, the weather—then shifted, voice tightening. “You good after last night?”

Simon paused. “Yeah.”

“You eat?”

“What.”

“You eaten. You showered. You—seen the news, any of that.”

Simon’s brow furrowed deeper. “Kyle. What the fuck are you doing.”

Gaz exhaled like he’d been caught. “Just… checking.”

“Checking like a worried wife,” Simon snapped, more confused than angry. “You rang yesterday to drag me out, stayed glued to my side like I was about to keel over, and now you’re ringing again at stupid o’clock asking if I’ve had my Weetabix. Why.”

Gaz went quiet. Then, softer: “Because I promised someone.”

Simon’s chest tightened before his brain caught up. “Who.”

Gaz hesitated. “Claire.”

Simon didn’t speak for a full beat. He gripped the fridge door hard enough it creaked. “When.”

“Months ago,” Gaz said. “Base. After you two had that scrap.”

Simon’s stomach turned because he remembered that fight with ugly clarity. Medical needed routine urine samples. Claire had asked him to piss for her—straight-faced, like it was nothing—so they wouldn’t catch her using. He’d gone cold, then vicious. She’d gone cruel back. Poison words thrown like knives because that’s what addicts do when cornered and that’s what soldiers do when scared.

Gaz kept going, careful. “She came to me after. Shaken. She thought you were done. Thought you’d really leave.”

Simon swallowed hard. “What did she say.”

“That she couldn’t—” Gaz broke off, cleared his throat. “She said she was scared you’d walk and she wouldn’t stop you. She asked me to… keep an eye on you if she ever went away. Rehab, deployment, whatever. Because she said you go quiet when you’re hurt and you don’t let anyone in. She said you’d pretend you’re fine until you do something stupid.”

Simon stared at the fridge shelf like it had written insults on itself. “She did that while she was—” He stopped, because the sentence wanted to turn into rage and he didn’t get to rage at Claire for caring about him.

Gaz’s voice softened. “Yeah. While she was drowning, she still clocked you’d drown quieter.”

Simon blew air through his nose. “You’re a nosy bastard.”

“Aye,” Gaz said. “And I meant it. Also—” He hesitated again. “I know what loneliness does when someone you love is away healing. My sister—Sienna—was in rehab for meth when I was early army. Nobody told me what to do with the waiting. I got it wrong a lot.”

Simon went still. “You never said.”

Gaz gave a small, humourless laugh. “Wasn’t exactly dinner conversation.”

“…Is she alright.”

“She’s alive,” Gaz said. “That’s the win. She’s good now. But those months? Felt like holding your breath in a room that won’t open.”

Simon’s throat worked once. He didn’t do feelings on the phone. He did facts. “So you’re checking because she asked and because you know.”

“Yeah,” Gaz said simply. “And because you’re my brother even if you’re a miserable bastard.”

Simon huffed. “I’m fine.”

Gaz didn’t let it slide. “You coping, though.”

Simon’s jaw clenched. He stared at the lawyer’s card on the counter like it was a live round. “I’m… managing. Seeing her helps. Price is—” he stopped, annoyed at himself, then forced it out. “Price has been decent.”

“Aye,” Gaz said. “He’s good at being a dad without saying dad.”

Silence sat between them for a second—comfortable, which was worse than awkward. Simon scrubbed at a spot on the shelf that was already clean.

“You miss her,” Gaz said, not a question.

Simon’s answer came rough. “Yeah.”

Gaz didn’t gloat. “Yeah.”

Simon swallowed. “Tell her you rang?”

Gaz paused. “You want me to?”

“No,” Simon said immediately, then corrected, because honesty was apparently happening today whether he liked it or not. “Not yet. I’ll tell her… when it’s right.”

“Aye,” Gaz said. “And—Simon?”

“What.”

“If you get another night like yesterday, you ring. Me or Price. Don’t go sitting in some back corridor alone trying to punch your own head quiet.”

Simon scoffed because he had to. “You talk too much.”

“Still here though,” Gaz replied, warm. “Still checking. Like a worried wife.”

Simon’s mouth twitched despite him. “Fuck off.”

“Love you too,” Gaz said, and Simon could hear the grin.

He ended the call and stood there in his quiet kitchen with bleach on his hands and a tightness in his chest that had nothing to do with running. Claire—months ago, scared, drowning—had still looked outward and thought: Someone should watch him. He won’t watch himself. He hated how seen that made him feel. He hated how much it made him want to drive straight to the clinic and press his forehead to hers and tell her, bluntly, don’t you ever think you’re alone in this again.

He didn’t do that. Not yet.

He washed his hands, dried them, and stared at the rosary beads in the drawer and the lawyer’s card on the counter like they were both the same kind of warning. Then he went back to cleaning, because the only way he knew how to love was to keep moving and keep showing up, even when his head wanted to go to war.

ST. THOMAS. WEDNESDAY 10:41 — CHOCOLATE, A CARD IN HIS POCKET, AND HIS FUCKING GIRLFRIEND.

Simon stopped at a corner shop on the way like a man planning an op he had no business overthinking and still did. Milk chocolate. Plain one, not stuffed with caramel or nuts or any other shite that could turn into a problem with ingredients or appetite or a stomach still relearning how to be a stomach. He stood there longer than he should have in front of the shelf, broad-shouldered bloke in black staring at confectionery like it held state secrets, then grabbed two bars because if one got rejected by clinic rules he’d have the other to throw at a wall later. The lawyer’s card rode in his jacket pocket the whole time, stiff and unwelcome against his chest every time he moved. He’d brought it because hiding things from Claire felt wrong. He knew full well it could be a cunt of a topic, knew it could sour her day, knew it could be one more fucking hand from the past clawing at her while she was trying to get her head above water. But he also knew her well enough to know she’d rather be told than have things waiting like a tripwire outside rehab. He’d show her if it felt right. If it didn’t, if she looked even half-wrong, he’d shut his mouth, pocket it again, and wait until she was out. Her call. Always her call when it came to her own ghosts.

The drive over was quiet in that way cars are quiet when your head isn’t. Wipers squeaked once over a clean windscreen because the weather couldn’t decide whether it wanted drizzle or just grey. He drove one-handed for a bit, other hand near the wheel, the card knocking about in his mind like a loose round in a mag. Then his thoughts would turn on a dime, stupidly, to the fact he was seeing her again, and that did things to his pulse he did not appreciate. He’d seen her yesterday. Hugged her yesterday. Kissed her yesterday. It still felt like a reward he hadn’t earned every single time. Worse now, after Gaz’s call. After finding out she’d asked Kyle to keep an eye on him months ago while she was still rotting from the inside and pretending she wasn’t. That sat under his ribs in a rough, hot way. She had been drowning and still thought to set a guard on him. Stupid woman. Perfect woman. His woman, whether he was sheepish enough to choke on the word in public or not.

Amina was at reception again, all clean cardigan and those steady eyes that never made a show of knowing more than they said. “Morning,” she said, voice low and easy. “Heard you’re smuggling contraband today.” He held up the chocolate like a guilty bastard. “Checking first.” “Good man,” she said, and that almost made him snort. Elena caught him halfway down the corridor before he could knock somewhere he wasn’t meant to, and he held the bar out to her with the seriousness of a battlefield handoff. “This alright.” Elena took it, read the label like she was about to cross-examine the cocoa percentage, then texted someone—nutritionist, he assumed—with a speed that told him she’d already had stranger requests from panicked relatives and clingy husbands. She got the reply, nodded. “It’s fine. Small bits. Might actually help with the normalcy part.” “Normalcy,” Simon repeated, unimpressed. “You lot always use words like that.” “And yet here you are buying chocolate like a worried wife.” “Fuck off.” Elena grinned because she’d learned exactly how far she could take the piss with him and still keep her fingers.

Claire was in the shower, so Elena left him outside the room with a quiet “she’ll be out in a minute” and a look that was somewhere between fond and professionally nosy. He went in alone and shut the door on the corridor’s little clinic noises. Her room had the lived-in look of someone starting to exist in a place instead of just occupying it—book on the bed, blanket kicked half aside, water glass, the bag he’d brought days ago sitting more unzipped than before, like she’d stopped treating everything as temporary. He sat on the edge of the chair first, then changed his mind and took the bed because it gave him better sight lines of the door and because he knew she’d laugh if she came out and saw him sitting with parade-ground posture in a recovery clinic like a twat. He picked up Tess and thumbed through the pages, found where she’d marked bits in pencil—small lines at the margins, one savage little note beside a man’s dialogue that just said wanker—and he felt his mouth go crooked without meaning to.

Water shut off. A moment later the bathroom door opened and she came out towelling her hair, black sports bra, black sweatpants low on the hips, damp skin still pinked from hot water, curls dark and heavier with it. She blinked at seeing him there and he had the half-thought of saying something—some cocky little line about wives keeping him waiting or whatever other bollocks came first—but she smiled first. Tiny thing. Barely there. Enough to gut him. Then she crossed the room without asking permission from the air and leaned over him, arms around his shoulders, just folding into him like she’d decided this was happening and that was that.

He got his arms around her on reflex, hands warm over bare back, one splayed between shoulder blades, the other riding higher toward the nape where the towel had left damp curls against her skin. He put his face into the side of her neck and breathed once, deep, because her skin smelt like clinic soap and heat and her, and after the night he’d had and the run and the fucking card in his pocket and the general state of being Simon Riley in love and annoyed about it, the hug hit harder than it had any right to. She was still damp and warm from the shower, scars moving under his palms when she breathed. He felt the small bones of her spine, the stronger muscle over them, the life of her. They stayed like that long enough for it to stop being greeting and turn into something heavier and quieter.

When she pulled back it was only enough to look at him. Her thumbs grazed at his hairline, just the edge of it, little absent strokes like she was checking he was real and not just a visit-shaped hallucination. His own hands slid up and cupped behind her ears, rough palms over damp hair, holding without trapping. She kissed him first. Slow. No hurry, no teeth, just her mouth on his and the steady give of it. He kissed her back with the same patience and felt the ridiculous tension in him ease in ugly increments. She breathed him in through her nose as they parted, and he saw it—that softened look, not sweet in any childish way, not made harmless, just open for a beat because it was him and she didn’t have to armour every second. Then she shifted and sat beside him, hip to thigh, the bed too narrow for his frame and her knees anyway, and started talking almost at once because apparently surviving a decent therapy session had put a motor in her mouth.

“So,” she said, still rubbing the towel over her hair, “Rebecca’s not a cunt.”

He turned, elbow on his knee, watching her. “High praise.”

“I’m serious, dickhead.” Her mouth twitched. “I went. Sat down. Didn’t bolt. Didn’t try to throw a chair. Didn’t tell her to suck my cock and die. She uses CBT. Which sounds like internet filth but apparently it’s not, it’s just—tracking thoughts and whatever. She had hot chocolate in the office. Actual hot chocolate smell, not those stupid humidifiers that smell like fake lavender and strangling.”

He could hear it under the gruffness, the small charge in her voice, the way she kept glancing at him like she wanted his reaction and was annoyed at herself for wanting it. Pride hit him so hard it felt stupid. Big, ugly, private thing. He let it show just enough in the corner of his mouth.

“Look at you,” he said, low. “Going to therapy like a proper civilian.”

She snorted and shoved his shoulder. “Fuck off.”

“No, serious. Good on you, girlfriend.”

That stopped her for half a beat. Girlfriend. He watched the word land, watched the way the skin under her eyes changed the tiniest amount, how she acted like it was annoying while not moving away from it in the slightest. “Don’t do that,” she muttered.

“What. Tell the truth.”

“You sound like a knob.”

“Could call you wife instead,” he said, deadpan. “Really speed-run this shite.”

She stared at him, offended and not, then laughed under her breath and looked down, scrubbing the towel harder through her hair to hide it. “You’re such a prick.”

“Aye.” He leaned in a fraction. “Still proud of you.”

That got her. Properly. No dramatic nonsense, no watery eyes, just her whole face easing for a second in a way nobody else would even clock. Satisfaction, yes. Relief, yes. The kind that comes from doing something hard and having the right person recognise it without making it sentimental. She swallowed once. “Yeah, well,” she said, aiming for dismissive and missing. “Didn’t hate it.”

“Revolutionary.”

“Shut up.”

He did, for a minute, because she was smiling the smallest bit and he liked looking at it more than hearing himself.

She asked about the bar then. Not casually, exactly. Curious in that sharp Claire way where curiosity is half care and half debrief. “Soap’s girl. Bianca. How is she.”

“Seems decent,” Simon said. “Music teacher. Red hair. Green eyes. Smiles at Johnny like he invented breathing.”

Claire wrinkled her nose. “Disgusting.”

“Agreed.”

“She pretty?”

“Yeah.”

“That’ll go to his head.”

“It already has.”

She laughed again, softer. “And the pint? Price still drinking like an old dockworker?”

“He’s refined now,” Simon said. “Uses a glass.”

She tilted her head, black eyes up on him, listening hard. “Gaz behaved?”

“Depends what you call behaved.”

“Mhm.” She tucked damp hair behind one ear. “What else.”

He kept going for another few seconds about Bianca’s laugh, about Price refusing to dance like his life depended on it, about Johnny vanishing off with his bird like a teenager with no shame, and then she cut in again.

“What else.”

He frowned. “That is what else.”

“No.” She watched him, face going more intent than playful. “You’re weird in the shoulders.”

He scoffed automatically. “That sentence means fuck-all.”

“It means your shoulders are up round your ears while you’re trying to sound normal.” She pointed at him with the towel. “What else happened.”

He nearly told her nothing. Nearly shrugged it off and moved them back to books or Rebecca or the chocolate in his pocket. She’d have accepted it. That was the problem. She’d have taken the line and not pushed, same as he did for her. But he didn’t want to lie to that look on her face. Didn’t want that little furrow between her brows staying there because she’d felt something off and he’d pretended she was wrong. Worse than that, some part of him wanted to tell her. Wanted her to know. That startled him more than the actual memory did. Simon doesn’t reach for words when he’s cracked. Not usually. With her, sometimes, he did.

He looked at her hands. Damp fingers curled into the towel. Knuckles scarred. Nails short. Hands that knew guns and blood and gentleness both. Then he spoke.

“Woman at the bar,” he said. “Sat too close. Mouthy. Called me hot. Told her to fuck off.” He paused, jaw going tight. “Then she put a hand on my back. Lower. Called me soldier boy.”

He said the last two words with enough roughness to skin bark.

Claire went still. Not theatrical stillness. Real attention. Full and hard. Her mouth opened like she was going to interrupt, then shut again so he’d keep going.

“It… didn’t sit right.” He huffed once through his nose, annoyed at the poverty of the phrasing. “Set something off. I went to the back. Couldn’t breathe properly for a minute. Price found me. Grounded it. Then I went back. Rest of the night was alright. Just…” He lifted one shoulder. “Bit tainted after that.”

There. Out. Ugly and plain and not nearly enough to explain what the phrase did to the cave in his head, but enough.

Claire stared at him in a way that made him wonder, very briefly, whether he’d made a tactical error. Not shock. Not pity either—he would have hated that on sight. Something meaner and sadder than pity. Recognition. It made the room feel smaller.

“The woman’s a cunt,” she said finally.

He let out a rough, short chuckle. “Aye.”

“She’s a cunt,” Claire repeated, quieter, gaze still fixed on him like she was taking him apart and putting him back right. “That shouldn’t have happened.”

“No.”

“I’m glad Price pulled you out.”

He nodded once.

Then she swallowed and said, even lower, “Wish I’d been there to do it myself.”

That hit him sideways. He looked at her properly then. There was anger in her face, but not the flaring kind. The compacted kind, dense and heavy and old. Beneath it was something that made his stomach draw tight: that silent little agony of someone hearing another person got touched in the wrong way and feeling it under their own skin.

“It shouldn’t have happened,” she said again, almost to herself. “What did it feel like after. In your body.”

He could have dodged. Didn’t. “Skin wrong. Like it still was there when it wasn’t. Chest tight. Head loud.”

She nodded too quickly, like she knew the list by heart and hated that she did. “Cotton helps sometimes,” she murmured. “Like—cotton shirts, cotton hoodies. Not clingy shit. Mint too. Gum or tea or toothpaste. Gives your head something else to link the feeling to. If it’s the skin-memory bit.”

He blinked at her. She kept going, half-advice, half-briefing.

“And eat something cold maybe. Or sour. Not because that solves it, obviously, but because your body can only track so many things at once if you force it. If your head keeps circling it, make it do a different circle. It sounds stupid.”

“It doesn’t.”

She looked away, mouth tightening. “It does. But it—works sometimes.”

He knew what she was doing. Knew it with a certainty that felt like swallowing broken glass. She was giving him those things because she knew them from use, not theory. From surviving worse than a hand on the back and a filthy phrase. He let that knowledge hit and move through him without showing its whole shape. Discipline. Hold it down. Don’t make your reaction another burden for her to carry.

Claire’s eyes dropped to his shoulder and then lower, to the line of his spine through the shirt as if memory had dragged her there. “You don’t like scratching over the serratus,” she muttered.

He frowned. “What.”

She blinked, startled she’d said it aloud, then shrugged one shoulder. “It’s just… true.”

“What’s true.”

“When we—” She cleared her throat, expression going slightly mutinous. “When we’re together. There’s this point near your back that gets you tense in a bad way if I drag my nails there. You look like you’re trying not to climb out of your own skin. So I looked it up. Anatomy. Muscle groups.”

He stared.

She was still not looking at him now, which made it worse. Better. Both. “Erector spinae. Serratus posterior, maybe. Somewhere around there. I just… keep clear.” She huffed at herself. “Wanted to know the line.”

The information landed like a clean punch to the jaw. Not because it was bad. Because it was too much in the exact opposite direction. He watched her, this blunt fucking woman who paid attention so closely she’d gone and learned muscle names just to not accidentally put him in the wrong place, and something in his chest went so raw he nearly swore at the ceiling for building him with organs at all. He cared for her that way, yes. Adjusted, watched, learned. He’d never let himself sit with the fact she was doing the same back at him, in secret, with Google and memory and those dark sharp eyes.

“Claire,” he said, and it came out rougher than planned.

She looked up at once, probably hearing it.

He kissed her before the moment could turn into some embarrassing speech. Not soft exactly. Not rough enough to bruise. Just hard enough to mean I heard that, you ridiculous woman. She made a small sound against his mouth—surprised first, then giving in—hands coming up to his jaw, towel falling into her lap forgotten. He took the back of her neck carefully and kissed her again, slower the second time, lips parting, the taste of mint toothpaste and whatever clinic tea she’d had clinging to her tongue. When they came apart they rested forehead to forehead, breathing each other’s air like two tired bastards who’d somehow found the exact same patch of ground.

“You absolute menace,” he muttered.

She smiled with her eyes shut. “You love me.”

The words cracked across his skull like a rifle shot. She said it joking. Sort of. He could hear the half-defensive angle in it, the way she threw truth as a taunt to see if he’d flinch.

He did not flinch. “Aye,” he said instead, because apparently he had lost his fucking mind. “Unfortunately.”

Her breath hitched in the smallest way. Then she recovered by nudging his nose with hers, muttering, “Chatty today, aren’t you.”

“Don’t get used to it, wife.”

That got him an elbow to the ribs and a proper grin. “I’m not your wife.”

“Shame. You’d look good terrorising the neighbours.”

“I do that now.”

“True.”

She stood after that with the weird abruptness she always had when feeling too much and needing an object to save her from it. Dug into the bag by the chair, came up with a brush and a hair tie, then turned back to him with one brow up.

“Been thinking of trying to braid it,” she said. “You feel like being useful.”

He looked at the brush in her hand, then at her damp hair, then back to her. “You trust me with that.”

“I trust you with rifles and my spine, Simon. Brush is a lower stakes operation.”

“Debatable.”

She snorted and sat on the bed edge with her back to him. “Come on then, big hands. Don’t rip my fucking scalp off.”

He took the brush from her and shifted closer. Up this near he could see every physical truth of her—water still clinging in droplets at the nape, the dark wet curl pattern tightening as it dried, the small pale lines hidden at the scalp where old fractures and surgeries and accidents had left their signatures. He knew the history of some. Blast. Fall. A buttstock to the wrong side of the head. The rest just existed, folded into her like everything else.

He started at the ends because he wasn’t thick. Slow strokes. Careful. The curls loosened under the brush and then sprang back with their own stubborn life. She guided him verbally, voice lower now, almost sleepy with the sensation.

“Not there—yeah, lower. Start underneath. Hold the section so you’re not yanking the root.”

“Bossy.”

“Competent,” she corrected. “Difference.”

He brushed and watched and learned. Her hair was heavier than it looked once wet, dense and springing under his fingers. He had never really done this with her before—never sat and tended to her in this domestic, stupidly intimate way—and it felt oddly bigger than it should have. Not because hair was sacred. Because she was letting him into another plain little thing, one of those normal human routines both of them had gone too long without.

He caught a few ends that sat straighter than the rest. Heat damage, maybe. Older. He ran the brush gentler there and asked, “What happened to these bits.”

She was quiet for a second, then answered easily enough that it was almost worse. “Used to straighten it as a kid.”

“Why.”

“Aunt did it.” Claire shrugged, watching her hands. “Said it was easier. Faster for church. She didn’t really know what to do with curls and we had to be presentable.”

Presentable. The word sat ugly in the air.

He kept brushing. “You like it straight.”

“No.” She made a face he could hear without seeing. “Looked dead. But in church they had this whole… unsaid code. Order. Decency. Hair all neat and controlled. If it looked too wild it reflected the state of your spirit or some stupid shite like that. So she straightened it. Over and over. Burnt the ends half to hell.”

His hand paused for the smallest beat, then resumed. There it was again: some tiny scrap of childhood, delivered in the plainest tone, more valuable than any dramatic confession because she’d just handed it over without ceremony. He didn’t crowd it. Didn’t lunge with questions about church or aunt or Grant or anything else lurking around those words. He just worked the brush through another section and said, rough and quiet, “Looks better like this.”

She tilted her head slightly, enough that he caught the side of her profile. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Looks like you. Not some old religious haircut meant to scare children.”

She laughed under her breath. “You’re such a bastard.”

“Still right.”

“Unfortunately.”

He smiled to himself where she couldn’t see it and divided another section between his fingers, careful not to catch the scalp. Outside the room there were footsteps, trolley wheels, the faint clinic life carrying on. Inside, it was just her on the bed in black cotton and damp curls, and him behind her with a brush in one hand and too much feeling stuffed into his ribs. The lawyer’s card was still in his pocket, waiting like a problem. He let it wait. For now, he had her hair in his hands, her voice in his ear, and a room where she was breathing easy. For now, that was enough.