and discovered that his entire platoon lay dead around him. Every single man had had his throat slit during the night. Every one but him. He spent his life haunted by the question: why? Why him? Why not the friend who had slept beside him, or the guy he didn’t like, or the captain? Why was he chosen to survive? Did his life have some yet unknown purpose? Or had he been chosen at all?
Carla and all the others would live with some of the same questions.
Hugh did the note-taking. They got the names of the others she had clustered with, two of whom had died under the barrage of submachine-gun fire within seconds. Nell comforted as best she could once they had wrung everything Carla knew from her.
In the end, they left her staring at a soap opera on television, still huddled inside her sweatshirt as though the temperature was sixty instead of eighty inside the small house. Walking silently down the driveway under the hot sun beside a tall, grim Hugh, Nell smelled again the heavy scent of the roses.
They would hear this story again, and again, Nell realized. Today, tomorrow, perhaps for weeks. She knew from experience that by the end of the day, they might be able to hear it and minutes later climb into the car and crack a joke, or talk about dinner plans, or a movie one of them had seen last weekend. They might even think themselves inured, but the horror would be lurking deep in their psyches, the reminder of the sprawled bodies, the acrid scent of blood, the remembered terror on every face.
How would she get through this summer, working this horrific case, worrying about her daughter, worrying about herself? she wondered in a kind of daze. Partnered with a macho jerk who could smile like that?
A man who, insane though the very idea was, would be the father of the unborn child she might be carrying, if the fates chose to teach her a lesson.
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