Chapter 3 #2
"I think about him a lot," he said quietly. "More than the other two, honestly, and I don't know what that says about me. Maybe because he was the one who'd have known what to say to me right now. He always knew what to say."
"What do you think he'd say? If he were here."
Elias let out a breath that wasn't quite a laugh. "Probably something like 'quit moping and dig the hole deeper, Vance, the plant's not gonna live at that depth.'" A real smile, small and sad and true all at once. "He wasn't big on sentiment. Efficient, though. Efficiently kind, if that's a thing."
"It's a thing. I've met a few people like that." I thought of my own father, briefly, who'd shown love mostly through fixing things without being asked, and let the thought pass without comment. "Sounds like he'd have liked seeing you do this. The garden. The living part."
Elias didn't answer right away. He looked down at the seedling he'd just planted, small and green and entirely unremarkable, the kind of thing you'd walk past a thousand times without noticing it was doing the hardest work there is — turning itself, slowly, into something bigger than it started as.
"Maybe," he said. "I don't know how to believe that yet. But maybe."
I let the silence hold for a moment before I spoke again, because some things need room to breathe before you can say the next true thing next to them.
"Can I tell you something? Not as your therapist. Just as somebody who's stood exactly where you're standing."
He looked up, surprised, wary in the particular way people get when you offer them your own scar tissue instead of asking for theirs. "Okay."
"I lost my brother," I said. "Rory. Three years after he came home from his own deployment.
He survived the war. He didn't survive the part after — the part nobody prepares you for, the part where you're supposed to just slot back into an ordinary life like the extraordinary thing that happened to you didn't happen at all. "
My hands kept moving in the dirt, steadying themselves on the work while my voice did the harder thing.
"He told everyone he was fine. Functional, he used to say. Like it was a status update instead of a warning sign. And I missed it. I was busy, I was in school, I told myself he sounded okay on the phone, and then one day he wasn't fine anymore and none of us had caught it in time."
Elias had gone very still, trowel forgotten in his hand.
"I'm sorry," he said. Quiet. Real.
"Me too. Every day, honestly." I met his eyes, and let him see exactly how much of this was true, because he deserved that, because a man carrying what he carried didn't need another polished, professional version of comfort — he needed the actual thing, unvarnished.
"That's why I do this work. Not despite Rory.
Because of him. Because I couldn't save my brother, and I decided I was going to spend the rest of my life making sure other warriors like him didn't slip through the same cracks he did. "
"Is that why you — " he stopped himself.
"Why I what?"
"Nothing. It's not my business."
"You can ask."
He set the trowel down fully, giving the question his whole attention, the way he probably gave everything his whole attention once the wall dropped low enough to let it through. "Is that why you saw it in me? On day one. Before I said anything."
"Yes," I said simply. "I recognized the look. The careful, correct sentences. The 'functional.' I've seen that particular disguise up close before, and I promised myself a long time ago that if I ever saw it again, I wasn't going to look away this time."
Something shifted in his face — not relief exactly, something rawer and more complicated than that, grief and recognition and something like gratitude all tangled together.
"The men beside me when I lost him," I went on, "every single one of them, every soldier and every veteran I've worked with since, thought they had to carry it alone.
Every single one. It's the most common lie this particular grief tells you — that you're the only one drowning, that nobody else could possibly understand, that reaching out is weakness instead of just being a person who needs another person. "
"And you don't believe that."
"I know it's a lie. I watched it kill my brother.
" I held his gaze, steady, unflinching, saying the thing I needed him to hear more than anything else I'd said all session.
"The fact that you're struggling doesn't mean you're weak, Elias.
It doesn't mean you're broken, and it sure as hell doesn't mean you're ungrateful for the life you came home to.
It means you're a person who went through something no person should have to go through. That's it. That's the whole diagnosis."
He looked at me for a long moment, dirt on his hands, spring light falling gold across the raised beds, three rows of seedlings between us that hadn't existed an hour ago and now stood small and green and stubbornly alive.
"You don't have to carry it alone," I said, quieter now. "You don't. I mean that with everything I've got."
He looked down at his hands — a medic's hands, hands that had done unbearable work and were now, improbably, covered in garden soil instead of anything worse — and when he looked back up, his eyes were wet in a way he clearly hadn't expected and didn't quite know what to do with.