She stared at him for a long moment. “Holy Jesus,” she finally said. “Is that how you think it was? That it was up to you? And that your actions made my life a nightmare?” She shook her head. “That’s not how it was. You should’ve just read the damn letters!”

He stared down at the pile in front of him. Then he lifted his eyes to hers. So, she’d been into his stuff, found them, knew they’d never been opened.

“Here’s how it was—”

“Marcie,” he said, his eyes darkening in regret. Pain. “Don’t, okay?”

“God, I thought I was the one who needed to understand,” she said, taking a delicate sip of the liquor. She made a face and pursed her lips, then said, “You’re gonna listen now. We lost our mom when Drew was only two, I was four, and Erin was eleven. Our dad raised us, but when I was fifteen he died suddenly—it was a coronary during a routine knee surgery. Very unusual, very rare. Erin was a recent college graduate, headed for law school, so she stepped in, became the parent, and we all stayed in the house that Dad raised us in and, of course, when Bobby went to Iraq, I lived there with Erin and Drew while he was gone. When we brought him home, that’s where we brought him. That’s where we were when you visited us—and we weren’t very good at that whole thing. We—all of us—were so new to caregiving, it must have looked to you like we weren’t going to survive it. It must have looked terrible…”

He remembered; there were days he’d had trouble putting it out of his mind. The house was a disaster, Marcie was skinny and pale and alone, she looked about thirteen. The hospital bed dominated the dining room so it was the first thing you saw when you walked in the house, leaving the family nowhere to have a meal. There was other medical equipment standing around the place—a fancy wheelchair with a head brace, hydraulic lifts, weights for counterbalance when moving that dead weight, a suction machine, oxygen tanks, basins, linens.

“We had to bring him home or leave him in a long-term care facility in another state. After a couple of months we got him into a civilian nursing home—an excellent place, with the military picking up the tab through CHAMPUS. I can thank Erin for that—she wouldn’t give up. Bobby had a large family—he was the youngest of seven—and we were all in it together, God bless them. They’ve been such a wonderful help—family to me in every way.”

“CHAMPUS?” Ian heard himself ask.

“It doesn’t always work out so good. A lot of wounded soldiers who need long-term care are assigned to military hospitals wherever there’s space, and it has nothing to do with where the family lives. I faced leaving Bobby in D.C. or the East Coast or Texas, but…We were very lucky. He had the best. And Ian—he might’ve looked pathetic, but there was no indication he was in any pain or stress. We pampered him, kept him totally comfortable at all times, and there were so many of us to do that. Bobby’s whole family—his mom and dad, six brothers and sisters and their spouses, nieces and nephews, me, Drew, and yes, even Erin got right in there. He was massaged, read to, kissed and hugged. He was almost never alone. We had a visiting schedule—he was always checked on and covered. Ian—it wasn’t torture for me. Losing him hurt, of course, but really, I lost him so long ago that by the time he passed…”

“Relief?” Ian asked reflexively.

“For him,” she said. “For me, the end of a long journey. You should’ve read the damn letters!”

He just shook his head. “I didn’t want to know he was dead. Didn’t want to know he was still alive.”

“He was alive, comfortable, cared for and loved.” She nodded toward the letters. “I wrote you about him, but also about me—it was really hard at first, grieving Bobby as though he’d already gone—but then my life became almost normal. I got out with friends quite a bit. I took a couple of vacations—Bobby’s parents insisted on it. I wrote you all about them, don’t ask me why. Hell, I wrote you everything. Every stupid thing. Like you were my best friend, not Bobby’s.”

“But you were still tied to a—”

“No, I wasn’t,” she said, shaking her head. “I loved Bobby. We knew he wasn’t going to recover. Bobby’s family tried to get me out, introduce me to people—sometimes male people. If I’d wanted freedom from him, from those obligations, no one in my family or his would have tried to talk me out of it. In fact, there were lots of discussions about things like that—like breaking me loose through divorce so I could pursue another relationship, about pulling the feeding tube so he would just die, but—”

“Why didn’t you just do that, Marcie? Why?”

“Because, Ian. Feeding him was part of keeping him comfortable.”

“But what if he was thinking in there?” Ian said, a note of pained desperation in his voice. “What if it was torture for him, thinking how much he hated living like that, not being able to move or communicate?”

She smiled gently. “If he was able to think of things like that, then he was also thinking about the legions of loved ones dedicating themselves to keeping him safe and cared for until he could make the last part of his journey.”

A long piece of silence separated them. “And none of them was me,” he said softly.

“You had your own issues,” she said easily, sipping her drink. “Bobby’s injuries were physical—yours were emotional. Everyone is entitled to have space to recover. Besides, you gave me the one thing I needed most, and for that I’ll be grateful forever. I had a chance to say goodbye. He was real important to me, Ian. Even though he wasn’t himself, I really needed to hold him in my arms, tell him I loved him so much, and that it was all right for him to move on—that I’d be fine. Do you have any idea how much that meant to me?”

“Even though you had so much to—”

“I just told you—it wasn’t too much. We were busy, yeah. But everyone felt like I did—on different levels. He was his mother’s baby—she needed that time. His father’s pride—he needed time, too. Bobby was amazing—his brothers and sisters needed that time to say goodbye.”

Ian was quiet for a moment before he said, “If I’d read the goddamn letters, I might’ve been one of the people to pitch in, in case he was thinking in there, counting faces…”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she tipped the bottle over both their glasses. “Want help finding more things to be guilty and regretful about, since your original ideas aren’t covering all the bases? As I understand it, you were barely home from a miserable war, broke up with your fiancée, fell out with your dad, left the Marine Corps, to which you thought you’d give at least twenty years. So, Bobby’s injuries were just one more thing, and all the family is so grateful you risked your life to try to save him.” She took a sip. “Ian, no one’s mad at you for not being around.”

“Yeah. You sure about that?”

She leveled him with a determined green-eyed stare. Then she snatched the pile of letters and dragged them over to her. “Let’s start right here.” She snapped off the rubber band and, once she saw they were stacked in order of delivery, lifted the first one and opened it.

“‘Dear Ian,’” she read.

“I hope you’re well. You’ve been out of sight for too, too long and I miss you so much. It would be so nice to hear from you. I want you to know that Bobby’s been moved to a wonderful nursing home. His entire family and my entire family work together to be sure that he’s always around loved ones. We help with some of his care, but there’s an awesome staff here. He’s not in pain. Really. Of course we don’t know everything, but doctors have run every test imaginable and examined him a hundred times—he feels nothing from his neck down. And he never exhibits any symptoms of tension or anxiety. I’ve been told he could make tears if he felt suffering. Ian, there are no tears. In fact, even though they say I’m crazy, I think sometimes I see the closest thing to a smile.

“My life feels strangely normal. I work at the insurance company—same job, same friends. I don’t make a lot of money but my boss is real flexible; he’s a great guy—he brings his yellow Lab to work with him every day. Bobby’s wonderful mother insists I have nights out with some of the girlfriends who were keeping me busy while the two of you were in Iraq—we even go dancing sometimes, but a couple of them are pregnant so more often we do movies, dinners out, picnics in summer and parties with our gang in winter. I seem to have inherited a really large family and huge group of friends, almost all married with families. They’re the same friends I’ve had for years—there are three girlfriends from high school I’ve known forever and four women from work I’ve known since I started there. You’d think working together every day, we’d get sick of each other—but we still drive the boss crazy talking and laughing all the time.

“I like to take my time with Bobby in the early mornings before work—but not every day. Most days, though, when he’s just coming awake, I like to be the first person he senses. Don’t laugh at me now, but I think he can smell me. He turns his head toward me and I can tell he knows. Then I like the evenings. Reading to him relaxes us both. I’ve been reading Bobby Ivanhoe—it’s just amazing how much I get into this story by reading aloud. I have no clue if he’s hearing me, and I’m sure he isn’t understanding me, but I almost can’t wait to get to the nursing home and start the next chapter. Bobby has read more good books since he was injured than he ever did before. I get right up on the bed with him to read and sometimes he turns his head toward me and seems to nuzzle me, burrow his head into my shoulder….”

Marcie read on, through a dozen letters, every once in a while replenishing her glass and his. At one point she got up and fixed herself a glass of cold well water, but continued on. Eventually, the letters contained more about her and less about Bobby, because of course he remained unchanged. She had written all about her trip to British Columbia, about the charm, the landscape, the friendly people. Then there was an all-girls cruise for four days, three nights. She took Ian through two years of her life as the wife of a disabled marine, as a sister, a sister-in-law, daughter-in-law, friend. There were family gatherings, new births, weddings, things that were normal. She had a falling-out with a close girlfriend that alienated them for a few weeks and in the next letter explained how they worked it all out. She told him about a bad haircut, about her younger brother Drew’s plethora of girlfriends and his careless ways with them. She even reported on the VW’s broken fuel pump.

The letters were more about Marcie’s life than Bobby’s. And Marcie’s life was not the torture he’d envisioned. But the thing that had him riveted was that she wrote to him as if he were an old friend. An important friend. And she always included her phone number, asking him to call her collect anytime. And she always closed with “Miss you…”

Then came the most recent letter, written last year, telling him that Bobby had passed, sweetly and quietly, and as divine luck would have it, she had been there. Since she was only there for a couple of hours a day and took some days off on occasion, she considered this a small miracle. She was cradling his head in her arm, reading, when she realized he hadn’t moved his head or eyes or mouth in a long while. She felt for a pulse, put her face against his to see if he was breathing. “‘And I knew right away…. Not from the absence of pulse or breath really…It was as if I felt his spirit leave him. I don’t know if you’ll understand this—it was a great relief to know that all this time his spirit had been there while we all loved him so well. I had always thought it possible that his spirit had gone home long before his body would release its hold—but I swear to you, I had a fullness in my heart as though he’d passed through me as he departed. And I said, “Goodbye, darling Bobby. We’ll all miss you.” And I was so happy for him.’”