Billy's Baby - Annie J. Rose Page 0,37

with equipment, but I settled myself on the sand, leg outstretched. I glowered at the bright sun and gleaming water. I had screwed up on the trail, and my head up my ass over some girl. And it could’ve had a lot worse outcome. It could have been a client who fell and got hurt because I was ignoring the terrain. I could have knocked out my damn teeth, which was exactly what I deserved for flaking out like that.

While Mickey had the group out in the water, I had time to think. It had been a rookie mistake, sure, but it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. For anyone else. But for me, with my history, I knew the dangers of getting distracted. I knew how a woman could cost a man his life even if she was a thousand miles away.

Just like that, I was back there. Hot sand, sure, but not an ocean anywhere around. Everything parched, dust thick in the air, and even the water in my canteen tasted chalky from it. The entire landscape bleached as bone under a pitiless bright sky. And my buddy Mason, still telling me about the email from his wife. A woman I would forever think of as ‘that-bitch-Kelly.’

We were on the move that day, shifting locations in the barren region of Iraq where we were stationed. There were eight of us that peeled off to check out what looked like an old shed, a ramshackle structure that seemed out of place so far out of a nearby town. We were on our guard, expecting to find something. Expecting a booby trap, expecting an ambush. Every inch of ground inspected before we took each careful, silent step. We never set a foot wrong and did it automatically out of practice, but always, always tuning our attention in to the present moment. The present moment was always life or death in our line of work.

We didn’t chat or joke around when we were on patrol. The stakes were too high. But then Mason, my best buddy, he’d go quiet for a few minutes and then say something like, “She hadn’t even seen him since high school. Why now? Why would she do this?” and he’d be off again about how his wife had cheated on him while he was fighting for our country overseas.

Mason’s concentration was shot. He lost his edge completely, preoccupied with what was going on half a world away in his wife’s bed. So it was just a matter of time, really. I was watching his back, God knows I was, but we’d been on a march for ten hours. We were all exhausted and a little dehydrated, painting by the numbers at that point. I blamed myself in a way. But mainly I blamed her. She might as well have put a gun to his head. Because he was the one who went on ahead instead of staying together in the formation we always used for recon. Mason broke pattern. So he was the one who stumbled on the IED. He was the one who flew back with a cry as the blast knocked us all down. It blew him apart. I was the first one to get to him, to what was left of him. There were no moving goodbyes. No broken pleas to tell his wife he loved her. He was long gone by the time I crawled over the blood-soaked dust to his side.

Even now, years later, I was shaking just remembering it. Those insurgents built a bomb out of anything they could get. Part of me didn’t even blame them. If I had to live like that, under oppression and hopelessness all my life, I’d probably want to blow shit up too. I could sympathize with them, but I could never muster a damn shred of forgiveness for Kelly. Mason may have loved her, but I’d go to my grave an old man who had a coal of hatred in my heart for her. If she hadn’t cheated, hadn’t confessed just to make herself feel better while he was in the middle of a damn war zone, he would be alive. I knew it right down to my bones.

So when I missed a step and turned my ankle, when I damn near went sprawling on the hike, I knew better than anyone that I could just as easily have fallen and hit my head. I