"You told your mother you do email," Naomi said.
She set two coffees on my desk and sat down without asking.
"I do email," I said. "A lot of it. That part is true."
"Julia."
"What?"
"You are an air support operations officer. You spent yesterday in a briefing about joint fires integration. The day before that you were on the phone with a squadron commander for two hours."
"And then I answered email," I said. "See? Mostly email. I am being honest in aggregate."
Naomi did not smile.
"The party is Saturday," she said.
"I know when the party is."
"Your brother just made Staff Sergeant and you are driving down with a cake. Are you going to tell him this time?"
"I am going to congratulate him. That is the point of the party."
"That was not my question."
"It is his day, Naomi. I am not going to walk in and make it about me."
"You would not be making it about you. You would be letting him know you."
"He knows me."
"Does he?" she said. "What does Nico actually know?"
I felt my shoulders tighten. "He knows I am at Robins. He knows I work in communications."
"Communications," she repeated.
"Operations is a kind of communications."
"And your rank?"
"He knows I am in the Air Force."
"Julia."
"He knows I got promoted a while back."
"A while back," she said. "You have been a major for four years."
"I know how long I have been a major."
"Does he think you are still a captain?"
I did not answer, and that was answer enough.
"Oh, Jules," she said, softer.
"It is not a lie," I said. "I just have not updated the details."
"It started as not updating the details. At some point it became a story. The Georgia story. Administrative work, mostly email, nothing interesting. You have told it so many times you say it the same way every time."
She was right. I could hear myself saying it at Thanksgiving, at Christmas, on Sunday night phone calls. How is Georgia? Fine. Work busy? Mostly email. Anything exciting? Not really. The words came out smooth, without any pause where the truth should have been.
"It did not start as a story," I said.
"Then tell me how it started."
"After Sangin, I came home and Nico called from Lejeune. He was a lance corporal, so proud, and he asked what it was like over there."
"What did you say?"
"I said I worked in an operations center. I said I coordinated communications. Which was true. I left out the nights the radios would not stop. I left out the unit that lost contact in the valley and the commander asking me if I had them, and me saying, working on it, working on it, for forty minutes until their signal came back broken and scared."
Naomi waited.
"He was nineteen when he enlisted, Naomi. He was about to go himself. What was I supposed to do, hand him every bad night I had so he could carry it into his own deployment? I thought if I kept it small, I could keep him safe from it."
"So you made it sound boring."
"I made it sound manageable. There is a difference."
"Maybe at first," she said. "But Sangin was years ago. He is not nineteen anymore. He is thirty five and a Staff Sergeant and he has his own bad nights now."
"I know that."
"Then why are you still protecting him from a deployment he has lived his own version of?"
"Because after the first time, it got easier not to say it. Then I got promoted and I thought, I will tell him when we are in the same room. Then I got promoted again and it felt too late to say it casually. Like, surprise, I have been a major for four years."
"You are stuck on the timing."
"I am stuck on his face when he realizes I did not trust him."
She leaned forward. "You did trust him. You just did not trust the conversation. There is a difference too, and he might hear the first part if you let him."
"I am fine," I said, and heard it land wrong even as I said it.
Naomi lifted an eyebrow. "You use that one on your mother. Do not use it on me."
"It is classified," I tried, and she laughed.
"Your rank is not classified, Major Romano."
"I will tell you later," I said.
"No," she said, gently. "You will tell him Saturday, or you will tell me right now why you will not. But later is how you got four years of later."
I sat there with the cup in both hands and no deflection left.
Chapter 5: The Voice in the Dark