Page 37 of Second Song

“I’m stuck with tinnitus. No one actually knows how to fix it forever. I’ve just got to get over myself and live with it like thousands of other veterans.” He answers my next question before I can voice it. “Acoustic trauma is common. No surprise when some of us spent so much time blowing shit up before we could rebuild safely. I wasn’t the first casualty. I won’t be the last.”

“I’m sorry, I only meant?—”

“No worries.” He lets out a laugh that isn’t anywhere close to happy. “It’s not the end of the world, just the end of a career.”

“Does it have to be?”

He doesn’t meet my eyes. “Would you trust someone who can’t weed out orders from background chaff that no one else hears?” He shakes his head as if I’ve answered. His shoulders straighten again although it seems an effort. “But I’m still here, aren’t I? Not like some poor sods in the same line of work as me.” He corrects himself quickly. “The line of work that I was in. Yeah, I hear phantom sounds that never let up. And it’s a drag when it disturbs my sleep, but I’m?—”

He clenches his jaw, and I see why. We’re beside a sign explaining how service personnel built this part of the garden for a fallen comrade.

“But I’m still here,” he finishes, sounding wrecked. And that’s what we’ve walked into, I realise. This part of the garden looks as if a bomb dropped right here in Cornwall. It must have been a while back—plants crowd this devastation, more roses climbing broken walls, twisted metal rusting beneath bobbing daisies. We even cross a bridge built over a crater filled with blood-red poppies.

“From Afghanistan,” I read from more signage. “These poppies grew there.” I have a sudden realisation about what I’m standing over, and I deflate. “Shit.”

“What?” Liam touches my chin for a third time this evening until I look directly at him. “What?” he repeats.

“Oh, it’s…” I’ve already told him that I was stupid once and lost my first chance. I hadn’t expected to get confronted by this reminder, and definitely not while I’m with someone I want to think better of me.

Because that is what I do want more than anything in this moment—for Liam to know me as I am now, not as I was back when I was under a different kind of pressure, one that didn’t come with explosions but still shook my foundations. I want that so much that I mutter, “It’s nothing.”

“No,” he snaps before quickly giving a quieter order. “Don’t say nothing to me, Row.”

He cups my face while we stand right where I don’t deserve to be, not until I’ve had a chance to talk with the men who built this garden, former contestants in the same stupid game as me, one of whom has an Afghan background.

Ed and Pasha must have worked so hard to build this memorial.

Liam draws a different conclusion from my nonanswer. “Do you know how often people have said that to me? Nothing?”

That’s another lonely flat note.

So is this.

“People say nothing to me far too often. It only ever means I’ve missed something important. That the radio station in my head has tuned into nonsense instead of tuning into what’s really important. So don’t say it. Not even if you think whatever you said isn’t worth repeating.”

His hold on my jaw is gentle, although it wouldn’t matter if it was firmer. I couldn’t look away from him even if I wanted, not when the only one of us who’s earned a place in this garden isn’t done speaking.

“Whatever you’ve got to say, I want to hear it.” His hold on me gentles even more but doesn’t release. Maybe he knows I’ve leaned into his cupped palm so much that I’ll stumble if he drops it. Frankly, it’s the only thing holding me up when he adds, “I was relieved when I heard you. Yesterday at the school, I mean.”

His voice drops, his bruised gaze pulling me even closer.

“I don’t catch everything people say when my tinnitus gets busy, but you?” His gaze drops all the way down to my stomach as if he can see what he sketched there before it rises again. “I heard you laugh. Didn’t think I’d get to hear that ever again. Thought I’d be long gone before you came back to Cornwall. Thought we were a one and done. All I wanted to do was make sure the school wouldn’t fall down on top of you.”

I’m close enough to see his colour rising.

A wave of something warm rises in me too when I grasp what that means.

“You took the job for me?”

“Someone’s got to save you from yourself, right?” He’s joking. He’s also still flushed, but his gaze doesn’t waver. “Thought I’d be done months before you started, only there you were, back sooner than I expected. Still throwing yourself at shit that scares you. I heard you worrying about getting it right for the kids.”

“You heard that?”

“Soldiers are nosy fuckers. Yeah, I was listening.” He rubs at the back of his neck. “Kinda want to be around to hear more.”

He already told me he’s a demolition expert.

He turns me to rubble with a final comment.

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