Page 33 of The Way We Fell

“Shit, Katy, I’m sorry.”

“No—no, Jay, I didn’t mean that. I mean, I did. You scared me. But I don’t want you to apologise. You don’t need to. There’s nothing to apologise for. I just want you to be okay. Are you? Okay?”

I consider it for a moment.Am I okay?

The nightmares. Waking up in a sweat. The pins and needles. The world that doesn’t feel like I exist within it anymore. The body that doesn’t feel like my own. I shake my head.

“No, I don’t think I am.”

Chapter fifteen

Jay

5thSEPTEMBER,2026

“Where’s Caleb?”

“Who’s Caleb?”

I growl.

“Sergeant Caleb Dalton. He was by my side the entire mission. Where is he?”

The woman—a nurse, I think—twists her expression into something I don’t understand. I don’t think I like it.

“Let me find out for you.”

I don’t see her again.

The following morning, Doctor Pink-Face clears his throat noisily as he adjusts the machine pumping some kind of drug into my arm.

“I’m sorry, Sergeant Bevan. We just got word. Sergeant Dalton didn’t make it.”

PRESENT DAY

“It’s funny—when you go out there, you know even before you set foot on the transport that you’ll be coming home incomplete. As a unit, not everyone will make it back. Maybe not all ofyouwill make it back. I mean, shit, my leg nearly didn’t. But when you leave, it’s still euphoric—because you’realive. You made it.

“But so many didn’t, and it’s—that’s the hard part. The hardest part. Because so many didn’t. Some of them, they didn’t even last a fucking day. My best friend, Caleb… he didn’t make it. He died that day. When I got hurt.”

Caleb and I stood shoulder to shoulder as we completed basic training. We joined the regiment together. We jumped together hundreds of times. He and I crawled through mud, water and fire together. Only, the last time we did—well, it really was the last. He didn’t survive the explosion that rocked the jeep that day. It’s a fucking miracle I did, and that my leg was still attached. I shouldn’t have survived. But I did. And as I hung there, upside down, pinned in place and resigned to burning alive, I found myself covered in my best friend’s blood, and crying for the one thing I wanted more than anything else in the world in that moment: my mum.

Katy’s silence is a patient one. I haven’t been able to get the words out until now, choked and frozen in the memories that flash behind my eyes. We ordered pizza earlier, but I could only manage to nibble at the crusts before my body felt too full, too heavy, too overwhelmed by a bone-deep exhaustion that had me falling asleep for several hours.

When I woke, Katy was reading something on her e-reader that had a pretty smile curling her lips. Now, she watches me intently from the other end of her sofa. The blanket she tucked around my legs hours ago is still there. We’re in her living room, the string lights bathing the late afternoon in a kind of glow that feels like a warm hug. Everything about this room feels likeKaty. It’s small, but it’s cosy, with bookshelves built into alcoves on either side of an electric fireplace. They’re stacked to the brim with books and ringed with glowing string lights.

It’s pretty, it’s warm, it’s comfortable. Katy’s big brown eyes pin me with a stare somewhere between sadness and longing, but, to my surprise, not pity. There’s never pity on her face, even when I’m recounting my darkest days, the days I didn’t know whether I’d make it to lunchtime. When I didn’t know if I’d survive the next hour.

And there were days like that. There were a lot of them. Those are the days that haunt me when I close my eyes, the ones that wake me in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. They’re the days that dog me at every turn. The ones I can’t shake, no matter how far I remove myself from my former life.

It’s like this all-consuming monster, this enormous, dark shadow, following me everywhere. To physio appointments. To the gym. To the supermarket. Fucking hell, it even follows me to take a fucking leak. It’s always there, lurking in my periphery, just far enough out of sight and out of reach that I can almost forget.

Almost.

Until there’s a loud noise, or something moves too fast, or too slow, or there’s a particular smell, or I get a flash of that strange, metallic taste in my mouth, or something feels too hot on my skin, or I’m in a crowd, or I’m asleep and reliving my worst days in my nightmares. It’s exhausting, never knowing when the shadow will engulf me. Never knowing if this time, when I break, I’ll break someone else with me.

“Have you… have you ever talked to anyone about it?” She brings a lidded jar to her lips and sips at her water. Her pink lipstick leaves a perfect stain on the straw.

“I’m talking to you.”

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