Luke grasped his shoulders. “Each river has its course, but they all come together in the end.”
The words were cryptic, but he was gone before Max had any chance of deciphering them.
Max staggered to the bed. He took Jed’s hand and ran his gaze over him. He half expected to see great craters burned in his body from the defibrillator, but there was nothing. In fact, Jed didn’t look any different at all. “What happened?”
It was a rhetorical question, spoken aloud by accident, but Glenn let out a weary sigh in answer. “Motherfucker died on us.” He pressed his fist to the marbled skin of Jed’s scarred shoulder. “How many times we gonna do this, kid? I’m getting too old for this shit.”
He collapsed into a chair. Max didn’t have to look to know he’d put his head in his hands and closed his eyes. What else was there to do? After the devastating tale behind the incident that had decimated Jed’s whole team, any normal person would do the same.
Max had never been normal. He felt drained, and heartbroken for what Jed had been through before he’d ever had the chance to know him, but he remained on his feet, tracing Jed’s bruised eyelids with his thumb and the paperlike skin below, the skin that had become so pale and thin it was almost translucent. It bothered him that Jed’s eyelids looked so tired and sore, and he wondered if there was anything he could do to soothe them.
Glenn shifted in his chair, watching Max through hooded eyes. “He’s always needed someone like you.”
Max lowered the blanket covering Jed’s torso and considered removing his pillow. Jed didn’t seem to like pillows. “Hmm?”
“Someone who knows what he needs. He’s not so good at telling folk.”
It was a theory Max had heard several times over in one form or another, and he smiled a reluctant, rueful smile. “I didn’t know about this. I didn’t know anything. We’ve lived together since November, and I didn’t have a bloody clue.”
“Don’t blame yourself for that.” Glenn got up and stretched his arms over his head. “Keeping himself hidden was his baseline from the start. It’s a hard habit to break.”
Max knew that sentiment all too well. “Thank you for telling us what happened to you all that day. I think it will help Dan to know.”
“But not you?”
“Some days.” Max followed a vein in Jed’s wrist all the way to where it disappeared into his shoulder. “Then some days I don’t want to know anything. I just want him to be happy.”
Glenn didn’t answer. As had become his habit throughout the day, he’d drifted to the foot of the bed and picked up Jed’s chart. He flipped through it, going right back to the first page. After a while, he let out his trademark low whistle. “Man, he’s lost some weight. Says here he’d started putting it back on. I can’t believe that shit.”
Max thought back yet again to Paul’s stack of storytelling photographs. “He showed me a picture of you and him in the desert. He was heavier then, a stone or two, I reckon.”
“A stone? That’s, like, Brit speak for ten pounds, right?”
“More like fifteen.”
Glenn grinned before he sobered. “That’s a hell of a lot. Is that how you knew me? From a photograph? I didn’t know Jed had any.”
“They were Paul’s. His wife gave them to him. Actually, he seemed to think some of them were yours.”
“Sounds about right.” Glenn shook his head. “Paul was like that… always had to see something with his own eyes to believe it. Jed keeps everything in that bigass brain of his.”
“What about you?”
“Bit of both. There’s a lot of things I’d rather forget.”
Max thought of the bloodshed behind another set of photographs. Jed had once told him that he’d met Glenn right at the beginning of his military career. He wondered if they’d fought in Somalia together, wondered if the murdered aid worker had beenGlenn’slover.
Somehow, it didn’t seem the right time to ask.
“How long was he sick before you found out what it was?”
“Hmm? Oh, you mean the gastroparesis?” Max nodded, and Glenn went on, “Not long. He….”
The door opened and Dan appeared, his eyes rimmed with red and his face drawn. “Everything okay in here?”
“Come see for yourself.”
Dan shook his head, ignoring Glenn’s gentle encouragement. His hands twitched at his sides, and Max could see he was agitated.