The photograph of eight men had been taken years earlier during a deployment. The faces in it belonged to people who had shared exhaustion and fear, traded terrible jokes, and depended on one another when ordinary language was no longer adequate. Three were dead now. Two had not returned from combat, and one had died years later after struggling with injuries nobody around him could see. Byron did not think of those losses as proof of his own heroism. He thought of them as unfinished conversations.
On the night Colt found the photograph, Byron had placed it in an inside jacket pocket to take it to a shop that could make a protective copy. He wanted a version he could give Hank Caldwell, the one surviving friend who remembered when all eight men had last been together. The photograph slipped out when Byron opened his locker to change into his uniform. Colt noticed it before Byron did. By the time Byron turned around, Colt was holding the picture beneath a bright overhead light.
"What's this?" Colt asked. "Your bowling team?"
"Give it back, please," Byron said.
The directness of the request seemed to amuse Colt. He waved the picture at two fighters sitting on a bench, made another joke about old men collecting souvenirs, and then flicked it across the room. The photograph slid beneath a bench and caught against a rubber mat. Both fighters stopped smiling. They had never heard Byron raise his voice, but something in the way he went quiet made the room feel suddenly different.
Colt pointed under the bench. "Go on. You're good at picking things up."
Byron went down on one knee and retrieved the photograph. A small crease had formed across the face of a Marine who had once carried spare socks for everyone else because he could not bear to see a teammate suffer from something preventable. Byron smoothed the paper between his fingers. He resisted an impulse to speak the man's name aloud in that room. He put the photograph in his pocket and stood.
Colt told him to relax because it was only a picture. Byron looked at him for a moment and recognized that an explanation would do no good. To Colt, the photograph had value only as an object capable of producing a reaction. The people inside it were not real to him, any more than the cleaning staff or the security guard were. Byron turned and walked to his post without answering, carrying more than the weight of the damaged paper.