His apartment was six blocks away, above a small insurance office whose sign had faded from red to pink. The staircase was narrow, which he disliked on mornings when his left knee stiffened, but the rent was manageable and the neighbors generally minded their business. He had a one-bedroom unit with a kitchen barely wide enough for two people and a living room containing a secondhand sofa, a television, and a bookcase. There were no trophies on the walls. A visitor might have mistaken him for a retired maintenance worker who had lived a modest and unremarkable life.
Above the television sat three things he dusted every Sunday. The first was a folded American flag in a glass case. The second was a photograph of eight men in combat equipment, all young enough to believe their strength would last forever. The third was a small wooden box with brass corners rubbed almost smooth from years of being handled. Byron seldom opened the box. He had learned that grief could remain quiet for weeks and then take hold of an ordinary afternoon without warning.
His wife, Miriam, had died six years before he accepted the job at Apex. They had met when Byron was a young Marine visiting relatives in North Carolina, and she had impressed him by refusing to pretend that his stories were interesting when they were not. She worked as a school librarian, remembered every child's favorite book, and had a laugh so sudden that people often began smiling before they knew the joke. During the years he was away, she sent letters containing the ordinary details he needed to imagine home: a leaking roof, a rude neighbor, a recipe she had ruined, the roses coming into bloom. He carried those letters until the paper grew soft at the folds.
When Miriam became ill, Byron learned another kind of patience. He learned how to organize medications by day, how to make a room comfortable without asking whether it was comfortable every five minutes, and how to recognize the difference between a person wanting company and a person wanting quiet. He had spent a career believing that difficult situations improved through decisive action. Illness taught him that sometimes there was no decisive action that could make anything right. After she died, he found himself awake at night with nothing to do for anyone.
The security job gave his evenings structure. It also gave him a place where people occasionally said good morning, even if it was two in the morning, and where being useful did not require explaining his past. He was not desperate to prove that he had once worn a different uniform. In fact, he liked the simplicity of his name tag. Byron Fletcher, security. No one needed anything more than that in order to treat him decently.