Chapter 6

The range closed for lunch at 1300. The trainees filed off the line in squads, chow-bound and grateful for the break, and Vance stood at the instructors' station with the visitor folder tucked under his arm and a question that wouldn't let him be.

Mason came up the path alone, the olive range polo sweat-dark at the collar, carrying the cardboard carrier — empty now, six cups gone to the men who had hands warm enough to hold them. He set it on the ammunition table and looked at the captain. His face was still careful, still blank, but the set of his shoulders said he had been waiting for this conversation.

"Where did the note come from?" Vance asked. It wasn't the question he'd planned to ask. It was the one that had been working at him since Mrs. Delgado held up the creased paper.

Mason's gaze dropped to the carrier. "The morning after I got back from rotation," he said. "My wife asked if I wanted coffee to start the day. I said yes, black, no sugar. She wrote it down. I pinned it to the board so I didn't have to remember. It was — " He stopped, and a ghost of something passed across his face. "It was the first morning in eight months that someone asked what I wanted before I had to ask for it."

The words found Vance in a place he didn't usually visit. He stood at the edge of his own range, holding a visitor form he should have read three weeks ago, and listened to his assistant instructor explain that the coffee run was not a delivery.

It was a lifeline.