If You Believe in Me by Natalie J. Damschroder Page B

coming home.”
    Amber flinched and felt her face flush. Don’t lash out . Maybe she didn’t know all the facts. “Did you hear something? Did he call?”
    “No. That’s the point. We haven’t heard anything from anyone for half a year. It’s been three months since they declared him missing. He’s not coming home. ”
    Amber shook her head, afraid to look away from him, her heart breaking at the pain he must be feeling. “Of course he’s coming home,” she reassured him. “You have no reason to believe otherwise.”
    He just glowered at her as if she were stupid. Her flush deepened, and this time she was unable to hold back the rush of anger. The argument she’d laid out in a relentless litany since Kale had been deployed rolled through her head. If he were dead, the military would have sent someone to the Rikers’ house to notify them, released his body to the family if they could, and given him a hero’s burial. They’d received no such notification. Nothing at all, in fact, for months.
    Too many months.
    Kale had contacted home whenever he could. The haphazard nature of the communication had been difficult, but Amber hadn’t expected anything less. She’d done a lot of research in those first weeks, wanting to give them the best chance she could. Deployment statistics were bad enough for couples who had been married for years. She and Kale had only been together a few weeks before his deployment.
    His leaves were short and infrequent, but they packed a lot into the time and reinforced the love they’d declared before he left. The last time she saw him, two Christmases ago, she’d faced the final stretch of his service with ease. It was almost over, and they could spend the rest of their lives together.
    Then something changed.
    At first, when she didn’t hear anything from him for several weeks—all her e-mails going unanswered, her mail sent back unopened—she assumed he’d changed his mind about her. Maybe even met someone else. Eventually, she asked his parents if they’d talked to him. When they said they hadn’t, the growing pain of rejection had chilled to fear. Was he missing in action? A prisoner? On an assignment that required him to go dark? None of the possibilities she dreamed up made complete sense, especially as time went on…and on. His parents inquired through channels and were told only that Kale would make contact as soon as he was able, and they were not at liberty to discuss the nature of his work.
    That alone was difficult enough. Amber found herself stuck, unable to plan for the future, unwilling to act like there wouldn’t be one. And then, three months ago, all the news outlets exploded over an unidentified squad of servicemen captured, killed on film, and buried in as-yet-undiscovered graves. The government denied any such thing had occurred, but within days the Rikers received notice that their son was missing in action, with no other details confirmed or conveyed “at this time.” Amber seemed to be the only one who refused to connect the two.
    Arthur rinsed the sponge and dropped it into its holder on the edge of the sink. “We’re old, Amber. We can’t endure this anymore. You know Dottie’s been sick. It gets worse every day we don’t get word, every holiday that he’s not here.”
    “But we just need to have hope—”
    “Hope means fear. And it’s tearing her up inside.” A strand of hair from his comb-over drooped, exposing his scalp and making him look uncomfortably vulnerable. He straightened and swept his hand over the top of his head. “It’s tearing you up, too. You can’t deny that.”
    She tossed up her hands. “What do you think I can do about it? I can’t change what is.”
    “You can move on.”
    Her breath hitched. “What?” she managed to croak.
    “Dottie won’t get better if she doesn’t start moving through the grieving process.” The way he said it made it clear he meant himself too, but he was part of a generation that