Chapter 13: The Longest Night
The ache began as a dull throb, a deep, insistent pulse buried in the tissue along her left side. Leia stared at the water stain on the ceiling, shaped like a lopsided Africa, and focused on breathing through it.In, two three four.Out, two three four. The scar tissue, a ridge of tight, angry skin beneath her cotton sleep shirt, felt like a hot wire had been sewn just under the surface, connecting her ribs to her hip. A souvenir from the car accident last year, a pledge of pain she’d learned to ignore.Usually.
But now she couldn’t move.Not an inch.
Ethan was a furnace against her right side, his head a heavy, trusting weight on her shoulder. One of his hands still fisted a small handful of her t-shirt.His breathing was deep and slow, the rhythm of it vibrating through her bones. It was the first sleep without terror she’d witnessed from him since his return. It was a sacred, fragile thing.
If she shifted to ease the screaming in her left side, she might wake him.The thought was unendurable.Barron stirred on his makeshift bed on the floor. In the thin grey light of pre-dawn, she saw his eyes open, instantly alert. He looked up at her. She forced her face into what she hoped was the placid mask of sleep, softening her jaw, letting her lips part slightly. Her heart hammered against her sternum, a betraying rhythm she was sure he could see. He watched her for a long moment, then his gaze slid to Ethan, checking.Satisfied, he settled back into the pillows, turning onto his side. His breathing evened out again, a quiet counterpoint to Ethan’s.The lie worked. He believed she was asleep.The responsibility of the deception somehow made the pain sharper, more personal.
She counted their breaths.She counted the faint, passing cars on the street below. She counted the beats of pain until they blurred into a single, endless moment. The sky outside the window shifted from charcoal to slate, then to a bruised lavender.A single bird began a tentative song.Another answered. The world was waking up, and she was trapped in a statue’s body, holding the ceiling up with sheer will.
When the first proper spear of gold sunlight pierced the gap in the curtains, illuminating the dust motes dancing above Barron’s sleeping form, Ethan groaned softly.His fist unclenched. The weight of his head lifted from her shoulder.Leia dared to blink, her eyes gritty and dry.
He rolled onto his back, squinting at the unfamiliar ceiling. Confusion, then recognition, then a sharp, shamefaced glance at her.“Lee. Your arm… was I…”
“Dead weight,” she whispered, her voice raspy from disuse. “Like a bag of wet sand.Don’t flatter yourself.” A feeble joke, but it landed.
A ghost of a smile touched his lips, then vanished as he saw her carefully, stiffly, trying to adjust her position.A wince escaped her as the scar pulled.
“You’re in pain.”
“I’m stiff. You try being a human pillow for six hours.”
Barron was awake now, sitting up, his hair comically flattened on one side. He looked from Leia’s carefully controlled expression to the way she was favoring her left side.He didn’t say anything. He just stood, walked out of the room, and returned a minute later with a glass of water and two white pills.He handed them to her.“Ibuprofen,” he said softly.
She took them, ashamed of her own transparency. “Thanks.”
“You should have shoved me off,” Ethan muttered, sitting up and scrubbing his face with his hands.
“And missed the chance to hear you snore like a chainsaw? Never.” She swallowed the pills, the water blessedly cool on her raw throat. “Besides, you needed it.”
The morning unfolded with a slow, deliberate gentleness.Barron made coffee, the rich aroma seeping into every corner of the quiet house. Ethan shuffled to the bathroom, moving like a man twice his age. Leia finally, gratefully, stretched out on her back on the rug in a patch of sun, feeling the knotted muscles along her spine begin to unclench.
They were sitting around the kitchen island, a silent communion over toast and coffee, when the front doorbell chimed, a sonorous, old-fashioned sound that echoed through the halls.Barron frowned. “Not expecting anyone.” The Secret Service detail outside would have only stopped someone truly unexpected, or truly powerful.He went to answer it. Leia and Ethan heard the deep, unmistakable voice before they saw him.“Where is he? How’s he looking?Let me see him.”
Donald Trump filled the kitchen doorway. He wore a navy blue suit, no tie, and carried the energy of a contained storm. His eyes, sharp and assessing, scanned the room and landed on Ethan.The bombast seemed to leach out of him all at once.
“Kid,” he said, the single word gruff. He walked over, ignoring everyone else, and placed a large hand on Ethan’s shoulder. He looked him up and down, not with a doctor’s eye, but with a builder’s.Evaluating the structure. “You look like hell.”
Ethan almost smiled.“Feel a bit like it, sir.”
“Good. Means you’re alive to feel it.” Donald pulled out a stool and sat, commanding the space. He looked at Leia. “He keeping you up?”
“We’re managing,” Leia said, her polite, political-science-major tone firmly in place.Donald nodded, accepting that. He turned back to Ethan.“The medal ceremony.Next week.East Room.Small. Just family, the Joint Chiefs, a few press pool cameras.We’ll keep it tight. You’ll stand, you’ll shake hands, you’ll get your medal. Then it’s done.”
Ethan’s spine straightened almost imperceptibly.The toast in his hand was forgotten. “Sir, with respect… I don’t need a ceremony.”
“Didn’t ask what you need,” Donald said, not unkindly.“This isn’t for you. It’s for the record.For the men who didn’t come back.For your unit. You think Miller’s family doesn’t want to see that his buddy got recognized? You think Davis’s parents don’t want to know it meant something?” He leaned forward, his voice dropping. “You think I’m letting what you did get buried in some filing cabinet?Not a chance.”
The kitchen was silent. Barron watched his father, a complex mix of understanding and tension on his face.
Ethan stared at the marble countertop.He gave one short, sharp nod. “Understood.”
“Good.” Donald clapped his hand on Ethan’s shoulder again, a solid, grounding thump. Then he turned his attention to the rest of the room. “You.” He pointed a finger at Leia.“Your mom called my assistant.Twice.Says you’re missing Friday Shabbat. Not an option, she says.You’re all expected.”
Leia flushed. “We were planning on it.We just… needed a night.”
“You’ve had a night. Now you have a family.” He said it as a simple, incontrovertible fact. He stood up, adjusting his suit jacket.His gaze swept over his son.“Barron. You’re looking after them?”
“Yes.”
“Good. See that you do.” He moved to leave, then paused at the threshold.He didn’t look back, his voice aimed at the hallway. “The food at Walter Reed is garbage.I’m sending my chef over tonight.Steaks. Potatoes.The good stuff. Eat it.” And then he was gone, the sound of his brisk footsteps fading, followed by the soft click of the front door.
The silence he left behind was different.Charged, but lighter.Barron let out a long breath.“Well. That happened.”
Ethan finally took a bite of his cold toast. “He doesn’t change, does he?”
“Not really,” Barron said, a hint of wry affection in his tone.
Leia slid off her stool, the ibuprofen finally beginning to blunt the sharpest edges of the pain. She walked to the sink, her mind already spinning—medal ceremonies, Shabbat preparations, the sheer force of will that was Donald Trump orchestrating their lives. She felt simultaneously steamrolled and seen.She turned, leaning against the counter.“So. Steaks tonight.”
“Apparently,” Barron said.
Ethan looked up, and for the first time that morning, there was a clear, unguarded light in his eyes.Not happiness, but a faint, resilient amusement. “Can’t say no to the Commander-in-Chief.”
“No,” Leia agreed, a real smile finally breaking through her fatigue. “You really can’t.”
Outside, the sun climbed higher, washing the polished kitchen in a clear, confident light. The day ahead was suddenly mapped, filled with the daunting, tangible proof of their place in the world—a medal, a family dinner, a presidential decree of steak.It was overwhelming.It was real. And for the first time since the phone call that told them Ethan was missing, it felt, against all odds, like something resembling a future.
And for the first time since the phone call that told them Ethan was missing, it felt, against all odds, like something resembling a future.It proved to be a future composed of small, brutal ministrations. The following days bled into a relentless cycle of light and shadow. Nights belonged to Ethan’s subconscious, a locked theater where horrors played on repeat. Leia would hear the first choked gasp, the rustle of sheets turning to frantic thrashing, and she was already moving across the hall. She’d slide into the bed, wrap her arms around him, and press her palm flat against his racing heart. “You’re here,” she’d whisper into the damp hair at his temple. “You’re home.” The mantra lasted until his body unlocked, the terror receding like a tide leaving him shivering and shamefaced. Her scar would burn a fierce, constant complaint, a hot seam of pain where his weight pressed against her.
Daylight offered no reprieve, just a shift in duties.She became a strategist of normalcy. She nudged Barron away from video games and towards his economics textbooks, sliding a plate of sliced fruit beside his laptop. “Your midterm’s Thursday,” she’d remind him, her voice soft. “Just two more pages and then you can sleep, I promise.” She made schedules, lists for the grocery store, and timed Ethan’s physiotherapy exercises with the precision of a drill sergeant.“Ten more reps. Don’t you dare quit.”
She prepared the house for his post-surgical return like a general fortifying a position. She cleared a bathroom of everything he could slip on, stocked the fridge with bone broth and soft foods, and arranged a nest of pillows and blankets on the living room sofa for his convalescence.Every detail was a thought, and every thought was a weight. Her own schoolwork piled up, a silent, reproachful stack of unread articles on her desk.
The exhaustion arrived not with a dramatic collapse, but as a slow leaching of coherence. Colors seemed less vivid.Sounds became either too sharp or terribly distant. On the fourth morning, she stood before the gleaming espresso machine, her mind a perfect, blank static. Her hands moved on autopilot, scooping loose-leaf Earl Grey from a tin into the machine’s portafilter instead of coffee grounds.She fumbled with the water reservoir, her fingers numb and clumsy.
Barron found her there, staring blankly as steaming water trickled slowly, producing a thin, pale brown trickle that smelled of bergamot and malfunction. He watched for a moment, his face shifting from confusion to dawning, aching understanding. “Lee,” he said, his voice careful, as if approaching a skittish animal.She jumped, rattling the portafilter.“I’m making coffee. It’s… not working.”
“You put tea in it.”
She looked from his face to the machine and back, the connection refusing to form. “Oh.”
He moved then, gently prying her fingers from the handle. He took her hand, his own large and warm, and led her from the kitchen’s harsh light. She didn’t resist, her body operating on a faint residual command to follow.In the den, he guided her down onto the deep, leather sofa. He lifted her legs, swung them up, and placed a cushion beneath her head. “Close your eyes,” he instructed, his tone leaving no room for argument.
“I have to check the—”
“Close them.”
She did. The world, held so rigidly for days, softened at the edges and rushed away.The pillow was cool against her cheek. A blanket, pulled over her, carried the faint, clean scent of Barron’s laundry detergent. She felt his lips press softly against her forehead, a sealant for her fractured state.
She was asleep before he had straightened up, a profound, instantaneous drowning into a void without dreams.
She was asleep before he had straightened up, a profound, instantaneous drowning into a void without dreams.
It was a sound that pulled her out, not a scream this time but a wet, choked gasp, like a man breaking the surface of deep water only to find it was oil. Her eyes snapped open in the absolute dark of the den. The digital clock on the cable box glowed a sickly green: 4:03 AM. Her body knew the rhythm before her mind did. She pushed the blanket off, the soft leather of the sofa sticking to her bare legs.
The hardwood floor was cold under her feet as she padded into the hall. A sliver of yellow light bled from under Ethan’s door.She didn’t knock.She turned the handle and stepped into the warmth of the room, the air thick with the scent of clean sweat and panic.
He was sitting bolt upright in bed, the sheets twisted around his waist like shackles.His chest heaved, each inhale a ragged, insufficient thing. His eyes were wide, fixed on the far wall, but they weren’t seeing the bookcase or the draped jacket.He was somewhere else.
“Hey,” she said, her voice sleep-roughened but calm.She walked to the bed and sat on the edge, the mattress dipping under her weight. He didn’t flinch. She reached out and placed her palm flat in the center of his back, right over his pounding heart.His skin was clammy. “You’re in your room. In Georgetown. It’s Leia.”
A tremor ran through him, a full-body shudder.He blinked, the distant horror in his gaze receding by millimeters.“Lee.”
“Yeah.” She moved, shifting to sit beside him against the headboard, and opened her arms.He didn’t collapse into her like before. He leaned, slowly, letting his head rest against her shoulder, his body rigid with the effort of containing the aftershocks. She wrapped her arms around him, one hand stroking his damp hair. “Bad one?”
“Didn’t see it coming,” he muttered into her t-shirt.His voice was shredded.“It was just… the smell of the blankets. The nylon. It smelled like the bag they kept over our heads.” He took a deeper, deliberate breath, testing the air of the room. “Lavender. Your laundry detergent. Book dust.”
“See? You’re here.”
They stayed like that, fused in the pool of lamplight, for a long time. Her scar began its familiar, hot protest against the pressure of his weight. She ignored it, focusing on the gradual softening of his muscles, the slowing cadence of his breathing. She counted the pattern of a plaid flannel shirt thrown over the chair. Red line, blue line, white line.
She didn’t sleep. She didn’t move. Her own exhaustion was a heavy cape she wore, but it was secondary. Her job was to be an anchor, a fixed point in the unreliable sea of his night. She felt the precise moment true consciousness returned to him, a subtle alertness replacing the tremulous calm.
The sky outside the window faded from ink black to a deep, cool cobalt. Bird song began again, tentative and then sure.A garbage truck groaned and beeped several blocks away. The world was insisting on morning.
Ethan’s head lifted from her shoulder.He ran a hand over his face, exhaling a long, shaky breath.“You didn’t have to stay the whole time.”
“Yes I did.”
He looked at her then, really looked, noting the purple smudges under her eyes, the way she held her left side slightly away from him.“You’re hurting.”
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.” He shifted, putting deliberate space between them, his expression grim. “You can’t do this every night, Leia. I can’t let you.”
“You don’t let me do anything,” she said, her tone leaving no room for negotiation. “I choose to. That’s how this works.”
They sat in stalemate as the room grew brighter, the shapes of furniture emerging from the shadows. Down the hall, a pipe knocked as someone—Barron—turned on a shower. The day was demanding entry.
Ethan finally swung his legs over the side of the bed, his back to her. His shoulders were set in a hard line. “The medal ceremony is tomorrow.”
“I know.”
“I don’t want you to see it.”
That got her to move. She leaned forward. “What?”
“I don’t want you there.” He said it to the wall, his voice hollow. “I have to stand there in that room and get a piece of metal for surviving. While Miller and Davis get flags for their parents. I have to shake hands and look grateful. I don’t want you seeing me like that. I don’t want you in that room.”
The words landed like physical blows. She absorbed them, the pain in her side flaring in sympathy. “That’s not your choice to make.”
“This one is.” He finally turned, and his eyes were raw, stripped bare. “Please, Lee. For me. Don’t be there.”
The shower stopped down the hall. A door clicked open. Footsteps approached, paused outside the room, and then continued softly toward the kitchen. Barron, giving them space.
Leia studied her brother’s face, the fierce, proud, broken man she’d pulled from the dark. This wasn’t shame. It was protection. He wanted to shield her from the grotesque theater of his honor, from watching him compartmentalize his grief for a cameras. It was the last thing he felt he could control.
Her throat tightened.She nodded once, a sharp, defeated motion. “Okay.”
The relief that washed over his face was worse than his anger. “Okay.”
She pushed herself up from the bed, her body stiff and protesting. At the door, she turned. He was still sitting on the edge of the mattress, a statue in the dawn light. “I’ll be right outside,” she said. “In the hall. I’ll wait for you there.”
A faint, grateful tremor passed over his lips. It wasn’t a smile, but it was an acknowledgment. It was enough.
She pulled the door shut behind her, leaning against the cool wood for a moment. From the kitchen, she heard the definitive hiss of the espresso machine, properly loaded with coffee this time. The scent drifted to her, rich and promising. She pushed off the door and walked toward it, each step a movement into a day that had already fractured, a new fault line drawn straight through her heart.
She pushed off the door and walked toward it, each step a movement into a day that had already fractured, a new fault line drawn straight through her heart. The kitchen was a blur of warm light and the rich, acrid scent of properly brewed espresso. Barron stood at the counter, pouring the dark liquid into two mugs. He didn’t look up, but his posture was a question. “He doesn’t want me at the ceremony,” Leia said, the words tasting of ash. She slumped onto a stool, the cold marble of the island seeping through her thin pajamas.
Barron finished pouring, his movements precise. He slid one mug toward her, the ceramic scraping softly. “Okay.” It wasn’t agreement. It was an acknowledgment of a battlefield condition. He finally looked at her, his blue-grey eyes scanning her face. “Did you fight him on it?”
“What would be the point?” She wrapped her hands around the hot mug, letting the heat scald her palms. “He thinks he’s protecting me from watching him perform grief. He gets to control this one thing.” Her voice hitched, a tiny fracture. “So I have to sit in some hall outside and listen through a door. That’s better.”
Barron leaned his hips against the counter opposite her, cradling his own mug. The morning light cut across his shoulders. “It’s bullshit.” He said it quietly, a simple statement of fact. “But it’s his bullshit to carry right now. We just walk beside it.”
A weak, watery laugh escaped her. “Since when are you so wise?”
“Since I watched my fiancée try to brew tea in an espresso machine.” A faint smile touched his mouth. “And since I realized the strongest person I know needs someone to make her coffee when her brain shorts out.” The smile faded. “He’ll change his mind.”
“He won’t.”
“He will.”
They drank in silence for a few minutes, the only sounds the hum of the refrigerator and a distant siren. Leia’s mind replayed the raw plea in Ethan’s eyes. Don’t be there. It felt like a door shutting between them. Footsteps, slow and heavy, approached from the hall. Ethan appeared in the doorway, dressed in the same borrowed sweatpants. He looked from one to the other, sensing the charged air. “I could hear you muttering out here,” he said, his voice gravelly.
“Just discussing the critical national security issue of caffeine procurement,” Barron said, his tone deliberately light. “You want some?”
Ethan nodded, shuffling forward. He didn’t look at Leia. The avoidance was a physical ache. Barron busied himself with another cup, creating a buffer of mundane noise. Leia watched her brother’s profile, the stubborn set of his jaw, the shadow of stubble that seemed to deepen his exhaustion. He was building a wall, brick by brick, and had asked her to hand him the mortar.
The day passed in a tense, hollow mimicry of routine. Leia attended a virtual lecture, the professor’s voice a distant drone. She took notes without absorbing a single word. Barron disappeared into his room for a study session, his door firmly closed. Ethan moved between the sofa and the window, staring out at the garden, performing the stretches his physiotherapist had prescribed with a grim, mechanical determination. They orbited each other, careful not to collide.
At dusk, the presidential chef arrived with two discreet aides, transforming their kitchen into a bustling, aromatic command post. The sizzle of ribeye steaks in a cast-iron skillet, the earthy smell of roasting garlic and rosemary potatoes, the rich decadence of melted butter—it was a sensory assault of normalcy they were all meant to play along with. They ate at the formal dining table, the clink of silverware too loud in the quiet.
“Steak’s good,” Ethan offered, not looking up from his plate.
“The best,” Barron agreed, a hint of forced cheer. “Dad’s chef used to work at Jean-Georges.”
“Tastes like meat,” Ethan said, and for a second, the ghost of his old smirk appeared. “Good meat.”
It was something. A tiny crack in the wall. Leia grasped at it. “Remember when Mom tried to go vegan for a week and Dad secretly fried bologna in the garage?”
Ethan’s shoulders loosened a fraction. “She smelled it on his clothes. She was so mad.” He took another bite, chewing slowly. “He said it was a ‘protein emergency.’“
The story, a silly fragment from a world before, hung in the air between them. It was a shared coordinate. We are from here. We remember this. The rest of the meal passed with less strain, punctuated by Barron’s dry commentary on his finance professor’s bow ties. The wall remained, but a window had opened.
Night fell, and with it, the familiar, dreadful anticipation. Leia lay in her bed, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the gasp, the thrash, the silence that meant she should go to him. It didn’t come. The house was quiet. An hour ticked by. Then another. She heard the soft creak of his door opening, footsteps in the hall, the quiet click of the front door leading to the garden.
She threw off the covers and followed. The cool night air raised goosebumps on her arms. Ethan sat on the wide stone steps that led down to the dormant lawn, a dark silhouette against the moon-washed flagstones. He was just sitting, looking up at the handful of stars visible through the city’s glow. She sat down beside him, not touching. The stone was cold through her pajamas.
“Can’t sleep?” she asked.
“Don’t want to,” he replied. His breath misted in the air. “If I’m awake, I choose the memories. Mostly.”
They sat in silence for a long time, watching a plane’s blinking lights crawl across the sky. The tension of the day had bled away, leaving a weary emptiness. He spoke first, his voice so low it was almost part of the night. “When they handed me the dress uniform this afternoon,” he said, “I put it on. Just to see.” He paused, gathering the words. “I looked in the mirror. The ribbons were wrong. Everything was wrong. It was like looking at a stranger wearing my brother’s face.”
Leia didn’t say anything. She just listened, her own heart a dull drum in her chest.
“And all I could think was,” he continued, the words coming faster now, tumbling out into the dark, “that the only person who would know it was all wrong… was you. You’d look at me and you wouldn’t see the uniform or the medal. You’d see me. And you’d know the difference.” He finally turned his head to look at her. His eyes were pools of shadow, but the moonlight caught the wet track of a single tear down his cheek. “I don’t want to be alone in a room full of people who see a hero. I want to be in a room with the one person who sees a messed-up guy who needs his sister.”
He swallowed hard, his throat working. “I changed my mind. I don’t want you waiting in the hall. I want you there. Right there where I can see you. Please.”