“Did you ask before you mocked it?”
“No, Master Chief.”
“Did you know whose table you were leaning over?”
“No, Master Chief.”
Thorne’s voice remained calm, which somehow made each question heavier.
George closed his hand around his cup of water. The paper flexed slightly under his fingers.
He could have ended Miller in that moment with a sentence, not professionally perhaps, but inside himself.
He could have given them the story, the mission, the names that still woke him before dawn.
He could have watched the young man shrink under the full weight of what he had insulted.
Part of him wanted to.
Not for revenge. He was too old for that kind of heat.
But because forgetting had become so easy for the world, and he was tired of carrying memory alone.
Yet another part of him saw Miller’s youth, his arrogance, his brittle need to be larger than everyone nearby.
He saw a boy wearing a warrior’s body and mistaking fearlessness for wisdom.
That did not excuse him.
It only made the choice harder.
Thorne looked back at George, and his eyes asked permission without saying the word.
The entire room waited.
George heard the hum of the fluorescent lights. The distant clatter of pans from the kitchen. Davis breathing too fast beside him.
He heard, beneath all of it, that old voice from Luzon.
“See you on the other side, Ghost.”
For years, George had believed silence was mercy.
Silence spared the living from stories they could not understand. Silence protected the past from careless hands.
Silence also allowed boys like Miller to grow into men who thought honor began with themselves.
The thought did not arrive like thunder. It came quietly, with the weariness of a bill finally placed on the table.
