Black hair. Muddy hazel eyes. Whipcord lean, muscled body. Masculine but not really handsome.

Blake is nothing like Carey. Negative to positive. I think their differences were the basis of their friendship. Each was what the other wanted to be.

“How are you?” he asks finally, staring at a splat of gray bird shit on my windshield.

“Seriously?” I say with a short laugh.

He sighs. “What do you want from me, Q?”

The truth, for a start. Maybe a lie to make me feel better.

“This isn’t the best time for you to come around. I wouldn’t even be here, except I offered to finish up for Mr. Breen.”

It’s hard to look at him, so I watch the shop’s Stars and Stripes snap and snag around the flagpole. “I wondered if you’d heard anything about Carey. The last time he wrote me, he was headed to Marjah. Is that where he went MIA?”

Blake’s surprise is palpable. He didn’t know I still talked to Carey. “You know how it is. The military isn’t telling the Breens much. His unit was on a scouting mission, hunting for IEDs. They got pinned down by snipers. The rest of his unit made it back, wounded but alive. Carey wasn’t with them.”

I imagine it like it’s a spread in National Geographic. Carey in his dusty camo, focused on doing his duty and trying not to be a target. Wondering how he can save everyone. Marjah’s one of the last Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. Poppy fields keep the local opium suppliers in business and the insurgents funded. Taliban soldiers use women and children as human shields and take cover in civilian homes. Marines are dying, fighting an invisible enemy.

“God! Why the hell did he have to go there?”

A smile lifts one side of Blake’s mouth. “Because he’s a damned hero.”

He hasn’t smiled at me in months. Not since before Carey left. If only I could snap a portrait of him and frame it for the hours I spend alone. I think about Blake’s mouth on mine and yearning spirals in my belly. Carey, I have loved for years, but Blake makes me ache. I don’t feel safe with him. I feel alive in a way I never did with Carey. That should have been my first clue.

I pull my gaze from Blake’s mouth and realize he is staring at my lips too. Maybe he is remembering. His eyes take on that tortured look he’s worn for months. It’s my fault. My silence put that expression there.

My jaw unclenches to tell him the truth that would set us both free: We. Didn’t. Cheat.

Three little words. A breath and we could comfort each other. Hold each other.

But he says, “You can’t be here, Q. It hurts the Breens to see you.”

I recoil. “What about you, Blake? I wasn’t the only one in those pictures.” Just the only recognizable one. In the picture, Blake held me, our clothes more off than on, but his back faced the camera. Innocent, due to the bad angle the photo was shot from.

He hunches his shoulders like he is warding off a chill. My camera strap is wound around his hands, and I study the grease creased into the side of his nails. Funny. He hates having dirty hands.

“I’m sorry,” Blake says to my windshield. “But I don’t think it would help them if I told the truth. I don’t want to hurt them any more than we already have.”

He looks like a hero for supporting the Breens, both emotionally and at the shop, while I continue to take the blame alone. My knees and elbow throb as a reminder. I don’t understand how I can simultaneously want to both hit him and touch him. Once upon a time, he was my best friend besides Carey. Back when I was still Carey’s Quinn.

“Why did you call me? I know it was you.”

You wanted to hear my voice. You missed me.

“I thought you should know about Carey. So you could steer clear of the Breens.”

I close my eyes and inhale one, two shutter clicks. “Get out,” I say calmly. He’s reaching for the door handle when I say, “You’re a coward. You know that, right?”

He stiffens and, for an instant, he reminds me of my father. Then he shakes me off with a violent twist of his arm. “Fuck you, Q. After what you did, you don’t get to judge me.”

The Jeep door slams behind him, and my camera bounces on the seat where he threw it. He stalks back to the garage, and I put the Jeep in gear. If Carey were here, he would have poked at Blake until he stopped acting like a prick. Then Carey would have scolded me for being such a bitch to Blake because the guy was doing the best he could, given the circumstances. If Carey were here, I would tell him to take his damned secret and shove it.

But he’s not here. And I won’t break another promise.

So I will pretend we were still together when he deployed, lying to our best friend and everyone who hates me for cheating on him. And I will forget that he broke up with me two days before those pictures of Blake and me were taken.

Because then I would have to remember how Carey had admitted that he loved a boy.

*   *   *

My father is in his garden when I get home.

The permafrost is melting, and he is itching to get his hands in the dirt. His gardening obsession started the year my mother left. Each winter, he kills hours mapping out the rows of fruits, vegetables, and herbs that he will plant. March arrives, and he fades from the house, consumed with preparing the soil for the seeds and bulbs he’s cultivated from last year’s harvest. He tends to the plot of land with the tenderness of a sweetheart caring for his lover.

Carey and I used to laugh at him. At the way he would force the land to grow at his command. This year, I’m not sure I can stand to watch my father dote on his plants.