“Can we do anything?”
“Not directly. The people handling civilian care are handling it.”
He nodded, disappointed.
Leah recognized another temptation: after guilt, people often wanted a reparative task large enough to balance the feeling. But Colin could not make himself the center of the girl’s story either. He had helped carry her father. He had handed her a shoe. Those actions mattered without entitling him to remain involved.
“Sometimes the part you get to do is small,” Leah said.
Colin gave her a sideways look. “You really collect unpleasant wisdom.”
“Occupational hazard.”
He smiled.
Weeks later, when he visited Mason, Colin brought up the daughter again. Mason listened, then asked why Colin seemed angry at himself for not knowing the rest.
“Because I want to know if helping him was complicated,” Colin said.
Mason stared. “It was already complicated.”
That answer stayed with him. The mystery was not a missing piece required before he could understand his own choice. Uncertainty was part of the choice itself.
Mason returned weeks later for recovery closer to home. Before he left, Colin visited him.
Leah did not go with him.
The conversation belonged to them.
Colin later told her only one part.
“I admitted I almost refused to help the other guy,” he said.
“What did Mason say?”
“He asked whether I helped him.”
“And?”
“I said yes. He said, ‘Then stop asking me to judge the version of you that didn’t get the final vote.'”
Leah smiled.
“I like Mason.”
“He’s annoying.”
The paper bird remained in Colin’s mind.
His younger sister mailed him drawings constantly. Before that day, he had treated them as precious mostly because she asked him to. He folded them into his bag, careful not to lose them but not always looking closely.
After the room with the child, he began opening every page slowly.
One drawing showed their family as four enormous heads with tiny bodies. Another showed Colin in a uniform the wrong color. His sister had written his name backward in one corner and covered the mistake with a star sticker.
He sent her a message asking how to fold a paper bird.
She replied with six photographs and an insult about his intelligence.
