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The flag is heavy in her hands. She’s still holding it when Mitchell comes up to her.
His eyes are red as the sunset. They stand together before the stone, alone in this grief-wrought field. The flag is thick cotton, woven with blues and whites, the red of the American flag. His eyes flicker to it for a moment.
“You should have it,” Sarah says. Her voice is dry like the rasp of pitted sand. “He was always yours anyway.”
“Ice -”
“Ice,” she repeats. “Ice.” She clenches her hands, watches as wrinkles grow stark on the patterned cloth. “He never let me call him that. A call-sign is for comrades in war. The parts of him I will never know.”
“I’m sorry,” Mitchell says.
“Are you?”
A pause. “No,” he says. “I guess I’m not.”
Sarah closes her eyes. “I always knew,” she says quietly. “I always knew that it would be like this. That there’d be a part of him I could never reach. A part of him I could never love. Sometimes I wondered what it was that he kept from me. The wars and the fighting. The lives he’s ended.” She looks to him, Pete Mitchell. Maverick. Even after all these years, he’s still sharp and fluid, a man in his prime against her, the withering widow. “Could I have loved that part of him? The one that went to war?”
Mitchell holds her gaze. “Would you have wanted to?”
“You were there,” Sarah says. “Tell me about the man you loved.”
He looks away. His eyes grow silver and glassy. He blinks, and tears slip down his cheeks. Pete Mitchell stands as a tall sentinel in the waning light, grieving where the widow will not. And why should she? Sarah lost Tom twenty years ago. She’s already had two decades to cry.
“I don’t think I loved him,” he says at last. “Not really. Not enough. If I loved him, genuinely loved him, I would have done the selfless thing. Told him to go back to you. To his life at home.”
“Do you regret it?” Her voice is stately. Calm. She’s never felt more composed, staring at this man who’s fucked her husband.
“I asked him that question once,” Mitchell says. “He never gave me an answer.”
“But you know where you stand.”
He thinks for some time. “I do,” he says. “I don’t regret it. And I never will.”
Sarah looks at the headstone. It’s veined with gold, carved with Tom's name in a simple print. It’s white marble, white as ice. She wants to laugh. She wants to cry. Most of all, she wants her husband back.
“Sometimes,” Sarah says, “sometimes I’m thankful you were there. Because if you hadn’t been, I’d have to love that part of Tom instead. The part that would have killed me.”
“That’s the only part of him I could ever love.”
Her nose burns and her throat aches. “It takes a strange compassion to love a monster.”
Mitchell’s smile tears at his cheeks like an open wound.
They don’t talk for a long time. The sun dips below the horizon. The last of the sky settles to a faint purple. “They knew, you know,” she says. “Our kids. From the moment they were old enough to understand infidelity. They knew.
“I hate you,” Sarah says. Her words are toneless and raw. “But more than that, I pity you. Envy you. I can only hope you feel the same.”
“Would it make you feel better if I did?”
She stares at Tom’s grave. “No,” she says softly.
Slowly, she looks back to Mitchell. His tears are gone, replaced with a cold, cold apathy. This, Sarah thinks, is how she felt all those nights, falling asleep alone. But for all her bitterness, the cruel vindication is nowhere to be found.
She holds out the flag. “Take it.”
Mitchell stirs. “Sarah -”
“You were the one who could love the monster. That makes you a far better spouse than I.”
He doesn’t move. “You loved the rest of him.”
“Not where it mattered.”
“He was more than his wrongs.”
Her laughter is like broken glass against bloodied skin. “You can’t love a rose for its petals and wipe away the thorns.” Her cheeks are wet. “ Take the fucking flag, Mitchell.”
He doesn’t move. The shadows stretch along the crevices of his face. It will be night soon.
He stares at her. In the darkness, his grief burns like fire. “You’re - doing this for Ice.”
“This is the closest you’ll ever get to having him. To having a home. I’m doing it for you, Mitchell.”
His voice is a broken rasp. “Why?”
Why? Sarah doesn’t know why. She doesn’t know. She wants it to be day again, for the sun to rise and for her husband to wake with it; she wants to see the dried tears on Mitchell’s face, the red corners of his eyes. “I was his wife,” she says hoarsely. “I brought out the best in him. The compassion, the selflessness. The humanity. Maybe - maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe kindness should be my first and last recourse.”
“I don’t deserve your kindness.”
She looks to the first glimpse of the night stars, faint silver against the dark sky. “If I was his wife, then you were his ruin. Maybe I’m doing this to keep you up at night. Maybe I’m doing this because I want you to remember Tom as I saw him. Maybe my kindness and your cruelty is the only understanding we’ll ever have.”
“Maybe,” he says quietly. “Maybe.”
Slowly, his fingers wrap around the edge. When Sarah lets go, he folds the cloth reverently, holds it close to his chest.
He doesn’t thank her. It’s not a favor. It’s spite and anger and twenty years of despair draped in a flag. But in a way, it’s dreams and hopes and all their good memories that’ll stay golden until they die. This is Tom: the kindness that Mitchell could never love; the severity that Sarah could never embrace. It’s a patchwork of all their sins, and somehow all the more complete for it.
“You made him happy,” she says. “I have that to love you for.”
He looks down at the flag. “I never made him happy. Everytime he left, another part of him died with me. Ice needed me to live. You were his reason to keep living.”
“Then maybe I do pity you after all.”
His smile fades. “You wouldn’t be the first.”
They stare at each other for a long time. And then they move as one, reaching for the other.
When they pull apart, Sarah wonders if Tom’s ever done this before with Mitchell. If, in their twenty years as lovers, they’ve ever done something so simple as hug and talk about their day and the weather and their hopes for tomorrow. If they’ve ever even met without fucking. Ever kissed without sex.
Somehow, she thinks not.
His final words to her are jagged with wounds old and new. “Bye, Sarah.”
“Bye, Pete.”
He nods in farewell. In his arms is the flag, the last he will ever know of Tom. Together, they disappear into the darkness of the graveyard.
Alone with her husband, Sarah lingers before his final remains. The air is silent. The night is cold. It’s late. She should leave, and she will. But not now.
Sarah closes her eyes and stands with Tom for a little while longer.