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mid-afternoon sun. It was breathtaking.
    She glanced over at him, and caught him looking at her the way she was looking at the valley. Heat rose in her cheeks.
    Emily stopped by a log railing and set one foot against a post, stretching her calf. Rafa stood beside her, rubbing his wounded leg. The skin below his PT shorts was puckered and red. When he’d first called them PT shorts, she’d thought that meant Physical Therapy, but he’d explained that in the military it was Physical Training. Even though he wasn’t with an actual unit, he still felt like it was his duty to stay fit.
    “Your leg hurting you?” Emily asked.
    “I’ll live.” He stood up straight, puffing his chest out like he was just fine, even though she could tell that he had to be in pain. “I used to run up and down hills like this with eighty pounds of gear on my back.”
    “Hills?” The valley was long and steep, and the peaks behind them climbed toward the heavens. On the upper slopes, there was already snow.
    “If you let yourself start thinking that you have a mountain to climb, you’ll never get out of the valley.”
    “Your soldiering sounds an awful lot like my psychology.”
    “It is. We both deal with children.” He grinned. “You’ve never seen a manchild until you’ve been inside a barracks. But enough Army talk, no?” He looked out into the valley. “It’s very pretty.”
    That was fine. If he didn’t want to talk about his pain, she wasn’t going to make him. She wanted to be more than his friend, and definitely not his shrink. Emily pointed to a spot in the hills, on the nearer side of town. “You can’t quite see it, but my apartment is over there behind that ridge.”
    Rafa looked at the ridge, his jaw clenching and his eyes narrowing.
    “What?” she asked.
    He took a couple deep breaths, each exhalation turning to a cloud in the cool mountain air. “The shape of that ridge just reminded me of Afghanistan. We joked that Kandahar Province wasn’t hell, but you could see it from there.” He squeezed her hand again. “The thing is, Kandahar is one of the most beautiful places on Earth.”
    “When people weren’t trying to kill you?”
    “No, it was beautiful even then. When you are in a war zone, you must always remember that people are trying to kill you. Even when the bullets are not flying, they are planning and maneuvering. The day you forget is the day you go home on a med-evac.”
    Emily didn’t respond. He hadn’t talked too much about his experiences in war, and she didn’t want to interrupt him if he was finally going to open up to her about them. She could sense a deep well of emotion within him, and she knew he still needed to come to terms with the things he’d seen. And the person he’d become.
    When he spoke again, his voice was quieter. “That final day, I thought that we were safe. The tribal leaders we were escorting were among the most respected in the whole province, and they assured us that we were safe.”
    He swallowed hard. “We weren’t.”
    Emily waited a little longer, hoping he’d open up more, but he just stared into the distance. She had a feeling that he was seeing something other than a peaceful Colorado valley.
    “Do you want to walk the rest of the way down?” she asked. “I’m starting to get cold.”
    “If you wish.”
    He walked beside her, not letting go of her hand. After a few minutes, he spoke again, his voice strained. “My leave is ending soon.”
    A pang of fear went through her. He was still technically in the Army, and the talk of Afghanistan made her worry that the government was going to find some way to send him back, prostheses and all. “What does that mean?”
    “I don’t know yet. I’ve been offered an honorable medical discharge. I talked to my father this week. He said his firm might hire me.”
    Emily bit her lip, considering that. It was a relief to know that he wasn’t about to go back into a war zone, but his father’s consulting