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They’d planned on going to his favorite restaurant for fried chicken.”
    They sat in silence for a while. Julie knew that Gabe had to be beating himself up for not seeing the crash coming. “If a person doesn’t want you to know something, they will find a way to keep it private. You can’t beat yourself up about this, Gabe. Butter obviously had something, some switch, flip or something.” She waved a hand, frustrated because that sounded ridiculous but she couldn’t give him more concrete answers. Heaving a sigh, he dropped his mostly untouched plate to the coffee table. “I know that. The curiosity could drive me insane, though.”
    He gave her a sad smile and she couldn’t help but reach out to stroke his hand. Turning his hand over, he wove his fingers between hers. “I’m really glad to see you again, Julie.”
    “I’m really glad to see you again too, Gabe.”
    “What have you been doing for all these months? Nobody seemed to know.”
    Julie loved that he’d asked around about her. She’d hoped that he would call her or text her, but he hadn’t. She worked with men every day that were struggling with amputations, and cutting Gabe and Butter out of her life had felt like part of her heart had been amputated as well. “I still work at Dr. Petrovic. Been there for a couple years now.”
    And was dissatisfied as she possibly could be. Julie didn’t say that out loud because there wasn’t anything he could do about it. And she couldn’t decide if she was actually dissatisfied with the job or because her personal life was in the toilet. She loved working with the vets and their families that made up most of the practice’s clients, and maybe that in itself was part of her problem, seeing the vets and their families together. In the not too distant past, she’d imagined that being her and Gabe.
    After she and Gabe had broken up, she’d started picking up shifts at Walter Reed. She’d left the hospital originally because she was stressed out from dealing with the hardest, most desperate cases. Lacey had left for the same reason. But Julie had needed something to fill her time and a part of her needed to be needed like that. She felt like it was her true calling as a nurse to be there. She just needed to find some middle ground between the urgent and desperate and the mundane, like Petrovic’s general practice.
    Gabe watched her narrow-eyed. “But are you happy?”
    “Enough,” she told him eventually. “Lacey left last year for Colorado and it’s been quiet there ever since. She just mentioned that her VA in Colorado is hiring. That was kind of an intriguing tidbit. I’ve really missed her.”
    For a moment, she thought alarm drifted through his eyes but it was gone too quickly to be sure.
    That calm expression settled across his face, as if he understood exactly what she meant. “I can’t imagine being deployed again and Butter not being there with me, nearby, at least, if not in the same boat, you know?”
    Julie nodded, totally familiar with the feeling. “You’ll take it one day at a time and every time you do something, it will get just the tiniest bit easier. Believe me, I had to completely reconfigure my life after we separated.” She choked out a laugh and waved at the pizza box on the table. “I couldn’t even order frickin’ Dominoes without thinking about you guys and crying.”
    Gabe winced. “Things were pretty tense between Butter and me when you left. I didn’t talk to him for a couple days and he seemed totally confused. He didn’t understand what he had done.”
    “No,” she agreed. “He came to see me a couple days after the fact and tried to kiss me into coming back. Said something about dreaming about loving me for a long time. Did he tell you that?”
    Gabe’s face had closed down with anger. “No, he didn’t.”
    Julie felt like she was talking ill of the dead. “I shouldn’t have said anything.” She started to pull her hand away but he stopped