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Mac looked at the lantern. The moth was still at it, too dumb to work out that the light wasn’t going to let it in.

“Long enough that I knew,” he said.

“Knew what?”

He couldn’t answer.

Tell her. She asked. She actually asked.

He closed his eyes and he was instantly transported. All he could see was a flat, white glare surrounding the marching shapes ahead of him. He heard the sound of his own breath going wrong, and he watched a kid—God, he’d been a kid, nineteen or maybe twenty—looking back over his shoulder to check whether the Canadian instructor was still coming.

Mac opened his eyes.

“Knew I was in trouble,” he said. “About two hours before anybody else did. And I kept going.”

“You kept going,” Jodie repeated.

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Mac rubbed the back of his neck. Even now, sitting in a tent in Colorado with the woman he loved, the honest answer sounded stupid.

“Because stopping wasn’t on the menu.”

But stopping this conversation is.

Jodie waited.

She’s good at this. She just sits there and lets you hang yourself.

He blew out a breath.

“Okay. Picture it. I’m the instructor. Twelve years in, selected, trained, the whole package. Those guys have been told this Canadian knows what he’s doing.” He turned his hand over. “They weren’t soft, Jodie. Some of them had been fighting for four, five years straight. They’d buried people. But they’d been handed to me, and the deal was I set the pace.”

“So if you called a halt⁠—”

“Then the pace was whatever the soft Canadian instructor at the back could stumble through.” He shook his head. “That’s not fair to them. It’s not how they thought… Sorry. That’s the ugly version.”

“So tell me the ugly version.”

Mac studied her.

She means it.

“I thought if I called a halt,” he said slowly, “they’d think it was because I couldn’t hack it. Not because it was smart, because the instructor was cooked and had to sit down. And then every single thing I’d taught them about pushing through, about the standard, about not quitting on your mates—” He stopped. “It all comes off the wall.”

“So you did the math.”

“Yeah. I kept doing the math in my head. Another kilometer. Get to the next checkpoint. Take five there. Drink more. Get some shade if we could find any.”

Just make it a little farther.

He could remember exactly how reasonable every decision had seemed at the time.

That was the ugly part.

“I wasn’t thinking, Hey, I wonder how close I can get to cooking my brain today. I thought I was managing it.” He counted it off on his fingers without really meaning to. “Drink more. Loosen what I could loosen. Shorten my stride, lengthen my breathing. Get to the next feature, reassess. Get to the one after that, reassess.”