The Husband Hour(71)

She nodded. It was a good question. “They were afraid, because of Rory’s fame, that the news would leak out before they could reach me. They couldn’t risk waiting.”

She sagged with exhaustion, her entire body weighted.

Matt moved close, unclipped her mic, and took the sound pack from her waist. She felt like collapsing against him. He steered her away from the camera and over to the bed.

“Just sit here for a minute. Let me get those off.” He turned off the lights, clicking on only a bedside reading lamp. The room felt calmer, and her sobs quieted to hiccups.

Matt pulled up a chair so he sat facing her. He reached for her hands, damp from her soggy tissue.

“Lauren, I understand.”

“No, you don’t,” she said. And then the words she’d been holding in for four years: “Because it’s all my fault.”

There. It was out. And maybe this was what she’d been afraid of revealing all along, not Rory’s failings, but her own.

“Lauren, you know guilt is a common feeling in a situation like this. He died; you’re still here. I felt it too with my brother.”

“No, you don’t understand. Rory volunteered for that second tour.”

Matt said nothing for a minute, and she knew the storyteller in him could put the pieces together. She’d refused to see her husband and banned him from their home. And after two months of being shut out, he turned back to the place where he felt useful, strong, in control; he sent himself back to Iraq. And he lost his life.

“I didn’t even know it was possible for him to go back that soon,” she said. “He had to have gotten special permission. He had to have wanted to get away that badly.”

“He would have been sent back eventually. You know that,” Matt said.

She shook her head, unable to speak. All she could hear was Emerson’s words the day of Rory’s memorial.



Hordes of photographers and news vans waited outside of her house. Two of Rory’s former teammates went into the house first, returned with bedsheets, and used them to shield her from the cameras as they hustled her from the car and through the front door.

The doorbell kept ringing. The house was filled with military personnel, the guys from Rory’s platoon and many more, plus the entire LA Kings team and guys from nearly every team he’d played on since middle school.

She noticed Rory’s mother and Emerson heading toward the bedrooms. Lauren had offered to have Kay Kincaid stay with her, but she’d said she preferred the hotel where her son was staying. Lauren wondered if she was going to the guest bedroom to lie down, if she was feeling okay.

Lauren followed them into the hallway.

“Kay, are you doing all right?”

Rory’s mother, tall for a woman and once spry and athletic, looked frail as she leaned on Emerson. She was in her late sixties; her hair was stark white and her olive complexion was uncharacteristically pale against her plain black dress. Her eyes were dark. They were Rory’s eyes.

“Are you following us?” Kay said.

“What? No. I mean, yes. I wanted to check on you.”

“She’s fine,” said Emerson. “Mother, go on ahead. I want to talk to Lauren for a minute.”

This was it, Lauren thought. She and Emerson were finally united. But it was too late for it to matter.

“Rough day,” she said.

“Save your crocodile tears for someone who buys it.”

She looked at him, stunned.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“If you hadn’t thrown my brother out of this house, if you hadn’t refused to join him on post, he’d probably still be here today.”

She knew she shouldn’t bite, but she couldn’t help herself. She was already blaming herself for everything. Emerson’s recriminations couldn’t be worse.

“No one wishes more than I do that we’d fixed our marriage before…before…”

“He volunteered to go back, you know.”

She hadn’t.

“No. It was soon, but I thought—”

“He campaigned for redeployment. It was the only thing he could do to get over losing his marriage. I have all the letters to prove it.”

She was shocked, but her instinct for self-preservation forced her to defend herself.

“He wouldn’t have been there in the first place if it weren’t for your influence!”

“You know, there’s a reason they give guys dwell time, keep them stateside after a deployment. They need it. But a public figure like Rory jumping right back in? Permission granted. Still, you have to wonder how things would have played out if he’d waited to go back until he was more battle-ready. If he hadn’t been running away from you.”



“It’s all my fault,” she said to Matt.

“Lauren, listen to me: You know better than that. You think you should have stayed in a dangerous, abusive situation to keep your husband around so he wouldn’t go back into a war zone? Think about this rationally. Just take a step back and look at it. I see things in terms of narrative, okay? My work is to understand cause and effect. You are not connecting the dots in a logical way.”

She sobbed. “You really don’t see it how I do?” she said. “It’s so obvious to me.”