Necessary Secrets. Barbara Phinney

loaded the baggage onto the truck’s bed. “Um, I need the pallet back sometime, Ms. Mitchell.” He turned to Jon. “Is this all right?”

      “Fine,” he muttered. Her stuff looked exactly like Rick’s. Rick’s stuff had had bright blue strips of cloth tied to the handles of the barrack boxes and duffel bag. Probably in order to easily recognize them in the sea of olive green Jon could imagine lined the floor of a Hercules cargo plane.

      Sylvie’s strips of material were the same color.

      Sweat beaded on his forehead. Yet his insides chilled him. He hadn’t received Rick’s stuff until six weeks after he’d buried him. And then, sick of not getting the answers he needed, and encouraged by his chief, he’d dumped his brother’s effects into his living room and called the airline. All that was left of Rick’s life had been sitting in his living room for almost a month.

      Damn it, Rick deserved better.

      Jon searched the horizon, a flat line broken up by the outline of the library beyond. Could Sylvie be right? Had he been delaying the inevitable? But to go through all of Rick’s things, every last scrap? What the hell would he do with it all? Longing ached his bones. Damn it, Rick, why did you have to die so young?

      He studied Sylvie’s profile in the back window of the truck as she peered into the bed at something. How had she felt, sorting through her lover’s clothes and uniforms, packing up his personal items?

      Being one hell of a woman, Sylvie would have managed, just as she’d manage parenthood. But she couldn’t give her baby the one thing he deserved: someone who could tell him about his father.

      Already he was thinking of the kid as a male. A boy, a lively blond boy just like Rick. A boy who needed a man in his life, like Jon and Rick had needed their own father even before some coward killed him.