The Debt 6 by Kelly Favor Page A

guys?”
    “Sure, some of them.   It wasn’t my job to decide who lived and died.   I followed orders like everyone else.”
    Raven turned and looked at him.   His eyes were dark and pained.   “Nobody could ever be the same after something like that,” she said, stroking his chest.
    “The only thing that kept me somewhat tied to the rest of the world was Peyton,” he said.   “I thought of her like a candle in the darkness, and in the worst times, I thought of her smile, her eyes.   I thought she would be there to love me when I came back, and it kept me going through all those black nights.”
    Raven’s stomach twisted like he’d just buried a knife between her ribs, but she hid her feelings.   Thinking about Jake’s strong emotions towards another woman, even a dead woman, was very painful.   But Raven had been wanting Jake to tell her about himself for so long that she kept her own pain well disguised.
    This is what you wanted , Raven .   Don’t complain that it hurts now that he’s finally doing what you’ve been asking for.
    “What was it like between you and Peyton when you came home?” Raven asked, picking up his hand and kissing his knuckles.
    “It was different than I expected,” Jake said softly.
    Raven hated that she felt a thrill of victory in his statement.   This was a dead woman, and Raven still was competitive with her.   It was disgusting in a way.
    “Different how?” Raven asked.
    “I might be remembering it this way because of what I found out about her later on.”   Jake took a deep breath and released it slowly.   “I was so fucked up from the war that she was probably spooked.   I had all the classic symptoms—insomnia, bursts of anger from out of nowhere, paranoid, reacting to loud sounds as if I was under fire from the enemy, and of course I didn’t want to tell her about any of it.”
    “Did she try to talk to you about what was wrong?”
    “A little, but not much.   Of course, I wasn’t very encouraging of her efforts, but I can’t say she tried all that hard either.”
    Raven couldn’t help but once again feel glad at some level.   She didn’t want Peyton to have tried, and she didn’t want Jake to have really loved this other woman.   The truth was that Raven wanted him and his emotions all for herself.
    “Were you two arguing a lot?”
    “We were mostly just distant, like two people living on two different planets.   Especially the first few months I was back.   At the same time, we had a wedding to plan, and things were moving ahead on that front.   By the time the worst of my symptoms had subsided and I was ready to try and work things out with Peyton, ready to try and fix whatever was wrong with us, I found out that she was sick.”
    Raven looked up at him again.   He made eye contact with her and gave her the ghost of a smile.  
    She reached out and stroked his cheek lightly.   “You went through a lot in a very short time.”
    “I still remember the day she came back from the doctors and told me that she had cancer.   She’d known she was getting a biopsy result and didn’t even mention it to me.”
    “That doesn’t make sense.   Why didn’t she tell you?”
    His body tensed.   “I don’t know.   Maybe she was busy telling the guy she was fucking.”
    Raven couldn’t even speak.   Her entire body flooded with disgust at herself for thinking so selfishly about his relationship with Peyton.   He’d been through horror after horror and disappointment and betrayal, and here she was only concerned with how it affected her.
    “Jake, I didn’t know.   I’m so sorry.”
    “I jumped ahead in the story,” he laughed.   “I didn’t find that part out until the end, when Peyton was in the very last days of her life.”
    “You took care of her until she passed, didn’t you?”
    He nodded.   “I did.   Even after I found out that she’d been having an affair, I took care of her.   By that point, I could see it was