Ever After Read online

“Hey!” Joe sat up. “You skipped a part.”

  “That’s the deal.” Justin chuckled and leaned back against one elbow. “I have the right to censor.”

  “Shoot. I miss all the good parts.” He made an exasperated sound. “You still walking around with her picture in your boot?”

  “Yep. Every day.”

  “Man, I can’t relate.” He shook his head. “I’m hittin’ the hay. You can read over the lovey-dovey parts in peace.”

  Justin smiled. “’Night, Joe.”

  “’Night.” His buddy flipped off his light switch and rolled onto his other side.

  “Don’t forget your prayers.”

  “Ah, man!” He craned a look over his shoulder. “You interrupted me. I was already past the Dear God part.”

  A bit of laughter shook Justin. How great it was having Joe’s friendship. These Baghdad nights would be too lonely without his buddy. Some nights they didn’t talk about Emily at all, but pulled out their Bibles and went over the book of James or Colossians or Hebrews. Anything that might give them peace and hope to fight another day.

  He opened the letter again and found the part he’d skipped.

  Justin, I can’t believe you’ve been gone nearly three weeks. It feels like three years. Whoever said absence makes the heart grow fonder was right. Only I’m not sure how much fonder my heart can get without bursting through my chest. If you come back and find a hole where my heart used to be, you’ll know why.

  It made him smile, Emily that crazy over him. Let her know, God, let her understand that I feel the same way.

  He sighed, careful to keep quiet so Joe could get some sleep. He found his place and kept reading.

  I’m drinking coffee out of the mug you gave me. That means I’m thinking of the mud you’re getting over in the desert and yes, I know. You wish you were here with me, drinking a latte instead … just for the record, I wish the same thing. Thinking of you, Justin. Missing you like crazy. I love you, Emily.

  Justin folded the letter and placed it in the drawer with the others. Then he reached for the scrapbook. Slowly, he worked his way through the photographs. By the time he finished, Joe was out to the world, snoring louder than usual. He put the book away. It was late. Tomorrow he’d need to be as sharp as he’d been today. Careful to keep his head low when the bullets started to fly.

  He turned off the light and lay in bed, his eyes open. A lot had happened today, a lot that filled his head with images he’d have for a lifetime. But the one that stayed with him as he fell asleep wasn’t the protestors lying in a pool of blood or even the Iraqi children — before and after the attacks. It wasn’t the little boy who’d clung to him for so long. It was a different image.

  The one of Lauren Gibbs, her eyes truly opened for what Justin guessed might’ve been the first time in her entire life. And as he fell asleep, he wondered what she must’ve been thinking as she drove away. And he wondered something else.

  What she would write for Time magazine as a result.

  FIFTEEN

  Bob Maine reached the end of the story on his computer screen and leaned back in his chair. He cussed under his breath. “Gibbs … what’d you go and do?”

  He’d known it was coming. Half a year in the shadows of Top Gun could change a person. Still … Lauren’s first stories hadn’t seemed different. Same cutting-edge reporting, same skepticism. He stared at the screen. But this? He shook his head. Children clamoring after U.S. soldiers, protestors trying to thank the United States? It sounded like something the military public information office would cough up on its own behalf.

  Whatever was going on, he had to get to the bottom of it. He’d placed an urgent call to the compound and left a message for her. He knew her schedule; he was expecting her call any minute. If this was what she was going to produce from Iraq, she’d be better off stateside.

  “Hurry up and call, Gibbs.” He tapped his finger on the desk and scrolled to the top of the story. He’d already read it twice. He was partway through the first paragraph for the third time when the phone rang. He grabbed it. “Bob Maine.”

  “Bob?” The connection wasn’t great, but the static couldn’t hide her defensive tone. “This is Lauren. You read my report?”

  “Gibbs!” Across the room, a line of reporters looked his way. He lowered his voice. “Are you kidding me? This PR babble you sent me is your coverage of the protest?”

  “I was there, Bob. I saw every bit of it.” Her tone was passionate. “No, it isn’t what I usually find when I go out to cover a story. But I’m a reporter, and a very good one. You said so yourself.” She took a breath. “You sent me over to Iraq to get the news, right? Isn’t that right?”

  Bob wasn’t sure what to say. He hadn’t expected this. A sheepish promise to edit her story, yes. But a fierce defense of it? “What are you trying to say, Gibbs? That the report you gave me is fair and accurate?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t hesitate. “More fair than anything I’ve ever written.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m going to tell you.” And for the next thirty minutes, his star war correspondent not only explained the events she’d covered in the report, she explained her personal biases and how they’d affected her reporting. She sounded sharp and intelligent — and troubled.

  When she finished, Bob was still frustrated. But she’d made her point. “You should’ve been a lawyer. They get paid more.”

  “But this — ” her tone held vindication — “this means more.”

  “Fair and accurate?” He was still skeptical, but now his doubts seemed unfounded.

  “Fair and accurate.”

  At the end of the day, when Bob sent the story on to copy-editing, he could only hope one thing. That the readers of Time magazine would agree.

  Shane had heard very little from Lauren.

  Not that he expected to hear much. She’d left with her mind pretty well made up, her viewpoints firmly in place. Which was why he couldn’t wait to get his hands on a copy of Time magazine, the issue that was circulating through the offices at Top Gun. Something’s happened to Lauren Gibbs, he kept hearing.

  Pilots had stopped him in the halls twice that morning. “Sir, your fiancée … what happened to her?”

  At first Shane had been terrified. Had she been kidnapped or killed? But the pilot must’ve seen from his expression what he was thinking. “She’s not hurt or anything. She’s just … I don’t know, changed. Read the articles in the latest Time. You’ll see what I mean.”

  Shane’s heart pounded and he turned around, headed back to the lobby where the latest issues of a dozen magazines would be sitting on a table. He was halfway there when another pilot stopped him. “Did you read Lauren’s recent stuff?” The guy grinned. “What’d you do, brainwash her?”

  Something about the guy’s tone bugged him. “Haven’t read it.” He kept walking. He wasn’t trying to brainwash Lauren. She was entitled to her views. He only wanted her to find balance, to see where he was coming from. He found a copy on the table. The cover showed a scientist holding a test tube, but one of the smaller headlines read, “Democracy Suffers a Blow in Iraq.”

  Okay, so how was that headline different from anything Lauren had written in the past? The headlines were nearly all negative, intent on showing the ineptitude of the war effort. He took the magazine, stepped outside, and found a bench a few feet away. If something had changed in Lauren, he would know it. As surely as he knew her voice, he would know by her words if God had helped her see the war in a new light.

  He flipped to a layout near the middle of the magazine. The pictures were graphic, as they often were in Time. One small photo showed three bodies, broken and bleeding, with what looked like protestors gathered around, obviously grieving the loss of the men.

  But it was the center photo that caught Shane’s attention. Lauren never would’ve chosen to have her photographer get that shot. Not the old Lauren, anyway. Then he realized not only what was happen
ing in the photo, but who it was. The photo showed a grinning U.S. soldier tossing a football to a cluster of Iraqi children. But not just any U.S. soldier. This was Justin Baker. His friend’s son.

  Shane stared at the photo, studying it.

  Beneath the picture, the caption read:

  Lieutenant Justin Baker and a company of soldiers from Fort Lewis spend an afternoon playing with Iraqi children and handing out food and water. The children’s fathers were protesting insurgent violence a hundred yards down the street when gunfire broke out, killing three of the protestors.

  What? The emotions assaulting Shane were too deep, too many to identify all at once. First there was pride. Good for Justin — stationed in the middle of Baghdad near some of the worst violence, and still finding a way to bring joy to the kids. Shane closed his eyes for a moment, and he could hear the boy talking about the war at the pizza parlor that night.

  We’re doing good over there, really. The kids need to know that we’re their friends. We want democracy and freedom for them, so that they’ll know a different life than the one their parents were forced to live.

  Shane blinked his eyes open and stared at Justin’s face. That night, Lauren had looked away, played with the straw in her drink and acted like she hadn’t heard him.

  But here he was, he and his buddies, and no amount of political discussion could change the simple fact. Good was being done. Period. The picture proved it. Shane let his eyes wander over the rest of the photo. In the background a convoy of military vehicles seemed to hold bags, and a group of soldiers could be seen passing them out to the children. A small box near the picture provided statistics about how many humanitarian bags had been given to children in the past year, and a list of some of the things the children had been given. Water, food, candy, paper, pens, and toys.

  Shane looked to the top of the layout and there it was: Story by Lauren Gibbs. And the photos — he scanned the bottom of the first page. Yes, Photos by Jeff Scanlon, Lauren’s closest friend from Time.

  Confusion came at him then. Photographers took hundreds of photos in a given afternoon, so why use this one when it told a story the media typically chose to ignore? Wouldn’t Lauren have had a say in which photos were used? Especially on a spread like this one?

  The answer was obvious. Of course she’d had a say. She and Scanlon and their editor.

  Hope and disbelief fought for position in his heart. He’d looked at the photos. Now he needed to read what she’d written. There were two stories. The first bore a headline that said, “U.S. Soldiers Come to the Aid of Protestors, One Soldier Dead.”

  A slow breath leaked from between his lips. Another death, another loss. He read from the top of the story.

  A U.S. soldier was killed Wednesday in Baghdad while defending a group of peaceful protestors. Violence erupted when insurgent terrorists rained down bullets from a vacant building at the Iraqi protestors, killing three Iraqi citizens. U.S. soldiers stormed the building where the terrorists were hiding, fatally wounding all three insurgents. The single U.S. casualty was a nineteen-year-old soldier, the first to enter the building in pursuit of the terrorists.

  Minutes before the attack, one of the protestors, a man named Yusef, explained that his people were protesting violence by terrorists.

  “We protest violence against voters, against leaders,” Yusef explained. “Every time good man try take office, insurgents kill him, kill supporters. Kill voters.” Yusef said he was passionate about the need for a protest, especially in the days before the upcoming elections. “My people so grateful to Americans. So grateful. We have hope now, a chance to work and grow and live with our families. We glad for Americans.”

  Glad for Americans? Had Lauren really heard those words? And then chosen to use them? He kept reading.

  Tragically, Yusef was one of the protestors killed in the violence.

  “The Iraqi people, for the most part, are in favor of the war, because eventually it will buy them the freedom they want,” said one military commander at the scene. “When this war is over, we will have severely restricted terrorists’ ability to work and operate from this part of the world, and we will have secured a democracy for the Iraqi citizens.”

  Debate rages over whether the cost for such a victory is too high, in taxpayer dollars and in human life. “We believe in freedom and a safe place to live — both in the United States and in the Middle East. It’s not something we take lightly,” the commander said. “Yes, the cost is high. But it’s a cost we must be willing to pay if we’re going to see change.”

  The article went on, but Shane couldn’t see the words, couldn’t absorb another sentence without stopping to think through what he’d just read. Countless times, he and Lauren had debated the power of the press. “You go to cover a story and you see what you want to see,” he’d told her.“A million things happen at a newsworthy event. You take the hundred pieces you want to use and place them in the order you want. And you tell me that’s fair reporting. There’s no such thing, Lauren.”

  “The facts rise to the top, Shane. I get assigned to a story, and I talk to the people in charge, and I report the facts.”

  “All the facts?”

  “Of course.” She resented his insinuation that somehow the news ran through a filter in her mind.

  But here, in the article in his hands, Lauren had presented the facts in a way that could’ve been totally different. If she’d written the story a year ago, she would’ve pointed out that U.S. soldiers carelessly engaged in a gun battle with Iraqis while children played nearby — something that would’ve given the picture that American soldiers were heartless killing machines.

  This … this story was nothing of the sort.

  As he kept reading, the picture was very clear. Not only because of the way Lauren had written it, but because it was one he’d heard described to him tens of times before. He kept apprised of military briefings and updates on the war, and the scene that had played out in Baghdad the day before was a sadly common one.

  The citizens of Iraq, with their first taste of freedom, were anxious to have a new way of life, passionate about capitalizing on the democracy that had been shown to them so that their families and their children’s families would never know the terror of an evil dictator. Having taken reams of bad print, the U.S. soldiers rarely went on the offensive during a peaceful protest, rarely searched buildings or alleyways looking for terrorists.

  Instead they stood guard, giving the citizens their chance to protest, to make a plea to their fellow Iraqis to take a stand for freedom. Then, when something went awry as it often did, the soldiers stepped in and came to the defense of the Iraqi people. Too often, such a rescue involved the loss of American life.

  Always, when he spoke about the war with other military leaders, the consensus was the same. The president needed more support, morally, politically, and financially. The U.S. had the ability to hunt down terror cells, dismantling them and putting insurgents in prison, or destroying them along with their plans for destruction.

  But the military had been forced to work with one hand tied behind its back — largely because the media had convinced the masses that funding and manpower for the war in Iraq was no longer necessary. Worse, that it was a waste of American life and money to fight the war even one more day.

  Shane looked back at the page. A sidebar story ran with it, explaining the work Justin and other soldiers in his company were doing, how they felt the need to befriend the children of Iraq.

  Lauren … are you trying to tell me something? Has God worked on you this quickly? A shiver passed down his back and along his legs. What’s happening in your heart that you’d show this side of the war? He could hardly wait to talk to her, but he wouldn’t make the first call. If she’d turned in a story like this, then she was in a great amount of inner turmoil. The facts — a balanced view of the facts — had come smack against her longtime beliefs.

  Yes, he’d definitely be better off waiting until she’d had
time to think things through. One day soon, Lauren would call him. In the meantime, he would keep praying for her. He read a little further into the sidebar.

  “If these kids’ parents wanted us out of their country, they’d never be allowed to spend a morning playing with us, receiving handouts from us,” Baker, 22, said. “Spending time with the kids here helps them see life is going to change. Democracy will win in the end.”

  Shane smiled. Good for you, Justin. Good for you.

  He pulled out his cell phone and looked at the time. Emily would be on her way to her first class, but he couldn’t wait. He dialed her number. As it began to ring, he scanned the article once more.

  “Hello?”

  “Honey, it’s Dad.” The joy inside him came out as a quiet laugh. “Have you seen the new Time magazine?”

  “No.” She sounded breathless. “My roommate and I jogged this morning, and now I have five minutes to get to class.” Her voice held concern. “Does Mom have something in it?”

  “She does.” He wasn’t sure where to begin. “But nothing like we’ve seen before. First of all, the main picture is of Justin. Right there in the middle of Time magazine.”

  “Really?” He could tell by her voice that she’d stopped cold, no longer concerned about her class schedule. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes. Your mother must’ve seen him in Baghdad the other day.” His tone changed. “A soldier died, Emily. It was a hard day at war, but your mom … I don’t know what’s happening to her, but the story is so much more balanced than anything I’ve seen her write.”

  “I’ll get a copy in the library.” She hesitated. “Dad, are you sure? You really see something different this time?”