Gabe swallowed. “Didn’t the Army contact you when he got hurt?”
Alice shook her head. “Well, it’s possible that they did but I missed the message or something. Though it’s also possible that my being in another country screwed things up. Of course, I found out later that the care for emotionally disturbed patients where he was turned out to be a cluster f**k from one end to another, but I didn’t know that then. Actually, I barely knew anything about the war at all, because I’d stopped watching the international news. I was worried enough about Jake without hearing about how many more US soldiers were killed in Iraq every night, you know? It was bad enough with all the poor Canucks getting blown up in Afghanistan.”
“Yeah.”
“I dropped everything to get down there,” Alice continued. “I lef
