"Don't drink the hard stuff anymore," Walter said. "Doctor's orders. And my late wife's orders, which were scarier."
They sat in silence for a while. It was a good silence. The kind only two men who have seen the same kind of darkness can share.
"You know," Walter finally said, "when I came home in '69, nobody wanted to hear about it. People spit at us at the airport. So I shut it all away. Didn't talk about it for thirty years."
He took a sip of root beer.
"Biggest mistake of my life. Not the war. The silence."
Daniel turned the bottle slowly in his hands.
"I'm not ashamed of what I did," he said. "I'm just... done with it. I don't want Emily growing up as the daughter of some guy in a viral video. I want her growing up as the daughter of a guy who fixes gutters and makes bad pancakes."
Walter chuckled.
"Son, you can be both. That's the secret nobody tells you. You don't have to bury the soldier to raise the girl."
Daniel didn't answer. But he listened.
And from that night on, Walter Hayes came over almost every evening. Sometimes with root beer. Sometimes with tomatoes. Sometimes with nothing but stories.
Emily adored him. She called him "Grandpa Walt" within a week, and Walter pretended to be annoyed about it, but anyone could see his eyes shine every time she said it.
The news van left after three days.
But the attention didn't.
People Daniel had never spoken to started waving at him. Mrs. Pemberton, who had once complained to the homeowners' association that his pickup was "an eyesore," brought him a pie. A man in a golf cart stopped to ask if he'd consider teaching self-defense classes at the country club for "a very generous fee."
Daniel politely said no to all of it.
And yet, the strange thing was, his money problems were getting worse, not better.
Two of his regular clients canceled jobs. One said she felt "uncomfortable" having "a trained killer" on her roof. Another simply stopped answering his calls.
Then the transmission on his pickup started slipping.
Daniel sat at the kitchen table one night after Emily was asleep, with a stack of bills spread out in front of him. Mortgage. Electric. Water. Emily's school field trip. The quote from the mechanic: twenty-eight hundred dollars.