Mace folded the photo back into his wallet, its leather soft as skin. “Every last one,” he said. “Even the ones who didn’t come home.”
Mace stared at the snow falling past the porch light. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Had a whole band of them.”
He pulled a worn photo from his wallet—men in jump boots and M1s, grinning like they’d already won. “That’s Lipton. That’s Winters. That one there… that’s Guarnere. He called me ‘Philadelphia’ because I once got lost in a cow pasture.”
That night, after the boy fell asleep, Mace went to the garage and pulled down a dusty shoebox. Inside: a Bronze Star, a Nazi flag, a torn letter from a French family thanking “les hommes de Easy,” and a photograph of a frozen forest in Bastogne. He touched the image of a foxhole where he’d shared his last chocolate bar with a kid from Oregon who’d died two days later.
“Still with me, Billy,” Mace whispered.