Vigilance
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 10: Cortez’s Tags
Harris called two days after the HR meeting, his voice carrying the same careful weight it had held in the conference room doorway.
“Greg wants to meet you,” he said. “Properly, this time. Not across a trauma bay with a sucking chest wound between you.”
Mia stood in her kitchen, phone pressed to her ear, looking at the offer letter still sitting unsigned on the counter. “He remembers me?”
“He’s spent four years trying to find the corpsman who kept him breathing long enough to make it onto that helicopter. He remembers every detail. The color of your gloves. The thing you said to him right before he went under.” A pause. “He’s been carrying something of yours. Well. Not yours. But something that belongs with you as much as it belongs with him.”
She knew, somehow, before he said it.
“Cortez’s tags,” she said.
“He’ll bring them himself, if you’re willing.”
She met them on a Wednesday afternoon at a coffee shop two blocks from the hospital, off duty for the first time in what felt like a month, wearing clothes that weren’t scrubs. Harris arrived first, holding the door for a man who walked with the careful economy of someone who still remembered, in his body, exactly what it had cost to relearn walking at all.
Greg Harris was younger than she’d pictured from the flashback four years buried, the boy in the field replaced now by a man in his late twenties with his uncle’s steady eyes and a faint white scar tracing up from his collarbone, visible where his shirt fell open at the neck. He stopped a few feet from her table, and for a moment neither of them said anything, the space between them thick with everything four years and one shared afternoon of blood and dust had built without either of them choosing it.
“You’re smaller than I remember,” he said finally, and something in his voice cracked on the last word.
“You were losing a lot of blood. Perspective gets strange.”
He laughed, short and unsteady, and then he was across the space between them, pulling her into an embrace that had nothing careful about it, his shoulders shaking once before he got hold of himself. Mia stood still and let him, her hand coming up to rest against his back the way it might have rested against a patient’s, except this wasn’t a patient anymore, hadn’t been for four years, and the difference sat strange and warm in her chest.
“Thank you,” he said, low, right against her ear. “You don’t know. You can’t know what you gave me. Two kids, a wife, every single day since that field. All of it exists because you didn’t leave.”
“I was doing my job.”
He pulled back enough to look at her, hands still on her shoulders. “No,” he said. “You were doing a lot more than that, and we both know it.”
They sat. Harris ordered coffee for all three of them and didn’t touch his own, watching the reunion play out with the quiet satisfaction of a man who’d spent six months engineering exactly this moment without ever promising himself it would happen.
Greg reached into his jacket pocket and set something on the table between them, small, metal, worn smooth in places from years of being carried rather than displayed. Two sets of dog tags, chains looped together, the stamped letters catching the afternoon light through the window.
CORTEZ, R. and beside it, a second set, unfamiliar to Mia at first glance until she read the name and felt the floor tilt slightly under her chair.
SIMS, D.
“You kept both,” she said, voice unsteady.
“My CO recovered them after Vigilance. Sims’s family didn’t want his, in the end. Too painful, they said, better to remember him without it in a box somewhere. He gave them to me instead, because I was the one who made it out of that same firebase four months later, and somebody thought maybe I’d know what to do with them eventually.” Greg’s throat worked. “I didn’t. Not until my uncle told me he’d found the corpsman who held that position for six hours so both of them could at least die knowing somebody hadn’t left.”
Mia’s hand hovered over the tags without touching them, the old instinct rising, the same one that had kept her from breaking during those six hours, the wall she’d built brick by brick to survive holding two men’s hands while she watched one of them fade and couldn’t do anything except keep the fading company.
“Rosa,” she said. “Cortez’s fiancée. Do you know if she—”
“She remarried two years ago,” Greg said gently. “A good man, I’m told. She has a daughter now. She asked about you, once, when my uncle finally tracked her down looking for information. She wanted to know if the corpsman who was with Ricardo at the end ever made it home whole.”
Mia’s eyes burned, and she let them, for the first time in longer than she could remember allowing herself the indulgence in front of another person. “Tell her I’m working on it.”
“I think,” Harris said quietly, “she’d rather hear that from you directly, someday. If you’re ever ready.”
Mia picked up the tags finally, the metal warm from Greg’s pocket, the weight of them so much lighter than the weight they’d carried for seven years in her memory. She turned Cortez’s tag over in her fingers, tracing the stamped letters like they might tell her something new, though she’d traced that same name in her mind a thousand times already, in the dark, in the shower, in the space between patients on slow nights when her guard came down enough to let him back in.
“I think about him every March fifteenth,” she said. “Both of them. I light a candle. It probably sounds foolish.”
“It doesn’t,” Greg said. “My wife thinks I don’t sleep well that week every year, and she’s right, and I’ve never told her why, not the real why, not until my uncle explained what that date meant to somebody else too.”
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