The Cost of Paradise
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 8
It was Boyd, of all people, who started it, and he did not know he had.
“Doing anything for the weekend, ma’am?”
“No.”
“Nothing?”
“We will be at the house.”
Boyd made a face. “Ma’am, respectfully. You and Delgado have been in this country a month and I have never once heard you say you went anywhere.”
“We go to the commissary.”
“That’s not going anywhere. That’s errands.” He shouldered his bag. “Take the man out. He’s wound so tight he squeaks.”
She thought about that all the way home, which annoyed her.
“Boyd says you squeak,” she announced, in the doorway.
“He says I what?”
“He says we do not go anywhere and that you are wound tightly and that I should take you out.” She hung her jacket up. “He is a sergeant. He has opinions about everything. Yesterday he had an opinion about my curriculum.”
“Was he right about the curriculum?”
“Yes.” She turned around. “Carlos.”
“Yeah.”
“We have never done this.”
“Done what?”
“Any of it.” She gestured at the kitchen, the house, vaguely at the two of them. “I have known you two years. We have been in a war together, and an airplane, and this house. We have never once gone somewhere for no reason.” She frowned slightly, working it out as she said it. “I have never been taken to dinner. In my life. Not once, by anyone.”
Carlos put down what he was holding.
“Saturday,” he said.
“That is not an answer to what I said.”
“It’s absolutely an answer to what you said. Saturday. I’m taking you to dinner.”
The problem was that she had nothing to wear and did not understand the problem.
“I have clothes.”
“You have work clothes, PT clothes, and one funeral suit.”
“The suit is fine.”
“You’re not wearing a funeral suit to dinner with me.”
So on Saturday afternoon he took her to a place at the edge of town with too much light in it and racks of things she had no framework for, and she stood in the middle of it with her arms folded, braced, as if the racks might come at her.
“This is ridiculous.”
“Pick something.”
“I do not know how to pick something. I have never picked something.” She looked at a rack, and then at him, and there was something underneath the annoyance that he had learned to listen for. “I have worn what I was given since I was nineteen. Uniform, or what my mother made, or what was in the box that came. Nobody has ever said pick something.”
“Okay.” He pulled one off the rack, dark green, plain. “Then I’ll pick, and you tell me no.”
“That is stupid.”
“Tell me no, then.”
She looked at it a long moment.
“No,” she said, “it is too — “ and stopped, because she did not have the word in English, and made a gesture at her own collarbone.
“Too open.”
“Yes.”
He put it back without a word about it and took down another. She said no to four. She did not say no to the fifth, which was dark blue and had sleeves, and she took it into the fitting room with the expression of a woman going into a building that had not been cleared.
She was in there a long time.
“Avîn.”
“Do not talk to me.”
“Okay.”
Another minute.
“Carlos.”
“Yeah.”
“I look like a woman pretending to be a woman.”
“Come out.”
“No.”
“Come out and tell me that to my face.”
She came out.
He did not say anything for a second too long, and she saw it, and her chin came up defensively, which was when he finally got his mouth working.
“You’re taking that one,” he said.
“You have not said anything about it.”
“I know. Give me a minute.”
She bought the dress and then, at the register, with an expression he would remember for the rest of his life — half defiance, half a dare, as if she expected to be laughed at and had decided in advance not to care — she put a small dark blue box on the counter beside it, from a shelf near the front that he had not seen her go near.
He did not look at it. He looked at her, and then very deliberately at the ceiling.
“I saw nothing,” he said.
“You saw.”
“I saw absolutely nothing. I’m a professional.”
“You are the worst spy in the history of the world,” said Avîn, and paid for both.
The restaurant was nothing special, which was the correct decision and he had made it on purpose.
She took the seat facing the door without appearing to think about it. He let her. He had eaten with her perhaps two thousand times and had never once sat in that chair and never once mentioned it.
“This is very strange,” she said.
“Yeah.”
“Everyone is just sitting.”
“That’s what a restaurant is.”
“There is a family there with a baby and nobody is looking at anything.” She glanced around again. “It is a room full of people who are not watching the room.”
“How’s that feel?”
She considered it seriously.
“Loud,” she said. “It is loud in a way that is not sound.”
The waiter came. She ordered the second-cheapest thing on the menu, which he had also expected, and he ordered the good bottle anyway and she gave him a look and did not fight about it.
It went badly for about fifteen minutes. Neither of them knew what to do with their hands. They had spent two years talking about wind and holdover and rooftops and the dead, and stripped of all of it they sat there like two people at a job interview.
“This is a disaster,” she said.
“It’s not a disaster.”
“You have asked me about my week. You know about my week. You live in the house.”
“I’m aware.”
“So why did you ask?”
“Because that’s what people say at dinner.”
“It is a stupid thing to say.”
“It’s a completely stupid thing to say.”
And then she laughed — properly, out loud, head back, in a restaurant, in a blue dress — and two tables looked over, and she did not notice, and Carlos sat there and watched it happen and thought, with the clarity of a man who has been waiting a very long time: there. There she is.
After that it was fine. It was better than fine. She told him about Reyes and the curriculum and Boyd’s opinions, and he told her about a thing he could only tell her half of, and she said “then do not tell me the half, tell me nothing, the half is worse,” and he laughed, and somewhere in the second glass she reached across the table and took his hand — in a lit room, in public, in front of the family with the baby — and did not look away when she did it.
In the car she said, “I am going to say a thing and I would like you not to make it into a moment.”
“Okay.”
“You have been very patient with me.”
“That’s not —”
“Do not talk.” She was looking out the windshield. “You have been patient since Mosul and I have watched you be patient and I have understood every day what it was costing you, and I did not have anything to give you back, and I have hated that more than you know.” Her hands were in her lap. “I am not going to be patient tonight. So if you have any of it left, you should spend it now, because I am finished.”
Carlos drove about another four hundred meters.
Then he pulled the car over.
“Why are we stopping.”
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