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He shifts in the bed, watching as I run my nose, then my tongue, up the length of his index finger.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, I loved seeing you there.

” I laugh softly as I continue. “Watching your hands move, these hands”—I kiss them—“and your brain working. You’re so smart, Matthew, and I can’t imagine you doing anything else.

But I want to understand how you got there. How you came to be this way.”

“It’s just…my hands are mine, you know?” he says. “A few years ago, I had to decide what kind of difference I wanted to make with them and si tting behind a desk like my father, choosing headlines…it didn’t feel right. I wanted to touch people, make a real difference.”

“Doesn’t it scare you sometimes? What you do?” It scared me just being there, just standing in that cavernous room of overwhelming need.

“It did, at first.” His expression changes as he ponders, trying to explain.

“The first time someone’s heart stopped in front of me…

that’s not something you forget. That feeling of terror, of not knowing what to do.

I remember looking around for someone older than me—another physician, anyone—but all eyes were on me.

And you don’t get to run. It’s hard, but when the world falls apart around you, you learn how to stay. ”

“What happened to that person?”

“He died.” Matthew looks straight ahead. “But there have been many since him who didn’t. People I’ve been able to save.”

I think of myself. How I take lives while he saves them, because it’s quicker, easier. Feels necessary even, to protect what’s mine. How what he does is so much harder, infinitely so, looking into someone’s eyes and committing yourself to giving rather than taking.

Taking is easy. I would know.

Slowly, I kiss his hand again, right in the center of his palm. “You are an incredible person, Matthew,” I tell him. “To give so much of yourself and ask for so little in return.”

He sighs and looks away. “There are plenty of men out there who have given just as much, Kat. More, even. Men who have made the ultimate sacrifice for God and country. What I do now, it’s a pittance of penance for what I failed to do years ago.”

I roll onto my side, awareness heightened by the tension entering his body. “What on earth do you mean? Are you speaking of the war? There are more ways than one to serve your country, Matt. You’ve accomplished just as much good here as you could have done by enlisting in medical school. ”

He takes a slow, deep breath. “I didn’t just turn down the offer at Vanderbilt, Kat.” He closes his eyes, and my heart stutters.

“What do you mean?”

His lids remain tightly shuttered. “When the Selective Service Act passed, I allowed my family to buy my name out of the draft…through unsavory channels. Ethan was already deployed on the Western Front, and my father didn’t want to risk losing a second son.

He offered to buy my name out, and I accepted. ”

“I see.” My gaze roves across the taut lines of his face.

Conscription began in 1917 and cast a shadowy pall across the entire nation.

It was unprecedented, summoning men to war by lottery.

I remember the day Abe went to Savannah City Hall to register, the dread brewing in my stomach.

Tony is an immigrant, and Paul has been hidden since he was a child, erased by a “missing, presumed dead” tag filed by the orphanage years after his disappearance.

Only Abe was at risk of the draft, and it was perhaps the biggest break of his life that his name wasn’t pulled.

Many men, many families , weren’t so lucky.

I reach a gentle finger toward Matthew’s face, trying to smooth the lines burrowed there. “One selfish decision in a wholly unselfish life does not the measure of a man make, Matthew. Not in my eyes. You value life, including your own. There’s no shame in that.”

“There’s great shame, Kat.” His eyes spring open, blazing blue. “Shame I carry every day. That I must carry, for all the men who answered the call and didn’t return. Men whose lives, perhaps, I could have been there to save.”

I lay my head on his chest, pressing my cheek to his bare skin. “Your friend from Vanderbilt—I’ve forgotten his name, the one with whom you exchanged letters. Did he come home?”

“William?”

“Yes, William. Did he make it home? ”

“No.”

It’s only one word, one single word, but the pain it represents is so great, a solitary tear falls from my eye to his skin.

“Hit by a stray shell.” His words rumble in his chest beneath my cheek. “While he was triaging wounded on the field.”

I allow the words to sink in. I breathe in slowly, then out.

I wanted to know how Matthew became this way, and here it is.

It wasn’t his first answer, but this is the one that matters.

There will always be the story we tell the world and the story we live.

It’s in the intersection of the two where the greatest truth lies.

“He was very selfless and very brave,” I murmur, turning to press a kiss into Matthew’s chest, right on the damp spot where my tear landed. “And so are you.”