I wake up on a blow-­up mattress next to a mountain of beer boxes with a pistol under my pillow. I’d noticed its hard edges on my cheek, felt around, and paused when my fingertips touched cool metal. I pull it out and hold it flat in my hands, stare at its angles and curves, consider the desolation of the barrel, trying to remember how the hell it got there. Cleve is already awake and pulling a yellow-­and-­blue-­striped polo shirt over his head.

“Uh . . . what is this?” I ask.

He chuckles and sits down on the edge of the mattress. With pops and squeaks, it lifts my body and rolls me toward him.

“Don’t worry about that,” he says. He picks up a pair of camo-­print cargo shorts that’d been crumpled on the floor next to the mattress, pulls them over his legs, and stands once they’re at his thighs. My mind is somewhere else, struggling to piece together the night before. The sound of Cleve’s zipper pulls me out of a trance. “I put it there.”

He explains that the night before, he’d found Fowler, his nineteen-year-­old Marine Corps buddy, frantic and sobbing with both arms extended, the pistol squeezed between his sweaty, trembling hands and pointed toward his wife. Earlier that night, Fowler’d found a love letter in the hidden compartment of a wooden box his wife kept in her nightstand. It was from another Marine in their unit. One of his best friends.

“Our baby’s in the other room, you fucking psycho!” she had screamed, but Fowler remained. I imagine his face distorted by the puffy wetness of his crying, imagine his wife regretting saying those words the moment they fell from her mouth. Did she drop to her knees and beg for forgiveness, willing to do anything to save her own life? I wonder what I would do if I were looking down the barrel of a gun. They say that when someone is about to die, they see a montage of their life leading up to that point. Movies depict the moment before death as a reel of happy memories. Birthdays, graduations, first kisses—­one after another after another. But when I imagine this young woman, her baby in the room on the other side of the wall behind her, I know she was thinking about her future, all the things she would miss out on, her parentless child. Cleve, a peacemaker among his friends, convinced his buddy not to shoot.