He wasn't a bad man, not really. Maddie thinks that eight years ago, back in college, she might have thought differently, but, well...that was then.

The photograph is set, crisp black and white. She knows that if any other photos of him exist, she's not likely to come across them. In a few months, this picture will become the image of him she holds in her head as the reality of the man grows increasingly dim, progressing from vivid present to an abstract memory, something to file away in the back of her head like a box of dried roses that she can take out sometimes when she's feeling maudlin.

Maddie hates this about herself, and she was twenty-five, maybe older, when she realized that everyone is this way. It's why she became a writer, she thinks - to capture the people and moments that were forever slipping through her grasp. It never works, of course, but she has found other causes by now, other reasons to write.

Reasons like Solomon, gentle, decent Solomon and his family. Solomon is a good man, and his cause is a good cause - it is her cause as well, and she believes in it.

Her fingers hover over the glossy photograph, wanting to touch. He looks lean and handsome, somehow elevated by the stark simplicity of black and white. She remembers how he smelled that day, like sweat and the horrible cheap cigarettes he smoked, all overlaid with the copper tang of blood. The tip of a scar is visible on his collarbone, peeking out of his shirt, and she remembers that it ran down the right side of his torso, neatly missing the nipple. A knife, she thinks, or a bayonette - she never thought to ask. He had a lot of scars, but then, he'd been a soldier, hadn't he?

She hadn't even known how old he was. Thirty-one, Solomon had told her, later. Thirty-one, and crazy, was what he said. But a good man, in the end.

Maddie doesn't think Daniel Archer was crazy, and she doesn't really think he was a good man, either. Maybe in a better world, he would have been juggling a retirement fund and a mortgage, and there would have been time to think about questions of good and evil, but the world is a bad one and Danny died alone, hunched over his machine gun in the embrace of dry red rocks, and the only comfort she has is of knowing that his last deed, at least, was a good one.

Maddie doesn't think retirement would have suited him, anyway.