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"You really wanted to be an astronaut when you were a kid?"
The sound of Sam's voice made Nolan look up from the case file that he was going over, seeing her sitting across at the table that they usually shared during their meals together. A smile was beginning to form from the corner of her mouth as she took a bite of the paella that she had ordered.
"Excuse me? I-- I didn't catch that," Nolan said.
"You said during you're opening that you wanted to be an astronaut when you grew up," Sam rephrased. "That true?"
Nolan let out a quiet laugh. "Yeah. Up until I was five, that is."
A small, reminiscent smile came over his lips as he recalled, "I went as an astronaut for Halloween from the time I was three, I wanted to read every book about space and NASA and the space program, I wanted to visit the launch sites-- pretty much annoyed my parents with the last one."
Sam laughed, imagining a little, curly-haired boy pestering his parents to make the almost day-long drive from Rochester to Houston every summer.
"We only went once, but they did take me to Air and Space Museum in D.C. twice," he added.
"What changed your mind?" she asked.
The spark in his eye was quickly extinguished, and the grin on his face slowly faded.
"The Challenger disaster," he answered.
Even if he had decided to stop there, Sam would have understood completely. Despite that it had occurred seven years before she was born, she remembered how she had been rocked to her core when she had first learned of it when she was eight years old and found an article about it.
"Everyone at school was excited to see it, but I think I was the most excited of all of us," he began. "The TV was wheeled in and turned to the nearest network, and we were all just staring at it, counting down-- and then... you know the rest..."
His eyes almost looked glossy to her, reminding her of pictures of PTSD victims that she had seen during a psychology course back at Mercer.
"Even now, I can remember that day so vividly," Nolan said. "Jenny McFarlene, the girl who sat behind me and later became my sister's regular baby-sitter... I remember turning around and seeing her sit so... so perfectly still. Like a statue. And then, when I asked if she was okay, she started crying."
His breathing hitched for a split second, but he exhaled slowly, allowing himself to breathe normally again.
"It was probably the first time that she cried that hard," he added.
Sam watched him intently, noting each detail he spoke of and the expressions he made. If it still elicited that much of a response from him now, what was it like when...
No, she told herself. That's not an appropriate question. Don't ask him that.
But... she did anyway.
"What about you?"
"Well, what about me?"
"Did you cry?" she asked before she could try to stop herself.
Nolan leaned back in his chair in a way that made him seem older than he was-- and he often liked to poke fun at the fact that he was getting older.
"My father... he's very reserved by nature," Nolan told her. "By his upbringing-- being raised by a man who was a product of his time and of the Great Depression-- but he never believed that men weren't allowed to cry. But, still... I held it back for as long as I could. If my parents asked if I was okay, I said I was fine, even if I wasn't. But, they knew the truth. I stopped playing with my toy shuttle and my action figures, and I didn't keep asking if we could visit the NASA HQ in Houston."
He took a small sip of his water.
"Then, a couple of months after that... my mom had found where I had hidden my toy shuttle," he said. "She asked me yet again if I was okay, and I just... I just started crying. She held me, talked to me, and then she made sugar cookies."
"That's what moms are for," Sam said.
"My dad also talked to me," Nolan added. "He told me that it didn't make me unmanly if I cried, and that it wasn't healthy to hold my emotions in like that."
Sam shrugged. "Most dads back then probably wouldn't have done that."
"I know," he said. "And I'm grateful that my dad is the man that he is."
A half-smile began to cross over his face again as he moved onto the next part of the story.
"And I decided that... whatever I did, I wanted to help people," he said. "And... then, at the beginning of first grade, we went on a field trip to a local fire station. I was just... enthralled. To six-year-old me, it might as well have been me being born again."
Sam laughed.
"When I came home, I told my parents that I wanted to be a firefighter," he continued. "And it started all over again-- the Halloween costume, the toys, getting every book about it that I could get my hands on..."
"What made you decide against that?"
It was like she had rewound a tape to the moment that she had asked why he had abandoned his interstellar ambitions-- but it wasn't because of something specifically traumatic. She felt as he had asked her to share the weight of whatever burden caused him to decide against this other career path.
"Even before the Iraq War, my brother had wanted to join the Army-- and my sister..." he trailed off, trying to think of the right words to use. "She was just such an active little girl that would kinda test her limits. If my parents told her not to run with a glass in her hand, she was kind of more of a 'what if? But what if I did it?'. You could've told her not to jump off of the swings, and she would do it and chip her tooth. That was the kind of kid she was-- hell, it's the kind of person that she's grown up to be. And-- don't get me wrong-- she's doing a lot of good, but-- it's not easy being her big brother when she's pretty much the dictionary definition of an intrepid reporter."
Sam nodded in understanding. Nolan had often shared his worries about his little sister, who was now embedded in Ukraine during the height of Russia's invasion.
"I-- I just didn't think it was right for my parents to go to bed worrying that they would have to outlive all three of their children," he said. "So, at when I was sixteen, I decided to become a lawyer. I figured that way, I could help people without making my family wonder if I would be coming home alive every night."
"That's... that's a very noble thing to do, Nolan," she said. "But... are you happy with what you're doing?"
"Even with what we have to deal with, yes," he answered. "I am."
They both tried to get back to work as they finished their dinner, but one question rattled around in Nolan's mind as he stole nanosecond-long glances at Sam. She finally looked back up, as if she knew that he had something on his mind.
"Did you ever want to be anything besides a lawyer?" Nolan asked.
Sam's head tilted slightly as she reached back into her memories to find her answer. "Maybe at one point... when I was three, I told my parents that I wanted to be a princess when I grew up."
Nolan tried suppress a laugh, but she gave him an expression that told him that she wouldn't fault him for doing so.
"But for a while from... third to sixth grade, I think, I flip flopped between wanting to be a doctor or " she said. "I was kinda like you-- I knew that whatever I did, I wanted to help people."
"When did you decide that you wanted to become a lawyer?"
"When I was fourteen," Sam replied. "We were doing this mock trial in social studies, and my teacher selected me as the prosecutor. And it just felt so... natural. Like I had found a missing piece of a puzzle. From then on, I was so committed to that path-- I worked my ass off to get good grades, I would check out a law book once a week from the library..."
She bit her lower lip, looking down at her food for a brief second.
"Then... when Christina was killed, I... it suddenly hit me what being a prosecutor really meant," she said. "That I would have to work twice as hard as I ever did to help get justice for the victims and their families and anyone else that got hurt."
His heart began to sit like lead, and his chest pushed up against it like a vise, threatening to send it plummeting to his stomach. He always felt like that he had the weight of the world on his shoulders, but it always seemed like Sam was carrying the burden of each individual person on Earth.
"You think that we ended up where we're meant to be?" he asked.
She gave him a gentle, close-lipped smile. "I think so."
Or maybe we're not all the way there, yet.