Now if you’d met him at any number of those ceremonies where he accepted awards for bravery and such, anyone would be right to believe his story that that early trauma and his mother’s eventual death at his father’s hands had seared in his brain the good work that EMTs do in impossible circumstances. And so you would assume that the guy wasn’t haunted by the past. But Billy knew it was bullshit. He knew that every shift the guy worked triggered some feral part of him that only knew fear and anger and hatred, and couldn’t understand the world without those things. Billy knew that the polished
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