Lies to tell small children

You are five, when your father comes home for good.

Small for your age, and quiet, you go unnoticed in the corner of the hospital room - you hear your father using far too many words you will later be very soundly told off for repeating, hear the doctors and nurses throwing longer words back and forth (you like the sound of them, even if you don't know what they mean. You think you might want to be a doctor one day, maybe). Eyes wide, you watch as they go about their business, wondering if that's what your father did out in Afghanistan (although you don't think Afghanistan is as clean and shiny as the hospital. Not from the pictures and the news on the TV.)

And, sometimes, when you've been so quiet even your parents have forgotten you're still there, you see your mother crying.

It's relief, she says, when you ask her about it. Just relief, and knowing he's going to be alright.

But, you say, he was always going to be alright. He said nothing was going to happen to him, didn't he?

She wipes her eyes, pulls you up onto her lap. Does this look like nothing? she asks, and, even as you shake your head, you don't think she's really talking to you any more.

Five years later, as you sit on the end of your father's bed and roll your eyes at the story he's telling you (because you really don't think his squadmates were that stupid, even if you do beat Uncle Tommy seven times out of ten at Trivial Pursuit), and try not to think too hard about why he's back here and how much of that might or might not actually be your fault, you think back to that conversation.

And you wonder, for the first time, why he ever bothered to lie.