As I sat there at the table across from her father, I felt so nervous. There always seems to be a thin line between excitment/nervousness at seeing her family again and that strange ache. After making the arrangements to meet him for breakfast, the happy feeling of seeing him again, was chased away by that ache, and the realization that what would be a simple breakfast to anyone else was going to be filled with unspoken memories of a girl we both loved, and a renewed sense of loss. There was a lot of smoothing and re-smoothing the napkin in my lap, and an admiration of how ugly the shade of orange the napkin was. After covering all the general conversation topics, I decided to be bold and tread into the territory that I always fear. I asked about their trip to PNG, and as I saw his eyes well up, I thought for a moment that I may have made the wrong decision, but by then it was too late. As we he started to talk about it, out of his line of vision, an middle-aged man sat down facing me, just behind our table, who was meeting a friend for breakfast as well. He had white hair that was receding deeply from the top of his head, and he was wearing what appeared to be a new pair of jeans with a bright red three button shirt with a yellow ribbon adorning the left side of it saying "Support Our Troops", directly over his heart. As I listened to her father talk about how now there is a doctor in PNG who has lights over his operating table that services a village of over 7,000 people, I wondered about this man, and the coincidence that sitting not even 3 feet from him was a father of a slain solider. The rational side of me said that today was Red Friday, and he was likely just a supporter of the troops wearing his red. The other part of me, who believes that it was her who reached out to me the day of her wake, wants to think that this was just another way that she is reaching out to let us know that she knows we love her.