Caleb shot him a look. “Pops.”
“I know.” The old man waved a hand.
They needed a change of conversation stat. “Have you heard back from Noah yet?”
Pops shook his head. “Sorry, son.”
“Surely he heard by now that I’m dead.” Caleb didn’t bother to lift his hands and make quotes. They both knew what he meant.
“Even if he did, you really think he would have believed it?” Pops asked. “I mean, you’d know, right? If it was him.”
“It’s not like some mystical connection. I can’t feel if he’s in pain, or whatever they say on TV.” But they were identical twins. At most, Caleb felt strong emotions from his brother. But only on occasion, though. “But yeah, I would probably know if he’d been killed.”
Caleb leaned against the porch rail. The understanding between him and his brother that they would call each other if they ever needed help had stretched to three years of not much contact. Truth was, nearly dying had made him realize what he wanted to change about his life.
Talk about a cliché.
Lying in a Catholic hospital in Guatemala, he’d had to face some things that he’d been ignoring for years. Like the faith that Pops had tried to instill in them when they were little. A priest had sat by his bed for hours, explaining the gospel to him. Everything Pops had ever said made sense to him. Now that he was back, he wanted to dig into it.
And he wanted his brother in his life for real. Not just from a distance.
Problem was, he couldn’t just call Noah himself. Even cops had to use channels with the military to try and get him a message since all the emails Caleb sent went unreplied to.
Pops eased out of the chair. “He’s your brother. He’ll come back around eventually.”
Caleb could only nod. “I’m going to take a shower, then do you want to hit the store?”
“Sounds good. I’ll go take a nap while you’re in the shower.”
He didn’t bother telling Pops that the shower would take less than five minutes. The old man needed to rest when he felt like he should.
Every time he saw Pops over the years it seemed like the guy aged way more than he should have. But then, he wasn’t going to stay the same spry grandpa he’d been when they were young. Not now that Caleb and Noah were in their thirties and Pops was over eighty.
He passed the framed pictures in the hallway, the snapshots of family life over the years. Caleb didn’t often stop and look at the ones showing his parents, but something about missing hisbrother made him pause. He looked at the image of him and Noah with mom and dad at the lake, all of them holding fishing poles. One of the rare times that their parents had actually been around in the summer rather than leaving them with Pops and taking off to who knew where.
One summer they had simply never come home.
Pops hadn’t known where they’d been going, and Caleb and Noah had never been able to figure out what happened to them.
Over the years, the not knowing had grown into a cold indifference. After all, if their parents had been able to come home to them then they would have. Nothing would have stopped them, right? So either they just didn’t want to, or for some reason they couldn’t—which probably meant they were dead.
Caleb had never found out.
Eventually he just moved on with his life, and summers with Pops at the ranch had turned into high school in this part of Montana. Sharing a broke down pickup truck with his brother. High school football championships, all state two years in a row. Girlfriends. Graduation. The military, him only for a few years before leaving and becoming a fed. His brother sticking it out with the Army.
All of it with Tessa Ashland living next door. The preacher’s daughter, pretty much off-limits just because of that. But Caleb couldn’t say he never thought of her.
That he’d never wondered what might’ve happened if he’d stuck around.
After he dried off and dressed, Caleb went to the laptop on his desk—the one he’d done his homework at in high school. While he rubbed the gel on his burns, he looked through the information he’d amassed about Nathan Kessler.
It was going to take a serious operation to get the man to come out of hiding long enough for Caleb to snatch him up.Working his way up the ladder, taking out every sympathizer and climbing to the top of the pile to take down Kessler would take longer. Maybe. Right now he needed a serious infusion of godly wisdom to figure this out. Grandpa had promised him last night that wisdom was in the cards, now that he was renewing his faith.
Caleb put his head in his hands, his elbows on the desk, and laid it all on the altar in prayer. Revenge was something he desperately wanted. It drove him not to let this go. But he had to be smart about it and go for justice, not just the destruction of those he considered his enemies.
Noah would probably laugh at his line of thinking. Consider him soft for doing the right thing. But then, maybe not. Maybe his brother had gone through a similar kind of change since the last time they’d spent much time together.
A little while later, Pops knocked on the door frame and they headed out to the store. The route from the ranch toward town took them past Tessa’s farmhouse. The one she still lived in with her father.
