She'd been twenty-one for approximately four hours.
I'd known her since she was fifteen.
The coffee was too hot and I drank it anyway.
The kitchen was full. My mother moved between the stove and the counter, setting plates down without being asked, squeezing my shoulder once as she passed. She didn't say anything. She never did, on this particular day. She just fed people and kept moving and let February fourteenth be what it was.
My older brother Gage was at the far end of the table with his wife Millie tucked under his arm, the two of them talking low about something. Their daughter Bea was in the high chair between them, working on whatever my mother had put in frontof her. She got more of it on her face than in her mouth. Nobody seemed concerned.
My cousin Forrest had the chair by the window. He was drinking coffee and looking out at the morning and not talking, which was just Forrest now. He'd come home eighteen months ago after Sophie died and he'd been quietly putting himself back together ever since, or trying to. Some mornings he looked closer to okay than others. This wasn't one of them.
My little brother Dakota was the only one making noise, which was always true.
"You look like you didn't sleep," he said, pointing his fork at me.
"I slept."
"You look like hell."
"Dakota." My mother, from the stove.
"I'm just saying?—"
"Eat your eggs."
He ate his eggs. But he looked at me sideways and filed it away, which was the problem with little brothers. They noticed things and they stored them and they brought them back out at the worst possible moment.
I looked at my plate.
Two nights ago Haven had said take me home and I'd stepped back and watched her face do the thing it did when she was deciding not to show something, and then she'd said okay in a voice that wasn't okay at all and walked back through that door.
She might not come in today. That was the thing sitting on my chest since five this morning when I'd given up on sleep entirely. She was supposed to be here at seven for the start of the winter feeding rotation, same as always, but I'd given her every reason to call it in sick and find somewhere else to be.
I'd looked for her truck when I came up from the cottage. It wasn't there.
That was forty minutes ago.
Bea made a sound of extreme grievance and my mother appeared with a cloth and cleaned her face. Bea accepted this indignity with her father's expression, which made Millie laugh.
Gage caught me watching and raised an eyebrow.
I shook my head. Nothing.
Dakota pushed back from the table and carried his plate to the sink. "Somebody's in a mood."
My mother poked him in the shoulder. “You leave your brother alone,” she muttered. “You know what day it is, right?”
I winced.That day.The day an IED had blown my unit to hell and killed my best friend while he bled out in the sand.
Dakota glanced back at me.
Fuck, he was oblivious.
“Sorry, big brother,” he said.
I grunted. “It was eighteen years ago,” I said. “It’s fine.”
It wasn’t fine, not really. That meant eighteen years alone, eighteen years since coming home with a sore knee that would always be sore, eighteen years of having a glass of whiskey and a cigarette annually in honor of Specialist Ethan Nassar.
