Chapter One
Trevor
The first thing I notice about Roan is that it hasn't changed. It's only faded. Like a photograph left on a dashboard too long, the colors bleached out by something that should have been harmless.
I drive past June's Diner with its fogged windows and the same stupid neon sign buzzing weakly in the dusk. The hardware store's hand-painted placard has gone from red to the color of dried blood. The pharmacy's windows are dark except for the blue glow of a security monitor. And there it is, the sheriff's department, a squat brick building with a cruiser parked out front, nose pointed at the street like it's watching.
Two women on the sidewalk see the cruiser and go quiet mid-conversation. One of them laughs, but it's the kind of laugh that means nothing is funny. The cruiser sits there doing nothing, saying nothing, and still the air gets thinner around it. I've seen this before. I've lived inside thiskind of quiet. It's the quiet of a town that knows who runs it and what happens when you forget.
Ten years. I left at twenty-two with a backpack and the kind of rage that makes your hands shake. Now I'm back in a beat-up Ford that smells like cigarettes and gun oil, and the rage has settled into something lower and slower, something that lives in my chest like a bad lung.
Cembrook Road. The house sits at the end of a gravel drive that hasn't been graded since the last century. The white paint has surrendered to gray. The porch lists left like it's trying to crawl away from the front door. The side yard is a mess of weeds and what might have been a garden once. One of the garage doors hangs crooked on its track, half an inch of darkness visible underneath.
I kill the engine and sit.
The dread is specific. Not the vague unease of stepping into the unknown — the precise, mapped dread of a man who knows exactly what's inside this house and exactly how it's going to feel to walk through that door. I've slept in every room. I've put my fist through the hallway drywall. I've sat on the roof and watched storms roll in from the west. I know the sound the water heater makes when it's about to shit the bed. I know which step on the staircase groans loudest. I know that behind the kitchen sink there's a water stain shaped like Australia.
I also know Cole is in there. Somewhere. Moving through the same rooms I moved through. Breathing the same air.
I reach for the door handle.
The house smells like old wood and medicine and the staleness of windows that haven't been opened in months.The linoleum in the kitchen is the same brown-and-cream pattern, worn smooth near the stove where someone's stood for ten thousand meals. The light is yellow and thin.
"Trevor?"
Her voice comes from the living room, smaller than I remember. I follow it.
Eileen sits in an armchair with a blanket across her lap even though it's July and the house is warm. She's thinner than she should be. Her dirty blond hair has lost the sun-kissed shine it used to have, the same shine Cole still carries like it's nothing, like it doesn't cost him anything to be that golden. Her hands rest on the blanket, knuckles sharp under the skin.
"You came," she says.
"I came."
I cross the room and crouch beside her chair. Up close, the damage is worse. Her collarbones stand out like architecture. There's a transparency to her skin, a papery quality that makes me think of leaves in autumn, how they thin before they let go.
She reaches for my face. Her fingers are cool and light. "You look good. The military suited you."
"The military tried to kill me." I catch her hand and hold it. "You should have told me it was this bad."
"I told you enough." Her smile is real. It reaches her eyes and stays there. "You're here. That's what matters."
She called me three days ago. Wade was dead. Heart attack in his sleep, or that's what the coroner said. I didn't ask questions. Some men are born to die quietly in their beds, and Wade Hollander was one of them, which is a joke considering how loudly he lived.
The funeral is tomorrow. July eighth. I told her I'd come, sign whatever paperwork needed signing, give up whatever claim to the house I had, and then I'd go. I wanted nothing to do with this place. Simple and quick.
But nothing about Eileen is simple now. The woman in this chair is not the woman who raised me through the hell of my teenage years. She's the echo of that woman, the outline left behind.
"Where is he?" I ask, though I don't need to.
"Garage. He's been in there all day." She squeezes my hand. "Go easy on him. He's having a harder time with all this than he lets on."
I want to laugh. Cole Marek has never let on about anything in his life. He's the human equivalent of a closed door with a DO NOT ENTER sign nailed to it. But I nod and stand and make my way through the kitchen to the side door that leads to the garage.
The garage smells like motor oil and metal and the mustiness of concrete that never dries all the way. Cole has the workbench lit with a trouble light, bent over something — maps, papers, the scattered evidence of some project I don't understand and don't care to. His back is to me. He's wearing a gray t-shirt gone thin at the shoulders, and his arms are bare and tan and corded with muscle. His hair is sun-kissed blond and flopping over his forehead, the low-taper fade sharp at the sides. Two days of stubble on his jaw. From behind, he looks exactly like he did at eighteen, and the sight of him hits me in the chest like a round from a .45.
Twenty years of wanting something I can't have. Twenty years of carrying this stupid, pointless hungeraround like it's something precious instead of something that's been eating me alive since I was twelve fucking years old. And here it is, fresh as yesterday, lighting up every nerve I've got.
He hears me. I know he does, because his shoulders go still for half a second before he goes back to the maps.
