Neither of us moves toward it. I can feel the tipping point, the place where the fight could become something else, something that would redraw whatever this is between us — and I can see in his eyes that he feels it too, the same current, the same dangerous nearness to whatever lives between anger and surrender.
I step back first. My jaw aches. The muscle jumps, and I press my thumb to it without thinking.
Cole turns away. Plants both hands on the edge of the sink, fingers splayed, shoulders hunched. His back to me, the shirt dark between his shoulder blades, and I watch his breathing — quicker than it should be, harder than the argument warrants — and I know without seeing that his hands are unsteady. Not from fear. From the effort of holding back something that wants out, the same thing that's wanted out since we were kids in that bed, pretending not to feel our fingers touch on the mattress in the dark.
We stay like that. Him at the sink, me a few feet away, both of us breathing harder than we should, neither looking at the other. The garage light burns through the doorway. Yellow. Relentless.
I walk out without another word. Down the hall, past Eileen's closed door with the concentrator humming behind it, up the stairs with their familiar groans — third step, landing, the pause outside Cole's door where the lock is turned — and into the spare room where the stain holds its shape above me like a country I'll never stop mapping from a distance.
The garage light stays on. I lie in the dark and listen to the house breathe, and somewhere down the hall Cole does the same, and neither of us sleeps.
Chapter Eight
Trevor
Morning comes gray and unwilling. I'm still at the kitchen table when the light finds the window, a flat Pennsylvania dawn that doesn't so much arrive as admit defeat. My coffee is cold. Has been for hours. The mug sits in front of me, untouched, the surface gone still as pond water. Across the room, on the counter where it landed last night, the chipped mug from our standoff collects dust and dignity in equal measure. Behind me, the cabinet door hangs crooked, its hinge bent from whatever it took when my shoulder caught it on the way out. I don't remember hitting it. The body does things the mind checks out of.
I haven't slept. The ceiling stain kept its borders. The fan turned. The shoulder throbbed. Cole's words turned with the fan blades, a loop I couldn't shut off:You've let things be your whole life.
It lands again, fresh each time, like a fist I keep walking into. Clean shot. No telegraph. The kind of hit that doesn't bruise on the surface because it goes straight to the bone. Isit with my hands loose around the cold mug and let it land, because what else is there to do. Deny it? I stood in doorways and watched Wade happen. I watched Cole happen — the belt, the closed fist, the way he pressed himself to the wallpaper with the blue flowers and went somewhere else behind his eyes. I stood there. I did nothing. Then I left, and the doing-nothing became a habit I carried into the war and carried back out, a weight I learned to live with because examining it would mean admitting what it cost.
The Hannah page surfaces without warning. Seventeen. Track team. A girl. A kid. The kind of detail that lodges in your chest whether you want it there or not.
I get up. The chair legs scrape linoleum. My knee protests — the good one, not the one that aches — and I pour the cold coffee down the drain in a single tilt. It goes brown and silent into the pipes, the finality of something that was never going to be drunk anyway. I stand at the sink with my palms flat on the edge, staring through the window at the side yard.
The weeds have won. Been winning for years — a tangle of green and brown that reaches knee-high in places, swallowing the rusted swing set the neighbor kid outgrew a decade ago. Something moves in the undergrowth, a rabbit or the wind through dead stalks, and for a second I'm not looking at weeds. I'm looking at a rooftop in Iraq, at the quality of light through dust, at distances measured in yards and risk measured in seconds. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget.
Footsteps behind me. I don't turn.
Cole comes through the kitchen like a weather system —present, measurable, shifting the air pressure without making a sound. He doesn't look at me. Doesn't need to. I can feel him at my six, his presence as familiar as my own pulse and twice as complicated. He goes to the coffee pot, pours the blue ceramic mug that lives by the stove, and then he's gone, through the doorway and down the hall toward the garage, and the only proof he was here is the side door opening and closing and the smell of him left in the air — motor oil and sweat and something underneath I've spent ten years trying to name and failing.
We don't speak. The silence between us has texture now. Not the absence of sound — the presence of everything we're carrying and not saying, pressing down on the linoleum and the counters and the one working burner.
—
Later. The microwave clock says 10:17, which means nothing in a house where time is measured in medication intervals and breathing treatments. I take a shift with Eileen because it's what you do, because the pills need dispensing and someone needs to sit in the room while the nebulizer works, and because staring at weeds was starting to feel like surrender.
She's in the armchair by the window, the one that faces the backyard where nothing happens. Her dirty-blond hair is loose around her shoulders, freed from its usual practical knot, and it catches the weak light in a way that reminds me she was young once — not just younger, but actually young, with hair that had shine to it and hands that didn't tremble reaching for a water glass. Her hands are thin in her lap, fingers laced over the blanket, knuckles prominent under skin gone translucent in places. The cannula sitsunder her nose, the tubing trailing to the concentrator on the floor, which hums beside her chair.
I read her an article from a magazine I found in the living room. A lifestyle piece about a woman in Vermont who raises llamas as therapy animals. The writing is earnest and faintly ridiculous, full of phrases like "llama-ly love" and "spitting distance from happiness," and halfway through I realize I'm doing voices — giving the Vermont woman a folksy drawl that belongs in no state north of the Mason-Dixon — and Eileen is laughing. Actually laughing. A sound that starts low in her chest and catches on the damaged tissue and arrives as something between a cough and a chuckle, but it's laughter. Real. In this house. On this morning. After last night.
She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. "God, those poor llamas. Imagine having to listen to her all day."
"They tune her out. Selective hearing. Evolved trait."
"Like men."
"Like some men."
"Like the ones in this house." She looks at me then, really looks, her eyes clear despite the haze I know she's riding. "You and Cole. Are you going to keep circling each other like two dogs around a drain, or is one of you going to do something useful?"
The question lands. Direct. Unflinching. The clarity of a woman sitting in a chair watching her own lungs fail and deciding that pretense is a luxury she can't afford. I look at the magazine. The Vermont woman grins up from the page, surrounded by llamas that look profoundly unimpressed.
"It's complicated," I say.
The non-answer of the century. Eileen doesn't call me on it. Her eyes hold mine a beat longer than comfort allows, and in that beat I can see she already knows the answer — has known it since the day I walked back in with my duffel and my bad leg and ten years of silence packed into both — and the knowing sits in her face without judgment, which is somehow worse than if she'd judged me.
"Complicated." She repeats it dry, edged with something that might be humor or might be exhaustion. Both, probably. "That's one word for it."
