What a joke.
Inside, I take the stairs two at a time. They groan under my weight, the same complaints they made when I was sixteen and coming home late, trying to be quiet, failing. The hallway is narrow. The patched drywall is still there, a pale rectangle where my fist went through after Wade backhanded Cole hard enough to split his lip. I was seventeen. I put my hand through the wall instead of through Wade's face, and I've carried the shame of that choice for fifteen years.
The smaller bedroom is exactly as I left it. Narrow bed. Bare walls. A window that looks out on the side yard and the neighbor's rusted swing set beyond the weed-choked fence. I drop my duffel and sit beside it. The mattress sags in the middle. The springs creak.
Downstairs, a door opens and closes. Cole's footsteps, heavy and quick, through the kitchen. The fridge opening. A bottle cap twisting off. Then silence.
I lie back and stare at the ceiling. There's a water stain up there I don't remember, brown and amoeba-shaped, spreading slowly across the plaster. The house is making new wounds. Adding to the collection.
My plan was simple. Funeral. Paperwork. Gone.
But plans are for people who haven't met the enemy yet, and the enemy here isn't a man with a gun or an IED buried in a road. The enemy is this house. This town. The woman dying downstairs and the man in the garage who looks at me like a stranger he used to know, and the twentyyears of want sitting in my chest like something I swallowed that never digested.
The stain looks like a country I've never visited. Somewhere far away. Somewhere that doesn't have my name on any of its maps.
I close my eyes and listen to the house breathe. The old pipes knocking. The refrigerator humming. The creak of the floorboard outside my door that means someone's standing there, deciding whether to knock.
No knock comes. Just the creak, then footsteps moving away, down the hall, toward the other bedroom. The door closes. A lock turns, soft but definite.
I open my eyes. The stain hasn't moved. The room is exactly as empty as it was ten seconds ago.
Chapter Two
Trevor
The morning light through my bedroom window is the color of weak tea. I lie there a minute, watching dust motes turn in the air, and the ceiling stain looks exactly like it did last night — some nameless country, borders unchanged. My body feels leaded, like I slept on concrete.
Downstairs, Cole is already moving. The fridge opening and closing, the tap running, the clatter of someone making coffee with more force than the task requires. Normal morning sounds in a house where nothing is normal.
I sit up. The mattress groans. My shoulder aches where the round took a chunk out of it — March of 2020, a rooftop in Iraq, and the VA docs said the ache would come and go for the rest of my life. Some mornings it feels like the rest of my life started today.
The suit I brought is military-issue black, pressed and hanging in the closet because that's what you do with a funeral suit: hang it up and try not to think about why youown it. I shower in water that never quite gets hot, dress in the small bathroom with its cracked tile and mildewed grout, and avoid my own reflection in the mirror above the sink. I remember what I looked like last time I stood here. I don't need to see what ten years and a war zone did to my face. I already know.
In the kitchen, Cole stands at the counter with a mug of coffee. He's wearing a navy suit that fits him better than it should, like he bought it for someone else's funeral and has been saving it. His tie hangs open at the collar.
How fucked up is it to get hard on the day of my father's funeral? My dick stirs as my gaze moves down him, and I look away quicker than I'd like. Some things never change.
"Coffee's made," he says without looking at me.
"Thanks."
I pour a cup from the pot on the burner and lean against the counter, two feet of linoleum between us, and the distance might as well be the Grand Canyon.
Eileen is in the living room, dressed in a black dress that hangs on her frame like clothes on a wire hanger. Her hair is brushed and pinned back, and she's put on lipstick — a pale pink that does nothing to disguise the gray undertone of her skin. She looks like a woman who's decided to attend her own funeral as a courtesy to the guests.
"Good morning," she says when she sees me. Her voice is thin, reedy. "You clean up nice, Trevor."
"So do you."
She smiles, and it's genuine, and that makes it worse. "Liar."
Cole drives. I sit shotgun. Eileen takes the back, heroxygen tank wedged beside her, the cannula already in her nose. Nobody talks.
Oak Hill Cemetery sits on a rise at the north end of Roan, past the high school football field. The church beside it is small and white and unremarkable — the kind of church that exists because someone decided a town should have one, not because anyone wanted to build it. The parking lot holds six cars. Six. For a man who lived here his entire sixty-some years.
"Busy," I say.
Cole cuts the engine. "Wade wasn't popular. He was tolerated."
