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She looked like she couldn’t decide whether she should laugh or not, but he needed to say this, so he kept going. “You just tell me what you need, and it’s yours. I don’t expect you to offer me forgiveness. I wouldn’t even ask for it. But I want you to know that not a day goes by that I don’t think about your brother and wish that I’d made better decisions so that I might have kept him safe.”

Her smile... changed. “Thank you.” Her eyes were impossibly blue and the longer she looked at him, the bluer they seemed. “But I forgive you. Of course I do. How was any of that your fault?”

Noah stared back at her and thought for a moment that the scowl he was wearing might become permanently attached to his face. Maybe it was his face at this point. “What are you talking about? You can’t forgive me. It was entirely my fault. That’s not debatable.”

And instead of sitting back, nodding soberly, and waiting for Noah to account for every shitty decision he’d made that had led directly to William’s death under his command, his sister only looked at him for a moment. Just a moment.

With those wide blue eyes that he swore could see straight through him, deep into all his three am dark nights of regret and his memories like fire and his worst regrets that he, certainly, had no intention of forgiving himself for.

She looked at him like she could see his soul, and Noah knew that was a twisted piece of fuckery best left alone at the best of times, but she didn’t seem to get that memo.

Because what Raemy Miller did then was not the reasonable reaction. She didn’t run. She didn’t throw something at him or pull out a weapon to even the score. She didn’t launch into a tirade or demand he account for himself. She didn’t cry.

What she did instead was laugh.

2

Raemy had been on the road all summer.

She’d had a vague itinerary and her savings. An ending and a beginning, she’d told her sweetheart parents with great confidence. Because finally, she was moving on.

They all were.

Raemy had mourned William for years. They all had. Sometimes Raemy had felt as if she’d been buried with him, because it seemed when she looked back on it that everything had kind of stopped when he’d died.

Except, that was the thing about grief, wasn’t it? Only she had stopped. That didn’t mean the world stopped turning too.

At first, it had seemed offensive to her. She was expected to go about her business as if everything was normal? She was expected to get up and go teach her third graders in the same elementary school that both she and William had attended, and act as if everything was the way it always had been? She was expected to drive to and from work, get her groceries, eat, interact with people, live...

It all seemed so pointless.

Raemy couldn’t really remember the first year or two. It had been such a crushing weight, like the loss of William had taken all the light and color out of the world. It was bad enough that she’d lost her baby brother, her only sibling. But she had also had to suffer through that loss with her parents. She’d had to witness their pain. No parent should have to live through the death of one of their children. That wasn’t the way the world was supposed to work.

They’d formed a kind of trinity of tears, and they’d stayed there in the gray of it for a long time. And the funny part was that it wasn’t Raemy who’d spurred them to let go of that. She hadn’t been the one to suggest they try to live again.

It had been her father who had forced them all out of their rut. He had insisted that the last thing William would ever have wanted was for all of them to die with him.

That had hit Raemy uncomfortably hard, which was how she’d known it was true.

William had been a dreamer. He’d been like sunlight. He was four years younger than her and she had claimed him when he was born with all the confidence of a toddler. Her name had been his first word.

But he had known exactly what he was doing when he’d joined the Marines. He’d known what it might cost him.

He would never have wanted them to lie down and not get up again.

She had taken her father’s reminder of that like an action item, and the last couple of years had been brighter. Better. No one had ever forgotten William, or let go of him in any way. None of them would.

But when Raemy had gone to her parents to tell them that she wanted something different, something bigger than the life that she’d been able to sleepwalk through after losing William, she’d expected them to argue. But they hadn’t. They’d told her that they wanted the same thing and hadn’t known how to tell her.

And now here they all were, off on adventures.

Her parents were taking that cruise they’d always talked about, and were months into a round-the-world trip. Raemy had quit her job at the end of the school year and taken off in her car to see more of this massive, beautiful country than the darling little river town in Missouri where she’d been born and raised.

She’d gone to the Badlands, then Yellowstone. She’d visited old friends in Colorado. She’d driven into the Rocky Mountains and had hiked mountains so big they made her dizzy, then had traced her way through red rock canyons, all the way to the Grand Canyon. She’d found her way up to Montana and had stayed a while at Flathead Lake.

Then she’d made her way down, over a mountain pass into eastern Washington so she could drink wine in Walla Walla. She’d kept going, chasing the gorgeous Columbia River all the way west, where she’d hiked on Mount Hood and had eaten outrageously good food in Portland. Then she’d kept going to the sea. First to Astoria to relive the movies she and William had watched growing up. Then she’d wound her way down the stunning, gloriously atmospheric Oregon coast.

And she wasn’t sure when, in all of that, she’d understood that she knew exactly where she was headed.