Total pages in book: 173
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 169266 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 846(@200wpm)___ 677(@250wpm)___ 564(@300wpm)
I stop.
My hand is gripping the doorframe. I don’t remember reaching for it.
“Nate?”
Mia’s voice comes from behind me, soft and careful. I feel her approach more than hear it—the slight change in air pressure, the warmth of another body, the comfort of another soul. I’m not alone now.
“She died right there.” I nod toward the spot by the refrigerator. The linoleum has been replaced since then—different pattern, lighter color—but I know the exact location, could draw it blindfolded. “I was twenty. Home on leave. Found her when I came down for breakfast.”
Mia doesn’t ask who. She already knows from our conversation at the diner. What she doesn’t know is the rest of it.
“I stood there for maybe thirty seconds before I called anyone.” My voice sounds strange, distant, like it’s coming from somewhere else. “Thirty seconds. That’s a long time when someone’s dying on the floor. Long enough to think things you shouldn’t think.”
“What did you think about?” she asks quietly.
The question sits between us. I’ve never answered it before, never told anyone about those thirty seconds, about the voice in my head that whispered let her stay down, about the relief that flooded through me before the guilt crashed in to drown it. That I was almost happy it was finally all over—until the reality hit me, the reality that I lost my mom and never had one to begin with.
“I thought—” My throat closes. I try again. “I thought, it’s over. Not help her or call 911. Just…it’s over. She can’t hurt anyone anymore. And then it hit me: she can’t be my mother anymore. I never got… I never had…”
The confession hangs in the air, ugly and true. I wait for Mia to recoil, to look at me differently, the way people would if they knew what kind of son stands over his dying mother and feels relief.
Instead, she takes my hand.
“You were a child,” she says quietly. “A child she hurt, over and over again. You’re allowed to feel complicated things about someone who hurt you.”
“I was twenty.”
“You were a child when she started. That doesn’t just go away because you got taller.”
Something cracks inside me. Not breaking, exactly—more like ice shifting on a lake, the first sign of spring thaw after a long, frozen winter.
It feels like the longest exhale.
“Come on.” I pull her gently toward the back door. “There’s something else I want to show you.”
The barn is half-collapsed, but the hayloft is still intact. We climb the old ladder—me testing each rung before letting Mia follow—and emerge into a space filled with golden light and floating dust motes.
“This is where I used to bring Emma when things got bad,” I tell her, settling onto a hay bale probably twenty years old and somehow still holding together. “We’d play up here for hours. Make-believe games, mostly. She was always the princess, I was always the knight. Very original, I know.”
Mia sits beside me, close enough that our thighs touch. The contact grounds me, keeps me from floating away into the past.
“She was pretty damn lucky to have her brother as a knight, the role you seemed born to play.”
I smile. “Yeah. Though sometimes, she made me pretend I was a princess too.”
Mia laughs. “I like her already.”
“You would have, for sure.” I pick up a piece of straw, twist it between my fingers. “She was smarter than me. Braver too, in the ways that matter, in the ways I could never be. I could take a punch, but she could take the whole world telling her she was wrong and keep fighting anyway. During the Dark Decade, she was…” I shake my head. “She was a leader. People listened to her, followed her. She gave them hope when everything else was falling apart.”
“And that’s why they killed her.”
“Yeah.” The word comes out rough. “That’s why they killed her. She had people’s hearts, and that was dangerous. They lacked heart, you know? They could never get what she had.”
The wind whistles through the gaps in the barn walls. Outside, I can hear the distant cry of a hawk and the rustle of grass. The sounds of my childhood, unchanged by everything that’s changed. How this world moves on…
“I told you I was in Syria when it happened,” I say, unable to stop myself. “Middle of the night, middle of nowhere, and my CO pulls me aside and hands me a phone. I knew before I answered. You always know somehow. Those phone calls come with their own frequency.”
Mia’s hand finds mine again. Her fingers are cold, and I fold them into my palm, trying to warm them. I know she probably had that same moment, that same phone call, when she learned her mother and brother had died.
“I wanted to tear the world apart,” I continue. “Wanted to find every person who’d touched her, every person who’d given the order, and make them pay. But I was a soldier. I had a mission. So, I finished the tour, came home, and found out they’d already cremated her. No body to bury. No closure. Just a flag and an urn and a lot of official condolences from people who’d signed her death warrant.”