Stripped

Chapter 1

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 this kind 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 hunger around 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.

"You're late," he says without turning around.

"Traffic was a bitch."

"No traffic between here and anywhere worth going."

I lean against the doorframe. "Funny. That's exactly why I left." A lie, and I know it the second it leaves my mouth.

It gets him. He turns, and Jesus Christ, his face. The same jawline, matured. The same mouth set somewhere between a smirk and a challenge. His eyes are the color of summer sky, and right now they're looking at me like I'm a problem he's already solved.

"Look at you," he says. "All grown up and still full of shit."

"Look at you. Still an asshole."

"Some things don't change." He turns back to the workbench. "Funeral's at eleven. Reverend Phillips. Burial at Oak Hill. After that, paperwork at the county clerk's office. I made copies of everything you need to sign. Twenty minutes, tops."

His voice is flat, practiced. He's been rehearsing this. The cold distance between us is manufactured, and we both know it, and we both pretend we don't.

"I appreciate the efficiency," I say.

"Don't mention it." He folds a map with more care than the task requires. "Mom's been asking when you'd get here for two days."

"How is she, really?"

That stops him. His hands go still on the map. For a second I think he might actually answer — might drop the act and tell me the truth about what it's been like watching his mother waste away while his stepfather drops dead in his sleep like the universe has a sick sense of humor.

The moment passes. His jaw sets, and he goes back to folding. "You saw her. You tell me."

"I'm asking you."

"And I'm telling you to use your eyes." He sets the folded map on a stack of others. "She's dying, Trevor. It's not a mystery. The doctors gave her eight months, six months ago. She's on oxygen at night. She can't walk to the mailbox without stopping twice. So yeah. That's how she is."

The anger in his voice is fresh, and under it is something raw I recognize because I've carried a version of it myself — the fury of being frustrated with someone you love and having nowhere to put it.

"I'm sorry," I say, and I mean it.

"Don't." He shakes his head. "Just don't, okay? You didn't come back for her. You came back because Wade died and there's paperwork. So do the paperwork and then go back to wherever the hell you've been for the last decade. We'll be fine."

We both know that's a lie. Nothing about this is fine. Eileen is wasting away in an armchair. Cole is holed up in a garage surrounded by maps and clippings like a man building a case against the world. And I'm standing in a doorway feeling every one of those ten years like stones in my pockets.

And all the coward in me wants to do is run back to Knoxville.

"My old bedroom?" I ask.

The house has two bedrooms upstairs. One with a wide twin bed we shared until I was nineteen and couldn't take it anymore — couldn't lie next to him in the dark, listening to him breathe, feeling the heat of him a hand's width away and knowing I could never close the gap.

So I moved into the smaller room, the one with the secondhand bed, and we stopped sharing a room and started sharing a silence that lasted until the day I left.

"Yeah," Cole says. "Figured you wouldn't want to sleep in the same bed."

"I wouldn't."

"Then we agree on something. Miracle."

I push off the doorframe. "I'm going to get my bag."

"Don't let me stop you."

Back through the kitchen. Eileen's still in her chair, eyes closed now, breathing shallow.

The blanket rises and falls with the fragile mechanics of lungs that don't work like they should.

I stand in the doorway and watch her sleep, and the guilt arrives on schedule.

I should have come back sooner. Should have called more.

Should have been the kind of son who doesn't disappear for a decade because his heart is broken and he's too much of a coward to fix it.

Outside, gravel crunches under my boots as I haul my duffel from the truck bed.

The sky's gone from dusk to proper dark, and the trees at the back of the property are black cutouts against purple.

The house windows glow yellow. From the road, it probably looks warm in there.

Inviting. The kind of place where a family lives a normal life.

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 twenty years 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.