Chapter 2
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 you own 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, her oxygen 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."
"By who?"
"People who didn't know him well enough to hate him."
We get Eileen out of the car. Cole handles the tank with the ease of long practice, his movements economical and sure. I take Eileen's arm, and her bones feel wrapped in tissue paper. She leans into me out of necessity, not affection, and we cross the gravel lot toward the doors.
Inside, it's cool and dim and smells like old hymnals and furniture polish.
The pews are hardwood, polished by decades of restless sitting.
Maybe fifteen people scattered through the nave, most of them old, most of them alone.
I recognize a few faces from the hardware store, the diner, the gas station.
None of them look broken up. One woman near the front dabs at her eyes with a handkerchief, but she might be allergic to something.
The coffin is closed, because Wade Hollander was not a man whose face deserved a final viewing.
A pine box, unvarnished, the kind you buy when nobody cares what you're buried in.
Reverend Phillips stands beside it in a black suit that's seen better decades, hands clasped in front of him like he's holding himself together.
We take the front pew. Eileen sits between Cole and me, the tank on the floor at her feet, the tube running up to her nose like a lifeline to some other world.
Cole's posture is rigid, jaw set, eyes fixed on the coffin with a look that could freeze water.
I feel nothing. Not relief, not sadness, not even the satisfaction of outliving the bastard.
Just that low, persistent guilt, sitting in my gut like a stone I swallowed years ago and never passed.
The service is exactly what you'd expect for a man nobody loved.
Reverend Phillips talks about Wade's "contributions to the community" without naming one.
He mentions Wade's "devotion to his family" without elaborating on the nature of it.
He reads from Psalms in a flat, practiced voice, and the words fall into the church like stones into still water — brief ripples, then nothing.
I think about the first time Wade hit me.
I was twelve. He backhanded me across the kitchen for talking back, and my ear rang for three days.
By sixteen I was taller than him, broader, and the hits stopped coming my way.
Just like that. One day he was slapping me for existing, and the next he wasn't, and the reason was written all over his face every time he looked at me: fear.
Plain, simple fear. I'd grown into something he couldn't control with his hands.
But Cole was smaller. Cole stayed smaller. And Wade didn't stop.
I watched it happen from the sidelines of my own life.
A backhand for a spilled drink. A slap for coming home late.
A closed fist once, when Cole was seventeen and said something I couldn't hear from the top of the stairs, and the sound of that fist meeting his jaw stayed in my body for years, a frequency that hummed in my bones whenever the house went quiet.
I never stood up. Not once.
Why? The question has followed me for a decade, through basic and Iraq and the long, dull recovery in a VA hospital outside Baltimore. Why didn't I step in? Why didn't I put myself between Wade and Cole and take whatever came?
The answer is simple and pathetic. Standing up would have meant admitting how much it hurt to watch.
How much I cared. And that would have meant admitting why it hurt — that the sight of Cole's split lip, his silent tears in the bathroom after, the way he'd press an ice pack to his jaw and stare at the wall like it had answers — all of it carved something out of me I couldn't name without naming everything else.
The want. The hunger. The stupid, relentless ache of wanting the one person I couldn't have.
So I did nothing. I let it happen. I became a man who stands in doorways and watches and says nothing, and then I left, and now Wade is in a box and I'm in a pew with the weight of everything I didn't do pressing on my shoulders like a load I've carried so long I've forgotten what it's like to stand straight.
The service ends. Nobody cries. A few people lay hands on the coffin, a gesture so perfunctory it might as well be mandatory.
Reverend Phillips shakes our hands at the door, his grip soft, his eyes avoiding mine, and I get the distinct impression he knew exactly what kind of man Wade was and is grateful the subject is permanently closed.
We're on the church steps, Cole walking Eileen down toward the car, when the cruiser pulls into the lot.
It comes slow, the way predators move when they're not in a hurry — confident, deliberate, the engine a low rumble every person in the lot can feel in their chest. Black and white, county sheriff, lights on the roof but dark.
It rolls to a stop ten yards from us, and the engine cuts, and the silence after has a quality I recognize from combat zones: the quiet of people trying very hard not to be noticed.
The door opens, and Sheriff Calloway steps out.
A big man. Not tall — maybe five-ten — but stout in a way that reads as strength rather than softness, shoulders broad under a uniform shirt buttoned to the collar, pinching the flesh of his neck.
Gray at the temples, hairline receding, face clean-shaven in a way that looks freshly done, like he scraped the razor across his jaw an hour ago and the skin's still pink under it.
His eyes are the color of dishwater, and they move across the lot with the calm assessment of a man taking inventory.
The people still lingering near their cars go quiet. One woman steps backward, putting the bulk of her sedan between herself and the cruiser. An old man by the doors tips his hat — tips it, like we're in a western — and Calloway returns it with a single small nod.
He approaches with his hands at his sides, not in his pockets, not near the sidearm. Everything about the way he moves is calculated to put people at ease while reminding them exactly who he is.
"Mrs. Hollander." He stops in front of Eileen. His voice is deep, measured, used to being listened to. "My condolences. Wade was a good man. A pillar of this community."
Eileen's smile doesn't reach her eyes. "Thank you, Sheriff."
He takes her hand, and his engulfs it, and he holds it a beat longer than necessary, his thumb moving over her knuckles in what might be comfort or might be something else. Then he releases her and turns to me.
"You must be Trevor. I can barely recognize you. Marine, right?"
"That's right."
His handshake is firm but not aggressive. He's saving that. "Thank you for your service. The country's grateful."
I say nothing. There's nothing to say to a line that empty.
Then he turns to Cole.
The shift is small but unmistakable. Calloway's spine straightens, his shoulders settle. His face stays pleasant, professional, but his eyes sharpen, and the air between them goes thick with something that has nothing to do with grief and everything to do with power.
"Cole. Good to see you. Under better circumstances, of course."
Cole's jaw sets. "Sheriff."
They shake hands.
I watch it happen in slow motion. Calloway's hand closes around Cole's, fingers digging in — not enough for anyone at a distance to catch, but enough that I see the tendons flex in his forearm.
His grip is a vise, and he holds it, and his eyes lock onto Cole's hard enough to lift the hair on my arms.
But Cole was trained in not flinching, trained by the best. He lets his hand be crushed and keeps his face smooth.
"Real shame about your stepfather," Calloway says, his voice still pleasant, still right for a funeral. "Such a loss. But I'm sure you'll find ways to keep busy. Town like this, there's always something needs looking into."
The subtext is so thick you could spread it on toast. Cole's knuckles are white, but his face doesn't change. He holds the stare without blinking, without backing down, and for a long moment they're locked in a contest of wills.
"Thanks for coming," Cole says finally, flat. "Means a lot."
Calloway lets go. A red mark fades from Cole's fingers. "Any time, son. That's what I'm here for."
He nods to Eileen, to me, and walks back to the cruiser, footsteps unhurried, back straight. The engine starts. The cruiser pulls away, slow and deliberate, and disappears down the cemetery road toward town.
Nobody speaks. The lot feels colder than it did five minutes ago.
Driving back to Cembrook Road, Eileen falls asleep against the window, her breath shallow and wheezing. Cole drives with both hands on the wheel, knuckles pale, and the silence between us has a new dimension — charged, edged, something that smells like danger.
Back at the house, Eileen is done. The funeral took everything she had and then some.
Cole settles her into her armchair like a man handling something irreplaceable, and then he's on his knees beside her, working the tank — checking the gauge, adjusting the flow, fitting the mask over her nose and mouth with hands that know exactly what they're doing.
"She needs rest," he says, not looking at me. "The service wiped her out."
"I can see that."
He stands. Eileen's eyes are closed behind the mask, her chest rising and falling in the shallow, effortful rhythm of lungs turning to stone one cell at a time. The oxygen sighs softly, a sound like distant waves.
"I'll make dinner," Cole says.
"I'll help."
"You don't have to."
"I know."
He looks at me then, really looks, and for a second I think he might say something — might drop the act, let some piece of the unsaid slip through whatever wall he's built between us. The moment passes. His eyes flatten, and he turns toward the kitchen.
I stand in the doorway and watch Eileen breathe, and the guilt settles deeper, finds new pockets to nest in. Wade is in the ground. The paperwork is tomorrow. The plan was clean. Simple. No complications.
But nothing about this house is simple. Not the way Cole moves through these rooms, tending his dying mother with hands that could break a man's jaw. Not the look on Calloway's face when he crushed Cole's hand and called him son.
The afternoon light slants through the living room windows, yellow and thin, and the house holds its breath around us. In the kitchen, a pan clatters onto a burner. Water runs. Normal sounds. A life continuing despite everything.