Chapter 25 Vanguard
VANGUARD
Home, sweet fucking home.
Danny sets the Meridian down in the field where we used to let the horses graze, and I sit there for a moment, watching the dust settle around us.
The house is maybe a hundred yards away, with its weathered grey siding and sagging porch, the windows like empty eyes.
The barn behind it has collapsed on one side, the roof caved in from years of neglect that makes my heart twinge with guilt.
Big Sky Country. That’s what they call Montana.
And it’s true—the sky here is enormous, stretching from horizon to horizon in a blue so deep, it makes your chest ache.
When I was a kid, I used to lie in that field and stare up at it for hours, pretending I could fall into it somehow, pretending I could vanish.
If only I’d known that one day, I could fall into it by flying up, that I could literally disappear.
I would have thought it would have solved all my problems.
I would have been very wrong.
“Nate?” Mia’s hand touches my arm. “Are you okay?”
I realize I haven’t moved or said a word. I’m just sitting here, staring out of the car at a house I haven’t seen in years.
“Yeah.” I clear my throat. “Yeah, I’m good. Let’s go.”
Danny stays with the car. He knows better than to ask questions about why we’re here. He just gives me a nod and settles back in his seat. I help Mia down on the dry grass, her hand small and warm in mine, and we start walking toward the house.
The wind smells like sage and dust and hay. Underneath that is something older, maybe manure from the neighbor’s cattle or the mineral tang of the creek that runs along the property line, smells I’d forgotten. They hit somewhere behind my sternum, a pressure that almost brings tears to my eyes.
Fucking nostalgia. It has a way of sweetening the past and hiding all the bitterness.
“It’s beautiful,” Mia says softly, looking at the mountains in the distance, the golden grass rippling in the wind. “I can see why you wanted to come back.”
It is beautiful, more so than I even remember, but that has nothing to do with it. I’ve spent fifteen years not wanting to come back, not wanting to remember, not wanting to feel whatever it is I’m feeling right now.
“There’s a lot to love about this place,” I tell her.
“The wide-open spaces, the mountains, the wilderness. The people here? Not so much, especially when they’re the ones who helped usher in the Dark Decade.
All they wanted was more land and freedom, for their cattle and their underground bunkers.
But out here, we’re more isolated from their ignorance. ”
The porch steps creak under my weight. The same creak, the same spot—third step from the bottom, right side. I used to skip it when I came home late, back when coming home late meant punishment. My feet remember before my brain does, stepping over that spot automatically.
Mia notices. She never misses a thing.
The front door is unlocked. It shouldn’t be—the property management company I pay is supposed to keep it secured—but the lock was always temperamental. You had to lift and push at the same time, jiggle the handle just right. I do it without thinking, muscle memory from a thousand entries.
Inside, the house smells like dust and old wood and something faintly sweet that might be rot.
Hopefully, there isn’t a dead animal in the walls, though I think my senses would pick up on it.
The furniture is covered in white sheets, ghostly shapes in the dim light filtering through grimy windows.
Someone has cleaned recently—no cobwebs, no animal droppings—but the emptiness is absolute, the kind that has weight to it.
Mia stands in the doorway, giving me space. She seems to understand I need to do this part alone.
I walk through the living room without stopping.
Past the couch where my father used to sit after dinner, staring at nothing.
Past the corner where Emma used to do her homework, tongue poking out when she concentrated.
Past the spot by the fireplace where I stood the night I pushed my mother down, shaking with adrenaline and terror and something that felt horribly like satisfaction.
It was in self-defense, and I never meant to push her so hard, but looking back, it was my first introduction to the darkness. I just didn’t know it at the time.
The kitchen is smaller than I remember. Everything is smaller.
The counter where my mother used to lean, glass in hand, watching us with those unpredictable eyes, always cloudy with a mix of hatred—for us, but mainly for herself—and fear.
The table where we ate in silence, forks scraping plates, the tension thick enough to taste. The floor where I found her body.
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. ”
“I’m so sorry.”