Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Trevor
I sit in the truck. The heat presses through the windshield, thick and insistent, turning the cab into something between an oven and a confessional.
My shirt's already sticking to my back. The shoulder aches — the one that took the round, doing its thing when the temperature climbs or my posture slips below acceptable.
I straighten against the seat. Adjust the jacket I shouldn't be wearing in this heat but needed for the pockets and the look of it, the olive drab that says veteran without me having to say anything.
The street is quiet. Dellard runs east-west off the main drag, a block of houses that were probably nice thirty years ago and have lost ground steadily since.
Chain-link fences. Satellite dishes. A plastic flamingo on its side in a yard three doors down — same as the one at Tally's place, which means either Roan has a flamingo problem or there's a sale somewhere I missed.
Nobody on the sidewalks. The cicadas are cranked to eleven.
I get out. Close the door soft. The gravel underfoot is the same crushed limestone that's under every drive in this town, mud in spring and dust in summer, and right now it's dust, rising in small puffs around my ankles.
The screen door doesn't budge when I push it — the hinge seized, rusted through at the bottom pin — so I step around it and knock on the inner door.
Three solid raps. The kind of knock that says I'm not selling anything and I'm not leaving.
I wait. Count to fifteen. The porch creaks under my weight.
I can hear movement inside — floorboards, the shuffle of someone who wasn't expecting company and is deciding whether to pretend they're not home — and then the deadbolt turns.
The door opens a few inches. Chain still on. A face in the gap.
Brenda Coyle looks like she hasn't slept in a decade.
Dark circles carved under her eyes, the skin there gone thin and papery, like something's been eating at her from the inside and the eating shows.
Her hair's pulled back tight, a practical knot, dark strands going gray at the temples.
A faded flannel over what might be a tank top, sleeves rolled to the elbows, and her arms are thin — not slim, thin, the kind that comes from forgetting to eat because eating takes a presence grief doesn't allow.
She looks at me the way people in Roan look at strangers: like I'm either a threat or a waste of time, and she hasn't decided which.
"Yeah?" One word. Flat. Guarded.
I keep my hands visible, palms out, slightly away from my body, the way you do approaching someone who's been hurt and doesn't trust easily. My voice comes flat and unhurried, the register I use when I need to sound like the least dangerous man in the room.
"Trevor Hollander. Wade's son." I let it land. "Back in town for the funeral. Not a cop. Not a reporter. Cole mentioned you might remember me."
Her eyes change. Not soften — sharpen. The calculation runs behind her face, gears turning, memory pulling a file she hasn't opened in years. Her jaw works once.
"Hollander." She tastes the name. "You're the one who joined up. After." She doesn't specify after what. Doesn't need to. In Roan, after covers a lot of ground, most of it the kind nobody talks about.
"That's me."
"The war hero." Not a question. A statement, flat, from someone who's heard the phrase enough times that it's lost whatever meaning it had.
The words hit somewhere below the sternum.
A cold fist between the ribs, and behind it the memory: a rooftop, the crack of the rifle, the round taking me in the shoulder, the world going white and then red and then the gray I still see sometimes when I close my eyes.
The medevac. The hospital outside Baltimore.
The discharge papers. The Purple Heart in a drawer in Knoxville, because displaying it felt like performance, and performance is something I've never been good at.
I smile. It doesn't reach my eyes. It never does. "I'm the one."
She studies me three more seconds. Her eyes move across my face — the jaw, the cheekbones, the set of my mouth that Cole once said looks like I'm biting down on something bitter even when I'm not — and whatever she finds clears some threshold, because her hand goes to the chain.
The metal slides free with a rattle too loud for the quiet porch, and the door opens.
The interior is dim. Curtains drawn against the heat, heavy fabric faded to the color of old teeth.
Sparse furniture — a couch with a throw over one arm, a television older than I am, a coffee table stacked with mail and unopened bills.
The smell is closed-in and faintly sweet, a house where the windows haven't opened in months and someone's living on coffee and whatever doesn't need cooking.
She leads me to the kitchen. Small, linoleum yellowed at the edges, cabinets that might have been white once.
A table against the wall with two mismatched chairs — one wooden, one metal with a vinyl seat split down the middle and patched with duct tape.
She points me at the wooden one. Takes the metal one herself. We sit.
The silence breathes. I let it. Rushing gets you nowhere with people who've been hurt — learned that overseas, learned it again in VA waiting rooms, learned it every time I watched Cole shut down because someone pushed too hard too fast. So I sit.
Hands loose on the table. Eyes on her face without staring.
The fan rattles. The refrigerator hums. Outside, a car passes on Dellard, fading toward town.
She's waiting for me to fill the space, which is what people do when they're used to being interrogated — they make you work for it, make you prove you want it bad enough to break the silence yourself. So I break it.
"Came back to bury Wade." Flat. Factual.
The delivery that doesn't ask for sympathy, because sympathy's a currency I've never been comfortable spending.
"Wasn't planning to stay. Paperwork, mostly.
The house, the will." I pause. "Eileen asked me to stick around.
She's not doing well. Pulmonary fibrosis. Terminal."
Something flickers across Brenda's face. Not sympathy — recognition. The look of someone who's sat in too many waiting rooms and knows what terminal means out of a doctor's mouth.
"Ten years between," I say. One foot in front of the other. "Joined up after I left. Marines. Served in Iraq. Took a round in the shoulder a few years back — still catches when it's cold, which it isn't today. Discharged after that, spent a while in Knoxville."
"What'd you do in Knoxville?" Quiet. Careful. Each word chosen the way someone picks across broken glass.
"Odd jobs. Security work. Kept to myself.
" A few words to cover years of a life I still don't know how to talk about.
The blankness of it lands on the table between us.
Concrete apartment complexes and convenience-store coffee and the silence of a man with nowhere to be and no one waiting for him to get there.
Not much. The understatement of the decade.
She studies me. Her eyes are dark, almost black in the dim kitchen, moving across my face with the focus of someone who's heard enough bullshit in this town to know performance from truth.
She's looking for the tell — the twitch, the shift, the place where the story cracks and something else shows through.
I don't give her one. There's nothing to perform.
The blankness is real. Knoxville was real.
Keeping to myself was the one skill I brought back that turned out useful in civilian life, and useful is about the best I can say for it.
She gets up. Crosses to the sink. Turns the tap — the pipes knock in the wall, a sound so familiar it almost hurts — and fills two glasses with room-temperature water.
Sets one in front of me without asking, and the gesture is so ordinary, so human, that something in my chest tightens.
She sits back down. Doesn't drink. Just looks at the glass like it might hold an answer she hasn't thought to look for.
I pick up the glass. Set it down without drinking. The conversation needs to turn, and turning needs a pivot, and the pivot is a name I've carried since I read it in Cole's notebook two nights ago.
"I remember Annette."
Brenda's hands go still on the table. Completely still — the stillness that comes from below conscious control, the body reacting to something the mind hasn't finished processing.
Her fingers are long, thin, knuckles prominent under translucent skin.
They rest on the Formica like someone else placed them there.
"She was—" She stops. Corrects. The correction is visible, a tightening around the eyes.
"She is — was — she was a good kid." Present, then past, then the awkward hybrid grief makes when language can't keep up with reality.
Her jaw sets and the muscle jumps, and she presses her thumb to it the way I press mine to my cheek when the tic surfaces, and the likeness isn't lost on me.
Grief has its own body language, and Brenda Coyle speaks it fluently.
"Quiet, though. Always quiet. Even as kids, she was the one who watched.
I did the talking, she did the listening.
" Her eyes find the window, the slice of daylight at the hem of the curtains.
"Four weeks before she left, that's when it started.
She got quieter. Stopped eating much. Slept through the afternoon, woke at dusk, went out, came back late.
I nagged her about it. Told her she was acting strange.
Thought it was a man. Thought she was being dramatic.
" Her voice goes dry. "Teenage girls. Everything's the end of the world until it actually is, and then you wish to God you'd taken it seriously when you had the chance. "
I nod. Don't speak. Let her fill the space.