I grabbed Dixie’s hand and tugged her down the hallway to where my childhood bedroom was located. There were more pictures on the walls that made my knees weak and that had my heart trying to turn itself inside out. Those were the good ole days that Jules wanted me to remember, and the days I had tried my damnedest to forget. There was no outrunning the past. Somehow and someway it always managed to catch up to you, and when it did you were so tired from all the running that when it wrapped its arms around you there was no possible chance of evading it again. It held on too tightly.

“Jules and Dalen have the rooms on the other side of the house. The bathroom is across the hall here.” I pointed to a closed door that was a few feet down from the door that was cracked open to reveal the time capsule that was my old bedroom.

“Oh my.” Dixie’s voice broke on a laugh as she followed me into the blue-painted room that really hadn’t been touched since I was a teenager.

Luckily I’d always been a big guy, so the bed that was covered in a dark blue and white striped comforter was queen-sized, but that was the only sight for sore eyes in the space. There were still trophies from when I played high school sports on the dresser along with an outdated video game system that some hipster would probably pay an arm and a leg for now. There were posters of hip-hop artists and sexy pop singers on the walls that hadn’t had hits in a decade. Tucked into the side of the mirror that hung over a small desk with a computer on it that probably ran the first version of Windows were snapshots of a much younger me and the few friends I did have back in the day.

“He really didn’t touch anything in here did he?” I tossed her backpack on the bed as she wandered over to the mirror and started looking at the pictures pinned there. “You’re actually smiling.” She ran her finger over the image of me and the girl whose name I couldn’t remember that I took to senior prom. I only went because Caroline forced me to and I was only smiling because even when she was sick it was impossible not to around her. She told me I needed to get out of the house and that no son of hers was going to spend his last year of high school on death watch. Always looking out for me, just like the woman shooting me a look over her shoulder and muttering sarcastically, “I wasn’t sure you knew how to do that.”

Right after that prom picture was when I’d run to the closest recruitment office and signed my life away. It was the day that I knew for certain that it wasn’t better to love and lose than to never love at all. You could survive without love. It was a hollow, empty existence, but it hurt less than living each and every day knowing what you were missing, knowing how awful it was to love someone and lose them.

“It’s so weird to see this and know you were a normal teenager at some point in your life. I can’t get my head around you being anything but broody and badass.”

I ran a hand over my face and took my jacket off and tossed it on the bed next to where her stuff had landed. “Well, I’m sure you weren’t this much of a ray of sunshine before your dad got hurt. Our experience shapes who we are, good and bad.”

She shrugged a little and tapped a finger on a picture of me as a teen with Jules and a pretty blonde woman who wasn’t my mother holding on to a baby Dalen. “I always tried to focus on the positive instead of the negative, even before my dad got hurt. I let it out a little more after the accident. I stayed buoyant and refused to sink like everyone else that seemed all too willing to drown in their own sorrows. My experience maybe should have changed that but I’m glad it didn’t.” She changed the subject so quickly it took me a minute to catch up with her. “Who is this woman? You’re older in these pictures, so it can’t be your mom.”

I walked over so that I was standing directly behind her. That picture had the air locking in my lungs and my hands curling into fists at my sides. “That’s Caroline.”

She sucked in an audible breath. “Oh.” She cocked her head to the side and a soft smile toyed at the corners of her mouth. “She looks really happy with you, Church.”

I sighed and moved away from her to sit on the edge of the bed. “She was, when I finally let her in.”

I heard her soft gasp but I couldn’t look up at her. Her experience should have dampened her spirits. It should have knocked some of that constant cheer out of her but she refused to be defined by the hand fate dealt her. She was a thousand times stronger than I was. I took what fate handed me and let it not only define the way I would live my life but also dictate the man I would become. “When Jules first started dating her he didn’t tell me. Can’t say I blamed him, I was a little shit when my mom first brought him around. I guess I didn’t like to share.” I rubbed a hand over my face and looked at the floor between my feet. “Wasted a lot of time being angry that the people that I loved and that loved me were happy when I wasn’t. I treated Jules like an interloper and he didn’t want that for the woman that did her best to keep him together when my mom passed. He taught me better but I still acted like an idiot. I didn’t want him to replace my mom and I didn’t want another woman in my life that might eventually matter. I had Elma and that was good enough.”

The bed dipped as she sat down next to me on the mattress. Her tiny hand covered both of mine where they were clutched together between my legs, my knuckles white as I squeezed them together. I looked at our hands until our skin blurred. “Couldn’t not love Caroline. She was sweet, sunny, and soft. She never tried to force her way in but one day she was … all the way in. I was looking for her in the mornings, I was rushing home from school to have her help me with homework. She put a Band-Aid on my broken heart and I didn’t even realize that’s what she was doing. She pulled this family back together and she did it with nothing more than a smile. I had to love her and when I knew I was going to lose her it killed something inside of me. I hated myself for making her earn my love at first and I hated myself for letting that love take root. I already knew how it felt to lose a mom and I never wanted to go through it again.”