She rested her head on my shoulder and a soft sigh whooshed out and tickled my neck. “You had to do that twice. That’s two times too many, Church.”

I agreed. “I was a little bastard to my mom when she picked Jules. I was a little asshole to Caroline when Jules picked her. I wasted time with both of them for nothing. I’ve had good handed to me, hell I’ve had the best, two great women that loved me and raised me right, but I’ve also lost that goodness and I’m not willing to go through it ever again. I keep anything that might be good, that might make me happy at bay and I do it knowing I’m not a man that’s strong enough to survive another blow. Pushed my own little brother away because that was easier than thinking about having him ripped away.” I tilted my head so that my cheek rested on her curls and told her the truth about the man I was. I was a coward, not a hero. “Left the only person in the world that ever picked me, the man that chose me, in the dust because I woke up in the middle of the night choking on fear thinking about the things that could happen to him while he was on the job. I was almost a full-grown man when I made the choice to run away from home because it hurt too bad to be here and I abandoned everyone that needed me so I could fight monsters that made sense. If I was going to be surrounded by death I figured it might as well be in a place where it wasn’t a shock to lose someone.” I ran a hand over my face. “You didn’t let your circumstances ruin you when your world got turned upside down. I let mine destroy me. I wasn’t a son anymore. I wasn’t a brother or friend. I refused to be a boyfriend or a partner. I became a soldier, a man that forgot the past and refused to focus on the future. All that mattered was the moment and staying alive. I refused to be all those things that I had been before the army because I was bad at being them. I was a good soldier. Even on the worst days I was still good at war.”

She was crying. Silent tears rolled off the ends of lashes that were spiked together with moisture. I didn’t want her to cry for me. I didn’t deserve her sympathy but I knew her heart was too soft for the kind of brutal kick to the teeth my past carried with it. I leaned towards her and touched my lips to the crest of her damp cheek. I heard her breath shudder out as she sighed and leaned into the touch of my lips.

“You weren’t bad at being all the things you were before you became a soldier, Church. Life just made being them more challenging for you than they typically are for everyone else.” One of her hands reached up to curl around the side of my neck and I felt her fingers trace the line of my pulse that pounded there.

“You don’t need to make excuses for me, Dixie. I know what I did was wrong. I know I took the coward’s way out. Sometimes I think I’m going to choke on self-loathing. It tastes bad and it lingers for a long time. I buried my head in the sand and pretended that all the bad things happening here didn’t affect me. One look from Dalen, the distance between Jules and I, there is no getting around the fact that I fucked up. They needed me here and I needed to be anywhere else.”

Her hand slid around the back of my neck and her fingers scraped over the short hair at the back of my head. It was soothing. She was trying to tame the vicious sorrow that howled and pawed at my insides like a wild, living thing.

“You were a scared kid, Church, and yeah, maybe you were kind of a bratty one but you were still just a kid. A lot of kids act out when their parents introduce a new dynamic into the fold. I can’t say that I blame you for wanting to run or for wanting to find a place where loss and devastation make sense. Especially after having suffered so much. It takes a big man to recognize the mistakes he’s made and try to repair the damage he has done. You are moving in the right direction now.”

I kissed her on the tip of her nose and lifted a hand so that I could wrap it around her slender wrist. “You will always see the best in people even when they give you every reason imaginable not to.”

She exhaled softly and moved her head so that her lips were touching mine. “All I see is what you’re showing me, Church.” The kiss was swift and not nearly enough. “Now let’s go eat and spend some time with your dad. You have fences to mend.”

She slid off the bed and held out a hand so that she could tug me to my feet. I could still feel the sting of those memories all across my insides but when I rose to my feet and towered over her I also felt lighter. This time when her arms wrapped around my waist in a hug I managed not to screw it up and embraced her back.

It felt as natural as breathing. I thought distance was the answer to keeping myself safe from all that bad that was lurking, I was starting to wonder if I was very, very wrong.

Dixie

Dinner was tense and a little bit painful. It was clear both father and son were trying but the damage had been done and the road back to uniting this family was rocky and being navigated in the dark. They found common ground talking about how the town had grown and discussing the fact that it had taken the rest of Jules’s shift to get the missing-persons report on me revoked. Jules joked that we were lucky we hadn’t been pulled over on the way here from the hospital. Church didn’t think it was funny. It was weird and a lot concerning. Disgruntled and disgusted looks from strangers were one thing, going out of the way to cause trouble and strife for a stranger based solely on the color of their skin was another. I didn’t like anything about it and I hated that both Church and Jules acted like it was nothing new.

Dalen stuck his head in the dining room and asked his dad for help with his homework. It was an obvious ploy to tear Julian’s attention away from Church but neither man called him out on it. Church was going to have his work cut out for him with his younger brother and I wondered if either sibling could see how unmistakably similar they were. Church clearly looked up to and idolized his father and had pushed him away for complicated reasons I still didn’t fully have my head wrapped around. Dalen noticeably looked up to his big brother but was viewing his tentative homecoming with understandable skepticism. They were two apples that had not fallen far from the very handsome tree that had raised them.