Every hair on my arms lifted.
Footsteps sounded in the hall—measured, unhurried. Not the brisk stride of staff, or the relaxed lope I’d already learned to associate with Charlie. This gait had weight. History.
An older man stepped into the room.
He carried himself like he’d been tall his whole life and never once apologized for it. Broad shoulders beneath a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled neatly to the forearms, dark slacks, bare feet like he’d abandoned his shoes somewhere between whatever room he’d been in and here. His hair was mostly silver, still thick, swept back from a face lined in the ways men’s faces get lined when they’ve laughed hard and worried harder.
His eyes were what stopped me.
When they landed on Levi, something in them went bright and wrecked all at once.
For a second, I wasn’t in Dominion Hall.
I was in a canvas tent lit by a rattling generator, listening to Levi describe a man who could field-dress a deer in under twenty minutes and still be home in time to flip pancakes for seven hungry sons.
“Levi,” the stranger said.
His voice was lower than Levi’s, roughened by age and thousands of unfiltered cigarettes, if I had to guess. It threaded into the room like smoke.
Levi didn’t move.
For once, he didn’t hide a damn thing.
Shock flared across his face, then anger, then something that looked a lot like a small boy realizing the monster under the bed was actually the shadow of his own shoes.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked.
The older man flinched. Just enough to register. Then he straightened.
“My name is Byron Dane,” he said. “I’m?—”
“My father’s dead,” Levi cut in. The words came out on a ragged exhale. “They brought a flag to our house. They told us. My mother—” His voice cracked on the word. “We buried an empty box.”
Byron Dane’s gaze didn’t waver.
“I know,” he said quietly.
Silence landed in the room with the weight of a mortar.
I couldn’t breathe.
I looked at Levi—at the rigid line of his shoulders, the white-knuckle grip he had on the back of the nearest chair, the way his chest rose and fell like he’d just sprinted up a mountain. The faint sheen in his eyes he wouldn’t blink away.
He’d always, always talked about his father like he was gone.
Grief and resentment in equal measure.
Now that grief was standing in front of him, hands slack at his sides, looking like a ghost who’d gotten lost on the way to the afterlife.
I realized my own hand was shaking and curled it into a fist.
“Levi,” I said quietly, stepping closer, not quite touching him. “Breathe.”
His eyes flicked to me, wild for a second, then back to Byron.
“You let them tell us you were dead,” he said, each word rough-edged. “You let her bury you.”
Byron’s throat worked. “It wasn’t my choice,” he said. “Not at first.”
