“How’s the writing going?” he asks.
I shrug. “Been better.”
He steps closer, coffee mug in hand. His beard is shorter than when I first met him. But he still looks feral around the edges, as if the mountain refuses to fully let him go. Or maybe he doesn’t want it to.
“Figure we could add a second room here, a writing office for you, once some of these storms slow down and the roads are passable again. Maybe a bedroom for privacy.”
“You have big plans for this place.” I grin, cheeks heating.
“Guess I’m thinking long-term. If this still feels right to you.”
“More right than ever,” I say.
“Good.” His mouth works now, and then he says, “Maybe someday, we could add on a little nursery, too.”
Our eyes meet, and now we’re both grinning.
His eyes drift to the laptop screen, but he doesn’t ask to read it. Doesn’t ask what I decided. That burden is mine, just like his has always been his.
“The families deserve something,” I whisper finally.
Rhys nods once slowly. “I know.”
“But not this?” I ask quietly. “Not all of it?”
His jaw flexes. “I don’t know, Sloane,” he says, honest and tired. “That’s the problem.”
I lean back in the chair, looking out the window toward the misty mountains. Toward the place where everything broke apart and where I found him.
The truth didn’t set anything free. But it brought me here.
“I built my career believing the truth could always be uncovered if you dug deep enough. Now I’m not sure war leaves behind truths clean enough to recover.”
He looks down, Adam’s apple working before he says, “I don’t know whether Phoenix was saving lives or sacrificing them. Maybe he didn’t know either.”
Even Rhys only carries pieces of what happened that day. Guilt isn’t the same thing as certainty.
I could write a version that sounds complete. But that would be the biggest lie of all.
The families deserve honesty. But honesty and certainty aren’t always the same thing. And that’s why some stories survive in fragments.
Because nothing’s ever that simple.
War transforms people into symbols after they die—heroes, villains, sacrifices. But the living have to carry the contradictions, live with the things that evade simplification.
Maybe that’s the cruelest part of survival. The moment you learn that truth doesn’t always arrive whole. Maybe it never does, really.
With Phoenix, no one ever had the whole story. Not the reporters, the survivors. Not Rhys or even Phoenix. Some of it died with the men who never came home, and I’m finally willing to accept that.
Becausethat’sthe truth.
I follow him outside once the fog burns off revealing verdant forest. We’re back to where we started, staring at a half-buried, half-lost Jeep.
Rhys braces his boots harder against the mud and works the winch again. The cable groans sharply. The vehicle shifts maybe half an inch. Then stops.
He curses under his breath.
“You know,” I say, smiling to myself. “For a mountain ghost, you’re kind of stubborn.”
