"I did."
He turns his head and looks at me with those dark gray eyes that have seen everything and forgiven almost none of it. "You doubt everything good that comes near you, Afon. You always have. It's why you're still alive, and it's also why you've never been happy."
I don't have anything to say to that. He's right, and we both know it. There's no point arguing with a man who's been reading me like a cheap paperback since before this girl was born.
"You shaved," he notes.
"For the wedding."
"Mm." He looks back at the fire. "You look like the man I knew twenty years ago."
I shake my head. "That man's dead."
"No," Lukas says. "He's just been hiding on a mountain."
I look at the fire. The coals flare and settle. I wonder if my cabin is still there at all, or if all the ash has blown away or been covered by snow. To think I was planning to live there for the rest of my days, and yet, now that it's gone, I don't feel one bit of sorrow for the loss. The woman I'm going to marry came waltzing out of the woods and ruined my final peace, and all I want to do is beg for her forgiveness and let me spend the rest of my days with her instead.
Lukas doesn't say anything else. He doesn't have to. We just sit. Two old men and a fire and twenty years of silence we both know how to hold.
It's the most peace I've had in a long time.
"You told her about Bill," Lukas says.
"I told her everything."
"And she's still here."
"Against all odds," I agree. "For now. But only because she's got nowhere else to go."
Lukas turns the glass in his big, scarred hand. "You always did this. Tell yourself the worst version. It's a way of bracing for the blow." He sets the glass down. "But I watched her face when she talked about you, before all this. And I watched yours just now. So spare me the bullshit."
I wince, mostly because he isn't wrong.
"Yelena," says Lukas, inducing another wince from me, "is gone. That's harsh but true, brother. You don't have to carry that burden with you anymore. Your vow to her ended. And your vow to me ended, too. What happens next is up to you."
My thumb seeks the band without my permission. I make myself stop.
"I'll take it off when it's done," I growl. "When the war's over and Caroline knows everything and she's still standing in front of me.Ifshe still is."
Lukas studies me a long moment. Then he stands, slow and enormous, his knees cracking the same way mine do now. We're both old men. We were young men together, and we did terrible things, and now, we're old men, but the terrible things are still there, clinging to us with the last of their strength.
"Get some sleep, my friend," he says. "The war starts tomorrow. But first, you get married." He puts his hand on my shoulder on his way past, heavy and warm. "Try to let yourself have one good day. Before the bad ones come back."
He leaves. I hear his footsteps fade down the hall, and then a door, and then nothing.
I stay in the chair. The fire burns down. I don't sleep. I never do, not the night before something.
The satellite phone is in my jacket pocket. I almost left it in the truck, almost handed it back to Lukas, almost did a hundred things with it. But a man like me keeps the phone. It's habit. It's reflex. It's the same reason I leave the key in the ignition and the same reason I built a cairn full of cash in the snow.
And then…
… it buzzes against my ribs.
I go very still.
Only one number ever called this phone, and that was Lukas. Lukas just walked out of this room. So who could this be?
No one else has the contact.
