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Noah Kendrick knew exactly who the blonde woman was the minute she walked into the Salty Dog Diner that afternoon. He recognized her from the funeral. It had been a few years, but she’d left a lasting impression.

Or maybe what had left the most lasting impression was his own guilt, and so the faces of every single one of Corporal William Miller’s family members were burned forever into his brain.

His sister most of all.

Noah was behind the counter in the weathered old diner he’d been running since he’d gotten his honorable discharge from the Marines, eight years shy of his full retirement. Before that, it had been his grandfather’s for as long as Noah could remember. The old man had lived here in Wild Rose Point, a foggy, cold, perfect Oregon beach town where Noah had spent his summers when he’d been a kid growing up in Seattle. When Grandad had died, he’d left the diner and his house out back to Noah, because Noah was the only grandchild.

And maybe because he’d seen where his grandson was heading, Noah liked to think, and wanted to give him an out.

God knew, Noah had needed it.

He’d known it was time to leave the Marines, despite not making it all the way to retirement. Ghosts like William’s had started to outweigh any good he’d wanted to do and he knew that didn’t end well. He knew too many veterans to think otherwise. And after all the summers he’d spent there, he figured Wild Rose Point was the perfect place to nurse a few of his most pressing war wounds and see about exorcising a demon or two while he was at it.

Demons were easier to handle. They could be wrangled with discipline, more or less. It was as simple and as complicated as that.

Noah knew better than to think he could get rid of the ghosts. They liked to stick around. They liked to wake a man up in the middle of the night to remind him of his failures, and they weren’t much for boundaries, either.

It was easier to just accept them, and the guilt that came with them.

He accepted that. It wasn’t like he didn’t deserve to feel that guilt, after all. There was an itemized list inscribed deep into his bones, of every single thing he’d done that he wished he could take back, every order he’d given that had led to shit he couldn’t change, and every life he should have saved, but hadn’t.

The weight of it was staggering, but he carried it. He was alive to carry it, and he didn’t take that lightly. Other men had died, so he wasn’t about to complain about the things that kept him up at night.

Literally, it was the least he owed them.

As soon as he’d gotten the diner up and running under his management, he’d issued an open invitation to other combat vets. If they couldn’t get right with integrating into civilian life, but weren’t still hoping to run missions like some badass individuals everyone knew about up in Alaska, they could come and find a place in Wild Rose Point. By now, Noah not only housed vets in Grandad’s rambling old house, he’d renovated the old sheds on the property too, and he wasn’t averse to tents, either. If a veteran needed a place to crash, Noah made it happen.

Take mean, scraggly old Tank, former Army Ranger, who could scare children with his face—and often did. And yet the man baked like a dream. His specialty was something called a salted honey pie that was so good it had people lining up to get a piece of it every time he made them.

Sometimes the line went out the door and down the street, which would have confounded Noah’s grandfather. And maybe delighted him, too.

All that, and Tank—who sometimes didn’t sleep for a few days at a time and sometimes disappeared for a few more—got to feel like a human again. Like he was like everyone else, or at least adjacent to them.

Sometimes that was all a man had.

All of this to say that Noah had started thinking that he’d been doing a pretty good penance these last years.

But the woman who walked in? She was his reckoning. He knew that.

He rang up the customer before him and muttered something to one of the vets standing near him, indicating he’d be taking five.

“Understood,” Crusoe replied. “Though with a face like that, I might take more than five.”

Noah gave the man a glare that could have ripped a man who hadn’t been a Navy SEAL into shreds, but Crusoe only smirked.

“It’s not like that,” Noah growled.

“If you say so, Staff Sergeant,” Crusoe replied, because they all slipped back into their old military personas that easily. It was always right there, ready to come out.

Especially if a rank could be used as a dig, which was only to be expected from a Navy guy, Noah thought. And hoped his face showed.

But a little good, old-fashioned interservice rivalry couldn’t change what Noah had to do now, given their new visitor.

She was still standing there in the entry to the diner, looking completely unaware that she’d set Noah to taking stock of his entire life to date.

He didn’t allow himself to shirk his duty, even if it came by surprise, so he stepped out from around the counter and wound his way through the mostly-filled tables toward the door. When he’d taken over the diner, it hadn’t been full very often. His grandfather had mostly kept it open out of spite. The only customers were his grandfather’s cronies, and Noah maintained a table for the few of them who were still alive, over in the corner, out of respect.