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But he let it go.

Noah rested his forehead against hers, and it took him a long while to realize that he’d stopped talking. Stopped ranting. That all he was doing was breathing.

That maybe, she was helping him breathe. Just by being there, alive and warm and his, sitting with him and breathing for the both of them. Holding him together when he would have argued—at length—that he was perfectly fine and needed none of this.

He couldn’t conceive of arguing that now. Or anything else.

“Thank you,” Raemy said softly, and her lips brushed his forehead. His temple. The crook of his neck. “I know that was so hard. But thank you for telling me those things. For trusting me with them.”

Noah shook his head, but she made a soft noise, a soothing sort of noise, and he subsided. With a shudder that seemed to come from a deep, dark place inside him that he hadn’t even known was there. Like it was some locked box he’d shoved down inside himself and had forgotten about—or had forgotten he couldn’t open.

And now it was wide open, like that sunshine she carried around with her made it all the way down there, too.

So it made sense that it felt a lot like he was burning alive.

“I’m not the only one who loves you,” she told him, still doling out those kisses. He shook his head again, but when he opened his eyes and looked at her, she was smiling. “Those veterans you take into your home, you do know that they could go other places, don’t you? We can debate the efficacy of the VA, but they exist. There are other places they could go, but they come here. And they stay, and they work, and they figure out how to act human again. And do you know how it is that they figure that out?”

“Time,” Noah said at once, frowning at her. “They need time.”

“They need you.”

He started to say something, but then he saw the hint of her smile in her eyes, and he made himself stop. And she kissed him for it, a sweet press of her lips between his eyebrows.

“You’re stern and gruff, and they need that,” she said. “They don’t need anyone crying at them, or trying to make what they went through soft or palatable. You give them that, and you give them structure. You give them purpose. And all the while, there you are. Somehow managing it.”

He let out a noise of disbelief, but she didn’t take it back. “You make it seem not only possible, but doable. Those men adore you. Tank was telling me the other day that they all send you updates once they leave. That you get letters, cards, pictures of the lives they’re building when they go.”

“It’s not…” Noah stopped, and sighed. “Tank is making that out to be something bigger than it is.”

“I don’t think so.” She kissed one cheek, then the other. “When they thought that they were too dead, too ruined, to have anything like a life, you were there. You give them a roof over their head or you throw up a tent in your backyard, and you make it happen.”

“My grandfather would have wanted the land to be used, and I’m sure as hell not a gardener.”

Raemy smiled. “You teach them, every single day, that love is the only thing that matters.”

And he really couldn’t think of anything to say to that. He just shook his head.

“You feed them. You make them do those horrible calisthenics on the weekend and they groan through the entire thing and can’t wait to do it again. They love you for it.” When he made a sound, she shifted so she could look down at him. “You’ve shown them how to be real again. You’ve shown them that they can put their darkness somewhere else. Not to deny that it’s there, but to decide how to handle living with it.”

“Raemy.” His throat actually hurt. “It’s the least I can do. The least they deserve.”

“No, Noah,” she said, in that third-grade-teacher voice of hers. “It’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful. And it’s only possible because of you.” Her mouth curved, and her eyes were so intensely bright that it should have hurt to look at her. But it didn’t. “Do you really think that Tank would have discovered his baking abilities anywhere else?”

He actually smiled at that.

“You don’t have to keep paying penance,” she whispered fiercely. “Who are you even paying it for?”

All the usual responses to that bubbled up in him.

But for once, he just...didn’t let them out. He didn’t let them take hold.

He gazed at her instead. This beautiful, impossible, perfect woman curled up in his lap, looking at him with that same openness that he’d seen from the start.

She was so pretty. Her hair was tied in a messy knot on the top of her head. Her eyes were so impossibly blue. Her face was open, as always, like she wasn’t the least bit afraid what it showed or what anyone else might see on it. Her smile was aimed straight at him, and all for him.

And she loved him. She was in love with him.

He couldn’t claim that he understood how that was possible, because he didn’t. There was no possibility that he was good enough for her. There was no mechanism that could ever allow him to deserve her.