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“How about you help me with feeding those goats and we’ll call it even.”

“Deal!” Annie opened the book and pored over the pages.

Delmore looked between me and Keith, tipping his head as if asking if everything was all right. I nodded to reassure him. Delmore was one of the few in Baker County who had always been on the side of the Birkstroms.

“Let’s go, Annie,” I said softly. I turned back to Keith. “Bring the filly over, and I’ll get her started under saddle.”

His shoulders relaxed slightly. “Do you think Captain Hayes will take issue with it?”

“This is a business arrangement, Keith,” I said firmly. “Nothing more. Are we clear on that?”

Annie and I stepped out of the store and into the sunlight. Keith hurried out after me, his hands now empty of the items he’d been shopping for.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said.

I opened the door of my truck, tossed the rope inside the cab. Annie climbed in but watched Keith and me with wide, observant eyes. Heaviness pressed in on me. I wasn’t getting through to Keith.

I crossed my arms. “Did you know that your father started some scandalous rumors about the captain and me? To get me expelled from the association?”

He flinched. “So that’s what Hayes was talking about.”

“What?” When had he talked to Warren?

“I’m sorry, Eva.” He rubbed his forehead and shook his head. “You know if I thought I could find a way to be free of him, I would do it.”

“You’re not a prisoner, Keith.” My voice dropped.

He huffed a laugh. “I was so jealous of you, you know. Leaving for the Army when you did. I would have done anything for five years of freedom.”

My body tensed as a dozen of the worst memories flashed through my mind from the past several years. The catastrophic injuries, the piles of body bags, the rot and sickness festering in the jungle heat, and the battle in 1945 that nearly wiped us all out. My eyes stung.

Keith had fought his own war with a father who’d emotionally abandoned him after his mother died. But the men who had managed to make it home in one piece—they weren’t always whole.

“Trust me, Keith,” I said with a strained voice. “I’m glad you didn’t have to see what we saw.”

I muttered goodbye and got in the truck.

On the way home, Annie turned to me, her eyes wide over the spine of her book. “Eva? What is it that you saw in the war?”

I gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles turned white. “Has your dad talked to you about this before?”

“No.”

My stomach churned. “I don’t know if it’s my place.”

“Please, Eva? Mama says Daddy is different now that he’s come home.”

Weren’t we all? “Well, we saw the worst of what mankind can do to one another.”

She was quiet for a moment before whispering, “Is that what my dad saw too?”

“Yes, sweetie.” My voice broke. I’d heard enough from the soldiers in my two weeks in Kötzting to answer without any doubt of the truth. “He was one of the good guys, though. He only did what he had to.”

Annie lowered the book to her lap and stared out the window the rest of the drive back to Birkstrom.

Warren

Even as Pendleton drew near after three hours of driving, the guilt stuck with me. I hadn’t told Eva where we were going or why. She would have tried to talk me out of it.