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“Pictures,” she realized, and her stomach did something funny inside of her.

He had albums filled with pictures.

And he set them out before her, very carefully.

“Here,” he said gruffly. “They’re in chronological order. This was our life, Ruthie. For a few years, anyway.”

And when she opened the first book, she saw them both, wrapped up in each other’s arms, beaming at the camera.

It was definitely Dallas and it was one hundred percent Ruthie, except they were so young. And they were smiling so big it was almost too bright to look at, so obviously in love that it felt a bit like a violation to look at them.

Somewhere deep inside of her, something in her that she couldn’t even name began to ache, but Ruthie didn’t slam the album shut the way some part of her really, really wanted to.

She pulled in a breath. She didn’t dare look at Dallas, there across the table.

And she turned the page.

Chapter Five

Dallas sat there in the lobby that he’d crafted with his own hands, watching his estranged wife dig through the archaeological remains of the life they’d shared. The historical record of the things he’d lost, one photograph at a time.

He really thought he would have liked it better if he was being actively tortured behind enemy lines.

Not that he was sure he could tell the difference at this point. It was bad enough when he looked through this box on his own, filled with his usual self-loathing—something he’d forced himself to stop doing in recent years, in a bid to maybe mess himself up a little less. Watching her do it was excruciating.

A torture beyond any training he’d ever had. Beyond imagining.

At first, he tried to categorize every minute change of expression on her face. He looked for clues. He tried to tell himself whole stories about the way she shifted in her seat, or the small, faint noises he heard her make as she turned the pages and found a new memory to look at. Memories she could see were real whether she felt them or not.

He wanted to narrate the whole thing, knew he shouldn’t, and it was still hard to keep himself from doing it anyway. He wanted to tell her that she was the one who’d put these albums together. That she was the one who’d insisted on all those pictures in the first place. That she was the reason they had this record of those years, and how he sometimes—often—found it strange that those five years together felt richer, more deeply layered, and much longer than the eight years he’d spent without her.

This wasn’t the first time it had occurred to him to wonder if part of that was because he didn’t have a lot of photographs of himself from the past eight years here in Montana. He hadn’t collected them, that was for sure. He was sure that some existed, thanks to his family, but most of the pictures he had on his phone were of the renovations he’d done up on this hill.

Dallas could remember the progression of the lighthouse better than he could recall the passage of time.

He kept that to himself. He watched Ruthie move through the years, sometimes tracing a photo with her fingertip. And though every part of him wanted to lean in to see which picture garnered that response, he held himself back. He told himself he didn’t need to know.

Because none of this actually mattered.

This was a perfect opportunity to work on calming himself down no matter what, and it was humbling how bad he’d become at a skill that had once been second nature to him. He’d caught himself grabbing his own jaw and running his hands over his face too many times since she’d gotten here. Those were tells, and he shouldn’t have any tells, and no, it did not matter that he was not about to be called up and deployed any moment.

Dallas didn’t let himself fidget, whether he was an active servicemember or not.

He’d been trained for this. He was supposed to be able to look into the darkness, even if the darkness was inside of him, and remain calm under that pressure.

Under any pressure.

Ruthie closed the last of the albums and placed it neatly on the stack of the rest of them, then sighed a little. Then she looked up and caught his gaze, her own too bright and far too gold and green.

Dallas accepted the fact that maybe he didn’t have it in him to be calm like that any longer.

“So,” she said.

“Yes.”

Ruthie laced her hands together in her lap. “I just looked at a lot of pictures of two people who seemed pretty deliriously happy in each other’s company.” She nodded at the stack of albums. “Six books’ worth of deliriously happy.”

Her voice had changed, he realized. It was different now. She no longer sounded like she was indulging him as he told her fairy stories. That probably meant he’d been right, thinking that she needed to actually see these pictures of the two of them together to fully understand what he was trying to tell her.