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No matter how much he liked to pretend the pictures didn’t exist, these days.

He’d tried to pretend she didn’t exist either and now she was here, so maybe he wasn’t that great at this pretending thing.

“I think you’re going to have to tell me,” Ruthie said quietly, still gazing at him in that way that made his soul hurt, damn her. “You’re going to have to explain to me how all of that happiness turned into eight years of separation.”

If Dallas was completely honest with himself, he’d known that it was inevitable that he was going to have to discuss this since the moment she’d walked in the door. Though he’d thought, at first, that it was going to be a very different kind of discussion. He’d imagined that she would be the one guiding it and probably yelling at him a lot, too.

“Do you want a drink?” he asked her, not pleased to find that his voice was scratchy.

“I don’t.” She took a breath that made her whole body move. “I just want you to tell me, Dallas. How bad can it be?”

And he let out a sound at that. A sound that felt as bad as it sounded, and he was either going to have to start talking or toss himself off the side of the mountain. The thing about that was that he already knew that while he could spend a lot of time in the dark—too much time and too much darkness, according to everyone he knew—he couldn’t actually seal that deal.

The daylight always called him back, like it or not, and some years he hadn’t liked it at all.

That meant he only had the one choice.

“Okay,” he said, sounding rough, but he didn’t let that stop him. “I’ll tell you. But you should know going in that even though I’m going to try the best that I can to state only facts, there’s a very real possibility that I’m going to make myself sound better in this than I am. Certainly better than I was to you.”

“So far,” Ruthie said, her gaze almost green now and very direct, “you have gone out of your way to tell me what a terrible person you are. While also cooking me breakfast. Making my coffee perfectly to my taste. Insisting that I wear the appropriate cold weather garments to survive walking around in Montana in December. Taking me on a tour of your sweet little village here. And otherwise behaving a lot more like a very kind—dare I say nice—man than the one you keep warning me about.”

“It’s easy to pretend to be all of those things,” he growled. “But you can’t pretend long term.”

“Kindness?” She shook her head. “I don’t think you’re pretending. But stop giving me all of these dire warnings, please. Just tell me what terrible thing you did, so I can judge it myself.”

“That’s the thing,” he said, and he could hear the frustration in his own voice. “You already did judge it. The Ruthie I know already made herself crystal clear, and would never have come back here to drag it all up again. Never.”

Except maybe to deliver those divorce papers. Or maybe that, too, had been wishful thinking.

“This Ruthie did come back here,” she said simply. “This Ruthie can’t remember what she made clear, or why. And didn’t come here to have this discussion anyway. But here we are.”

And it was maddening, he told himself. She was absolutely maddening, and what made it worse was that he didn’t think she was trying to be. He was pretty sure that she was being completely forthright.

The way he’d always believed he was. Before.

But that’s because she doesn’t know, he reminded himself, harshly. That’s because she’s still caught up in how you look, and has no idea what you did.

And, okay, he could admit to himself that he was stalling. Hoping that either her memory came back—shocked into it by the sight of him—or she simply took his warnings to heart, decided that she was better off not knowing, and took off again.

But it was time for him to stop stalling. Past time.

“Deployments were hard,” he made himself say. “But we had that connection, and it was different. We understood each other. We trusted each other. We made the most of the time we had together, and it was good.”

God, was it good.

He leaned forward, bracing his elbows on his knees and letting his hands hang in front of him. “Some people don’t ever talk about the things they did. And there are some things I can never talk about, both for security reasons and because I just can’t. But you always knew. You always understood what was happening with me and you were there for me, whatever it looked like.” He remembered that part so vividly. The way she would take one look at him and know exactly what he needed. A hug. A meal. Or straight to bed, naked and hot and alive. She always knew. “I thought, particularly when I looked around at the other men on my team and how they handled things—badly—that I had it good. We were golden.”

Dallas paused then, and maybe he was hoping that she would jump in, and ask some more questions so he could somehow not get to the point of this, but she didn’t. She was sitting there across from him, tucked into the corner of that couch in that exact same position that he knew only too well from the house they’d shared. He could see that the socks she was wearing were ones she’d knit too.

He nodded toward them, and kept going. “You taught yourself to knit. Your grandmother wasn’t a crafter, you liked to say. But you needed something to do with your hands that got you off your phone, doomscrolling late into the night, alone in that house. So instead you watched old murder mysteries on television and you knitted your face off.”

Ruthie smiled at that. “I still do.”

“I think that there’s something about relationships based on always missing each other.” Dallas found her gaze, then, and he held it. Because maybe the time for being a coward was over. “I wonder if we were better that way. There was always a good reason to put off the hard conversations because we always knew the time we had together was finite. That the Army could crash in and take it at a moment’s notice.” He ran his tongue around his teeth. “I didn’t feel that, necessarily. Not while it was happening. It’s not like that was something I forgot to say while we were together, because I couldn’t have expressed it that way. Not then. But I’ve had a lot of time to go over it. Conduct a postmortem.”

“I think that’s probably true of most military relationships,” Ruthie said. “I’m surprised they don’t have a course on how to come home from… all that.”

“They do.” Dallas could feel his mouth twist. “We never thought that kind of stuff applied to us.” She blinked, then nodded. “We didn’t have affairs. We didn’t have drama like that. I got my discharge when I was twenty-five and we thought we had our whole lives in front of us. But that’s when everything went wrong.”