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“Tell me,” she urged him, quietly.

“It was me,” he said, gruffly. “All I wanted to do was leave the Army so that we could start our life. We talked a lot about that. How I’d signed up for something at seventeen, having no idea that I would meet you when I was twenty. Because if I’d known that you were on the horizon, I probably wouldn’t have signed my life away like that. I couldn’t wait to get out. But once I did, I didn’t know what to do with myself.”

He sat up again, but he couldn’t sit still like this. Instead, he stood and moved over to the mantel, so he could poke at the fire that didn’t need poking.

She waited. So he kept going. “It wasn’t that I couldn’t get a job. I could. I did. But I lost that sense of purpose, I guess.” He scowled at the flames in the fireplace and poked them so they danced higher. “The Army gives you structure. It gave me that, a purpose for everything that I was doing, very clear timelines about how everything would be accomplished, and how it would go. And without it, it was like I didn’t know what to do with myself.”

He snuck a look back at her but she was still sitting there, watching him. Listening. Taking it all in.

Dallas made himself say all of it, all the things he hadn’t been able to say then. All the things he’d figured out up here in this abandoned lighthouse, year after year.

“I don’t think I realized that I’d spent all those years growing up and dreaming of getting out of here. Or how much I focused on that and made it what I was about. Getting away from Cowboy Point. Distancing myself from my family and anything reminding me of my father.” He couldn’t look at her, so he glared at the fire again instead. “And then there was you. The Army became the thing I wanted to get away from, because I wanted to be done. I wanted to finally be with you the way that we wanted to be together.”

He thought she made a small noise at that, but when he looked at her she was looking down at her hands.

“We talked about starting a family all through my active years, but neither one of us wanted to do it if it meant that you’d have to be the one raising children that I’d only see in between deployments.”

“That sounds reasonable,” she murmured.

He turned to face her fully then, because that was the very least he could do. Literally, the bare minimum of what he owed her.

“What I failed to notice in all those years of trying to get away from something was that the only thing I ever learned how to do was leave. That my life only made sense to me when I was fighting to get away. And maybe it didn’t matter what I was trying to get away from.” He laughed a little at that, and pressed his fingers on the bridge of his nose, because he wasn’t entirely sure that laugh wasn’t going to go rogue and who knew what might come next. “But again, this is with the benefit of eight years of hindsight. At the time, all I knew was that I was mad. I was so fucking mad. Everything made me furious. But all I would say when you asked, and you always asked, was that I missed that order to my days. What was I supposed to do? Pretend that a CrossFit class was the same thing as the only job I’d ever had as an adult—a job that made me believe I had a purpose in life? I tried it anyway. It didn’t take.”

She was still sitting so still. And her gaze was locked to him. And what he liked least of all was that she looked so… calm. Neutral.

He couldn’t decide if it was because she’d developed such a great game face over the past years or if it was just as simple as the fact that he was telling her a very emotional story about people that she couldn’t remember. He could have been talking about a movie for all she knew.

Either way, it was disconcerting as hell.

“We came here about a month after I left the service,” he said. “I introduced you to my whole family.”

She scrunched up her nose, though he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “I hadn’t met them before?”

“Not in person.” He leaned back against the mantel. “We got married too fast. And when I was back from work, we just wanted to be together. We didn’t want to travel. We didn’t want to go anywhere. We just wanted to wrap ourselves up in each other and marinate in the time we had, because we knew we didn’t have much of it. But that summer, we came here, and we toured all around the west. And I think that on some level, I thought that it would be a way to envision what our future would look like. That’s what I hoped it was, anyway. But it felt like defeat.”

Ruthie frowned. “Our marriage felt like defeat?”

“Coming back here,” he made himself say, because he really didn’t like talking about this. That was why he never had. He ran his hand over his jaw and hated that he was fidgeting again. “I left at seventeen and I was determined that no power on earth would ever drag me back to this town. Cowboy Point was a little more than a wide space on the back of a forgotten mountain, as far as I was concerned. The literal middle of nowhere. But here I was again. And here you were. The reason I was back here at all.” He could hear how ragged he sounded, but he didn’t let that stop him. “And more and more, as the days went by, I was identifying you as the thing I needed to get away from.”

“That does not sound good at all,” she said quietly. “For anyone.”

“I want to be clear, now, that you didn’t do anything wrong.” He said that stiffly. Formally, almost. “None of this actually had anything to do with you. It was all me.”

“So you keep saying.”

He didn’t really like that response, but he ignored it, and kept going.

“We went back down to Georgia. It was a hot summer, and everything got worse. And worse.” Dallas hung his head, just for a moment, letting the memories slap at him. “I was never a big drinker, but it got heavy that summer. Maybe I figured that if it got too bad, it would force you to do something. Because I certainly wasn’t doing anything. I was stuck. But you…”

Remembering it hurt. All of this hurt. He didn’t want to be talking about this. He didn’t want to remember it. But he was the only one here who did, and she was right. She deserved to know. She deserved to understand what it was between them, what it meant.

Why she’d been right to walk away from him. And why she should have stayed gone.

“You were good to me,” he told her, meaning every word. “And I hated it. The worse I got, the kinder you were. I still don’t know why.”

“I don’t know the answer to that, Dallas.” Her eyes were still so green. And the way she was looking at him was tearing him apart. “But I’m guessing that I loved you.”

“I guess you did,” he agreed, though it made his chest feel like it was caving in. “And it made me hate you. It made me get darker and darker. Until one night, it just blew up. I said unforgivable things.”