His demon haunted him on the drive back to Halo Peak, sitting alongside him in the pickup, dishing out phantom taunts when he became tired, or wanted to reach out and touch the passenger he’d hoped he would share this journey with. Touch Lulah. Take her hand, have her fingers at the back of his neck, and see the compassion of her gray eyes. That’s what he’d hoped for and that’s what he’d ruined.

At each comfort stop for Calliope, he’d stared at his phone, his thumb hovering over Lulah’s contact details before stuffing the phone back into his pocket.

As he walked Calliope, he composed messages of apology, carefully editing out anything that could be taken as justification for his behavior. But he couldn’t quite force himself to connect with her because doing that might well take them back to the terrible place they had left.

Vince spent the afternoon unloading Ray’s gear from the pickup, stacking it in one of the stalls on the opposite side of the barn from his workshop set up. He took extra care with the paintings, making sure they were in a dry, protected position. Lulah’s cabin was the best place to store them, but it didn’t feel right entering there with her away.

The painting of Lulah on the carousel caught his attention the same as it had in Ray’s trailer. Now he found it more difficult to shrug off the coincidence of Lulah as a child, captured in oil, riding a carousel animal that could as easily have come from his grandfather’s workshop as any other. He put it aside. The picture needed framing, and he’d carve one for it. Maybe Lulah would like to hang it in her cabin.

Calliope followed him to his pickup and when he opened the door she jumped in and settled. He was headed for the Sanctuary to pick up Joker.

Marlo’s insight that made her so successful with the rescue dogs had locked onto his poorly concealed despair and her stubborn insistence that he join her and Adam for dinner was impossible to refuse.

At the highway junction he fought the desire to head in the opposite direction to that of the Sanctuary. If possible he would have stayed low at Lulah’s until she returned, but Marlo had always been difficult to resist, her vulnerability captured inside that tough little case and her knowing eye that saw deep inside him, understanding him at times, better even than Lulah.

The need to commit an act of penance had taken Vince through the gates of the Dog Haven Sanctuary as a volunteer over a year ago. Nothing worked for him since he’d returned stateside so he thought that if he did some good, something selfless, maybe that would extract some of the poison from his soul. On the road that day, he’d driven past the Sanctuary and decided that was as good a place as any to volunteer.

Lulah took him on at the Sanctuary without hesitation, never questioning the days he couldn’t turn up and grateful for the days when he did. And always he’d been aware of Marlo in the background, watching with care so that if anything alarming surfaced, she could send in Adam or come herself. A glance would tell her all was not well in Vince’s camp, but he didn’t mind.

He would practice what he would say to Lulah by talking with Marlo and Adam, because if he had to spend his life apologizing, he would gladly do that, although in his heart he knew that he should apologize once and move along. Could his carefully worded contrition survive contact with Lulah or would it fall apart?

Marlo and Adam remarked about how rough he appeared, and Vince admitted that he hadn’t showered since Vegas—since that shower with Lulah—although he didn’t share details with them. At the barn, he’d had what equated to a bird bath in a chipped enamel basin, but the water was cold and hard, the soap reluctant to lather. He accepted Marlo’s offer of a shower, and when he’d finished, he found dinner almost ready.

“Marlo, I think the shower’s broken; Vince still looks like shit,” Adam remarked when Vince entered the kitchen.

“Yeah, but clean shit,” Vince replied.

“Is what happened in Vegas staying in Vegas?”

“I wish.”

Marlo shot him a glance as she poured him a glass of juice. “We can talk about Vegas once we’ve eaten. You guys set the table.”

After dinner, they settled in the lounge. The four dogs sprawled in a heap on the floor, sedated by the heat from the open fire. Vince explained about Ray, told them Lulah’s plan to have him move as close to Halo Peak as possible for convalescing. Finally came the silence that could only be filled by the rest of the story. Vince settled his focus on the dogs and prepared to talk.

“I’ve really messed up and hurt Lulah. When I took a break, headed off after I found out about Doc, I intended to stay on the road for a bit, but after a couple of days, Butch messaged me with the contact details he’d dug up for Ray. I thought I owed Lulah, having let her down over the auction and stuff, and if I went out and found Ray for her, tried to sort out his mess, well, that might compensate somehow.” He cast a quick glance towards Marlo. “Yeah, fair enough, roll your eyes, groan if you have to.”

Instead, Marlo shook her head. “You men are unbelievable with your misguided ideas of trying to fix stuff for the women in your lives. Why don’t you discuss things first?” She turned to Adam but there was no backup from him. “Oh, never mind.”

“I seem to have a black belt in fucking things up with Lulah, well, women in general.”

Adam laughed. “Relationships aren’t easy, but it’s more difficult when it’s a relationship you’re trying not to have.”

He’d taken Marlo’s hand and pulled her closer to him. Vince envied the move, the ease of it, and the comfort he knew that their bodies close, warm, pulsing, would enjoy.

“Take it from me,” Adam continued, “I tried my best to not have a relationship, I failed and I have to say it is the best failure I’ve ever experienced. You can’t go any further with your healing until you decide whether or not you’re going to pursue things with Lulah. Do that and you can work out how to move beyond whatever it is that happened in Vegas.”

“I’m going to have to cut loose; it’s only fair on Lulah. I lost it in Vegas in the hotel room. One minute everything was going fine, and the next thing I knew I was in the midst of this sort of half-flashback. It brought with it an odd glimmer of clarity about how the way I am would affect Lulah if we took our relationship to another level. I never fully came out of reliving that nightmare, and I lashed out at Lulah over nothing. Not with my fists, but with words that were equally damaging. Once I’d done about as much damage as possible, I picked up my gear and, like a fucking coward, I walked out on her.”

They sat in silence as if they needed the quiet to digest what Vince revealed. If he kept this up, they’d be helping him pack, but he still had one thing to share, and he didn’t know if telling them would make things better or worse.

“I love her.” He blurted it out.

“Have you told her, Vince?”

“I told her, yeah. I guess I shouldn’t have done that. Selfish, really. Right after I told her, I lost it. I made Lulah feel vulnerable, unsafe. That’s what she said, that she didn’t feel safe around me.”

“Defense.”

“What?”

“Classic defense move. You told Lulah you loved her, and that exposed you, so you tried to drive her away before Lulah rejected you.”

“I wasn’t trying to drive Lulah away. It was an attempt to drive myself away, because I don’t deserve Lulah. She makes me feel so good, but I can only enjoy that for the moment before I’m overcome with guilt, because, you know…”

“Because the others didn’t come home, didn’t have their chance of love and life, to experience what you have with Lulah.”

He nodded. Marlo had left the room to make tea, to nurture and ground him the same way Lulah would and it fueled his desire to set things right for Lulah. If he told Adam why he had to leave then Lulah would have people she trusted to talk with, people who understood his problems. It wouldn’t make him a better person in anyone’s eyes, but it might help Lulah move on.

“You know, I have such rage inside me. Not in a way that would be a danger to Lulah, but at the way things turned out and at how lost I’ve felt since returning. Whenever I’m with people, I don’t know if I should be defensive, tell them everything, or close myself off. Or if even a little is too much. And always this rage, because you go over there to protect people, and after a bit, you can lose sight of who the enemy is.” He checked the door again for Marlo.

“It’s okay,” Adam assured him.

“I don’t want her to hear me like this.”

“She won’t; she’ll stay away.”

“I’m haunted by such terrible things. I tried to do what was morally right, but the very act of war compromises that. You think it will be balanced by the good you do, but that’s not how it works.”

“Do you think living behind this big wall you’ve built is going to work for you?”

“It will work. So long as I’m not hurting anyone, it will work. I’m not going to drag Lulah behind the wall to crouch with me, so I’ll head off for a bit when Lulah returns. When I’m gone, can you convince her, as I’ll try to, that I’ve gone because I love her…that’s why I have to go.”

“Whatever low opinion you have about yourself right now, Vince, you’re wrong. I want you to understand that. You were a warrior, are still a warrior, protecting those around you. Not only with weaponry, firepower, and the sacrifice of at-home comforts, but you try to protect their hearts and souls, too.”

He shrugged. “Goes with the territory.”

Adam stood as Marlo re-entered the room. “Let me find the contacts for the people who want you to make them carousel dogs and the gallery interested in your work.”

“Are you okay, Vince?” Marlo asked as she handed him a cup of tea. “I know what Adam can be like when he’s in full ‘let me understand and solve your problems for you’ mode.”

“I’m good, yeah.”

Adam returned to the room, handing him a slip of paper. “Here you go. All these people want you to recreate their dogs.”

Vince studied the list. Six names and two galleries. “Wow.”

“You have a lot of work there if you want it, Vince.”

“I’ll think about how to do this. I need to find somewhere to live with a workshop.” He saw Marlo give Adam a questioning look, and Adam’s barely perceptible head shake in answer. He drained his tea and stood before Marlo decided to ignore Adam and ask the tough questions.

* * *

Throughout Doc’s memorial service, Vince focused on the words about the man, the story of a life with an early finish. In all the hours he’d sat across the room with Doc, he’d heard little about his family beyond a brief acknowledgment of the after-hours existence of a well-loved wife and three children.

Doc always focused on Vince, deciding each session which particular piece of psychological shrapnel should be eased out and which shard should be left because the damage of removal, the reopening of that particular wound, may on a given day do more harm than good.

Now at the graveside, he steeled himself as the tide of memories from four other funerals swamped him. He stepped back, a retreat from the fellow mourners, to find support instead against a tree.

Several hundred yards away, a quiet back-country road ran as the demarcation line between the cemetery and the living world. Beyond that, a small copse of trees gathered like a battalion awaiting orders.

The wind dropped, and with the quiet of the stilled fallen leaves, the voice of the minister also faded so that Vince only heard snatches of past conversations. They were the voices of his fallen friends, his cardinal points, coming at him from the four compass marks so that his own center struggled to find its bearings within the chatter. Calliope stood sentry for him, facing the gathering, ready to act as protector of his personal space.

The voices of his dead friends drifted from the copse, and the south was Zane, the motivator and the charmer. He was the guy who carried everyone’s spirits, determined to make the most of his life. If Vince looked carefully, he could almost make them out in the trees.

Caleb, west, guardian of the setting sun, standing in that ready-for-action manner with his legs braced, his chin tipped that little farther up than people usually carried themselves, as if to say ‘hit me, I can take whatever you throw my way, but prepare yourself for the consequences.’

Nathan to the north, a leader, the one who took the dirty jobs because he would never ask anyone to do something he wasn’t prepared to do himself.

And Will, east, the hyperactive one who could get by on little sleep and less food. Will’s motto they adopted as their own—no lives half-lived— and Zane finished it: no woman half-loved.

No lives half-lived; no woman half-loved. He could hear them saying it now, sometimes as a rally cry, other times as an affirmation before they knocked glasses or beer bottles. Clink. Nathan would close his eyes as he touched bottles, calling estimates as to how much each bottle still held, half-full, half-empty, depending on his mood, because even a leader has vulnerable moments when every bucket seems half-empty and leaking.

A number of times, he told Doc he would welcome death without fear. Death could take him, and it would be a relief to join his brothers, because the debt of survival, added to the things he’d seen and done, was such a terrible weight.

Still focused on the trees, he saw a movement, or a trick of light, that seemed to bring Nathan one step forward, and as he tried to find a clear image through the blur of his tears, Nathan’s voice rang soundly in his mind. “No lives half-lived.” With that, his battle buddies appeared to position themselves like a four-point compass-rose imprinted on the earth before slipping finally from view.

The mourners were leaving the graveside now, and Vince waited to pay his last respects, his mood eased somewhat by what he’d witnessed. Nevertheless, it was a hard swallow, like shifting a rock, before he managed the words that would tell his therapist that he was safe for now. He bowed his head and whispered, “It’s not going to go away, Doc, but neither am I. Not today.”

He walked back towards his pickup, and Adoette, the VA chaplain who sometimes sat in on their group sessions, waved him over.

“How are you, Vince?”

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“Will you be at group on Thursday?”

“I’m not certain.”

“Vince, don’t give up because Doc has gone. It’s more important than ever that you stick with us, so that together we can honor and improve upon all that important groundwork you and Doc have already laid down.”

With that, the emotion he thought he’d dealt with, presumed he’d left at Doc’s graveside, welled in him. He cast a glance back to the copse and saw it for what it was: a bunch of trees at the edge of the road. Like the phantoms that came for him when tired or stressed, he knew that his friends were memories, incapable of manifesting as a group in the trees.

He’d known that all along, but when he’d tried to make new friends, tried to set his sights in another direction with Doc so that he could get along with his life, Doc was snatched away, too.

Understanding it as a ridiculous superstitious notion, he continued to recognize the part of himself that insisted he was jinxed and that Lulah wasn’t safe, because anyone close to him was soon stolen.

Adoette cosseted him in the warmth of her espresso-brown eyes. “I don’t know if I can carry on with everyone leaving me like this. I’m too scared to love anymore.”

“I understand you’re recently divorced. Do you have good support around you?”

“Yeah, I do.” Well, I did until I abandoned it.

“Vince, I’m one person who you don’t have to tell what you think I want to hear. Okay? You can’t trouble me.”

He shook his head, an attempt to back her off. “Too soon,” he managed.

She pressed a business card into his hand. “I’d like you to come to my office, tomorrow, ten-hundred hours. My number is on this card. Vince…”

He studied the card she’d placed in his hand before he closed his fingers around it. She had stopped mid-sentence, waiting for his attention. “Yes,” he answered.

“Be there. Don’t disappoint me; we both know you’re better than that.”