Throughout the night and the next day, Zeph couldn’t shake Tristan’s words.

He’d had a few people love him—fickly, maybe—and plenty of people tell him he was an asshole. But at the same time? Never.

And Zeph knew that eventually, he was going to have to face the demons from his past before he could move on. He’d been running away from them for damn long enough, but their hold was still too strong. He was running in place, trying everything and anything to get them off his back.

So to speak. A shiver ran down his spine.

“Fucking friends,” he muttered as he took out some energy on his protein shaker. He kept a hand tightly over the lid so he didn’t get overly enthusiastic and coat his kitchen walls with protein powder and spinach. It had happened before.

Confronting old demons was hard, though. He wasn’t sure he wanted to. It was way more comfortable to be alone, where nobody could hurt him.

But somehow, that wall had fallen. Pushing River away had already hurt him, and no matter what happened now, it was going to keep hurting. Running away from him even more? That would hurt him most of all.

Therapy was a bit of a stretch for him yet. He’d never seen himself being able to walk into an office and… well, spill his heart to some stranger. No way.

But he could find his own closure. He could go see those places that were etched in his brain. The ones that he consciously or unconsciously ran from, that he’d placed all the trauma into and boxed up tightly in the back of his brain.

Zeph hadn’t been to any of them in years, and maybe that was part of the problem. They were blown out of proportion, like a kid looking up at his school building and thinking it was huge, only to see it as an adult and realize it was just a regular old building.

It didn’t take nearly as long to drive to the first spot on his mini-tour as he’d thought—just forty minutes and Zeph was on the outskirts of Riverside, in a tiny residential street that he had to drive up and down.

It wasn’t until his third pass, when he was seriously in danger of having some old Neighborhood Watch lady spy through her curtains, when he spotted the house where he’d grown up with his parents.

He hadn’t even recognized it at first.

He parked out front and gazed at the faded green panels on the front, the single tree that still stood between the house and the road, the scrubby desert bushes by the driveway.

Zeph’s memories from that stage of his life were patchy, but they fit into this house. It was just strange to see that tree here in front of him that he’d climbed as a kid, and that corner of the house where he’d hosed down his bike after a mud puddle contest, and the front door his mom had carried him through, half-asleep after a road trip.

Before he could dwell and make more of it than the place it was, Zeph pulled away in search of his first foster home. That was easy—he remembered the addresses for every one. Some freaky ability for a kid who couldn’t add three numbers well.

Then, the spot Anton had crashed his car—unmarked by even a plain white cross, as per his parents’ wishes—and then a church.

The church. Where he’d been abused.

Tristan had picked the right word, and he’d wielded it the same way he’d thrown words at River to try to crack him.

The difference was that he’d been trying to protect River from himself by hurting him, but Tristan had been trying to hurt him to protect him from himself. To get him to see this.

Fuck. The place was dingy and small and his skin still crawled at the thought of walking inside, but it was there. A real place, where people still went and smiled and bonded over stupid church luncheons.

Where that asshole might still work. For all the homework he did on every dodge and weave his opponents were known for, Zeph had never once been able to bring himself to Google Father Peters and make sure he wasn’t a clergy member.

All that fight, and Tristan was right—he was aiming it at the wrong people.

If he didn’t get control of himself now, it meant that the bad people won. Not just the people who’d unintentionally hurt him—Anton, crashing his car in a moment of fear—but the people who’d hurt him on purpose.

Who had known exactly how bad they had to be fucking up a child.

Father Peters, George. People like them won.

Zeph was a fighter. He’d made it his damn career, and now he was starting to realize why. But it wasn’t his life.

He wasn’t going to fight everyone and everything. That was like when the enemy—the opponent—had you pinned to the mat and you wasted your energy swinging at places they could defend, letting them choke you out.

As he started his car, Zeph’s brain was a mile away—or maybe a few decades back, he couldn’t tell.

But he knew one thing for sure: he wanted to move on.