“DON’T THINK I DIDN’T RECOGNIZE you the moment you walked into my house,” my dad said. He was angry. The last time I saw him this mad was when he saw “DIVORCE LAWYERS” in my mom’s search history on the family computer. Yeah, my dad was the kind of guy who checked up on his wife’s search history.

“Why didn’t you say something then? If you were so worried about my intentions with your daughter?” Kael’s words stuck to me.

What was this? What was happening?

I felt like I was in a fun house, mirrors cut in weird shapes, bent to confuse you with a distorted vision of reality. What you thought was reality. Everything around me was warped, I could barely feel my feet on the grass.

“I wasn’t sure at first. Then I asked Mendoza if it was you. You’ve grown up a lot since then.”

“Because I was a child. A few months out of high school.”

“You’re still a child. Going around asking questions, sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong.”

“They came to me. I got pulled in for questioning because he tried to blow his fucking head off, okay?” Kael was trying to tame himself. I could tell by the way his breath pushed through his words.

“That was unfortunate, I’ll grant you. But this can’t get out.” My dad’s voice was lower to the ground now. He was menacing. More than a little scared, too. “We’ll all be fucked! Do you not realize that, boy?”

“Don’t call me boy! I’m not your fucking boy.”

I stood up, not caring now if they saw me.

I knew I needed to go inside, for my dad’s sake. I couldn’t let this escalate, but I knew that I couldn’t trust either of them to tell me the whole truth when I got there. I hated that.

“We’ll all be fucked. I’m retiring, you’re so close to that medical discharge you want,” he told Kael. “Mendoza—he’s getting the help he needs and can stay enlisted. We can’t have people snooping around.”

“Snooping around? Innocent people died and you fucking knew and hid it!” Kael shouted at my father as I opened the door. When he saw me his anger turned to panic.

With a slower reflex, my dad turned around to see what had Kael’s attention.

“Karina, I told you about him.” My dad pointed from Kael to me. He was always quick at trying to slap a Band-Aid on a problem. “I told you he was trouble and you didn’t take me seriously.”

“What the hell is going on?” My heart was pounding. Kael looked different, like a stranger again. It made my blood run cold.

“Tell me what you’re talking about!” I yelled, and when neither of them spoke, I screamed, “Now!”

Kael reached for me but I jerked away. “I can tell you what’s going on, your dad’s a crooked son of a bitch and has—”

“Bullshit!” my dad tried to interrupt.

“Let him speak!” I snapped at my dad. My hands were shaking. My whole body was shaking.

“It’s him, Karina. He’s a senile narcissist who has convinced himself of some plot that I’m with you because of him. It’s not true, he’s the cause of all of this!” Kael’s veil of composure was slipping. I wanted to comfort him. I wanted to run away.

I stood there between them as their truths swirled around me, trying to stick.

“Mendoza … the MP who fucking came at us! He’s behind all of it. My dad balled his hands into fists. “Speaking of military careers, did he tell you he’s on the verge of getting himself a dishonorable discharge?”

I could feel my face changing colors. The blood was rising to the surface as my chest throbbed under my work top.

I tried to read Kael, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t pull back the screen to see the Kael I was falling for.

“At this point you don’t even care, do you, Martin? You have your bags all packed to move up to Atlanta. Word travels fast. You bought a house there, right? Another project for you to destroy.” My dad’s golf shirt was pulling, untucking from his jeans and his skin was red, all blotchy. Like a liar, or an innocent man on trial. I couldn’t tell.

“You bought a place in Atlanta?” I turned to Kael. A lump in my throat.

He was speechless. I wasn’t having it.

“Did you?” I pushed hard at his chest, but he didn’t move. He was in his uniform. The green and tan had always been an omen to the bad shit in my life. Looks like that hasn’t changed.

I pushed him again and he latched onto my wrists. “It’s not like that. He’s twisting everything, Karina. He is. This is me.” He tapped his fingers against his chest.

“He falsified a report, don’t let him fool you. He signed that paper knowing damn well what happened. Are you denying it, Martin?” My dad was goading him. I knew the tone. I had despised it ever since I had learned to decipher it.

“Are you denying that you came into my office, shivering, your leg all bandaged, and signed your name on the bottom of that page? You signed it. Mendoza signed it. Lawson signed it. All of you! And now you decide, almost two years later to come back and dig up old bones?”

My dad was in full-on officer mode. I listened obediently. So did Kael. It was sickening to watch the way my dad knew just how to warp the tone of his voice to whip soldiers into submission—anyone, really.

“His friend died, Kare—”

“Don’t call me that,” I managed. My stomach turned. My dad’s ashy skin fell in loose folds around his jaw. That, combined with his shock of white hair made him look like a villain. Kael looked wounded and hurt, more hero than antihero. But looks can be deceiving. I knew that. I wanted both of them to disappear. The façade of a normal life … this stability I had convinced myself that I had with Kael was shattered. Shattered into tiny little shards too dangerous even to attempt to pick up.

“His friend was shot in the firefight when Mendoza murdered those innocents. Do you know how much investigating goes into those types of claims? You are children.” Now he was talking to both of us. “I was helping them! I saw their faces when they returned. You.” He pointed an accusing finger at Kael. “I watched you pull his body into camp, barely able to walk yourself.”

“You were protecting your own ass!” Kael snarled at my dad. “You didn’t give a fuck about us or our lives!”

My dad was talking over him. My head was spinning.

“Tell your daughter how you use the lives of young men and women to get promotions and medals. Tell her that because of you damn near threatening us, my fucking friend is losing his mind over the guilt and he can’t even talk to anyone about it because he …” Kael stepped toward my dad. I gave up trying to stand between them. “Tell her that Mendoza begged you to let him turn himself in. Those victims haunt him and you’re keeping him from healing so your retirement won’t be at stake!”

“Those victims haunt him? Are you hearing yourself, Martin? You’re a soldier. I’m a soldier. We’ve seen and done things most people can’t dream of.” My dad was talking to Kael in his own language. I could hear the words, but unlike them, I couldn’t call up images of death and destruction like they could.

“You know what will haunt him? If he can’t feed his family and his wife is left alone with those kids and no paycheck. That’s haunting. You need to man up. You and him. This isn’t some fucking video game. This is grown man shit and if you can’t handle it, you’re a waste of a soldier. Either you want to protect your friend and his family, or you want him to heal. You don’t get both in the real world.”

My dad always invoked “the real world” when he wanted to make a point, the point being that he was a grown-up and everyone else—me or Austin, or in this case Kael—were not.

“Going about this by sleeping with my daughter isn’t the way to resolve this, unless you want to get yourself in more trouble.” My dad was threatening Kael, openly. Then he turned to me. “He’s trying to strip my rank before my retirement and I won’t allow it. I’m sorry, honey.” My dad was working hard to compose himself, shifting now to the dad costume he’s so quick to throw on and off. It was eerie how he could change his voice, his stature, to match the role he was playing. At the moment, it was concerned parent.

“This goes way beyond you and whatever feelings you have. He’s putting people in danger, including himself by trying to shine a light on a closed case that not one of us need to open up. This will bring attention to you too. Did you think of that?” I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or Kael.

“All I did was ask Lawson if it was you.” Kael turned to me. “I didn’t know, Karina. I would never lie about that. I didn’t tell you the rest because—”

“Because he knew it was better for everyone.” My dad interrupted.

I stared at Kael while he tried to explain himself. I tried to find my footing, my center of gravity. I needed to process everything but it was beyond me. I looked at Kael. I searched his eyes but I couldn’t find what I was looking for. He was blank, shutting down, taking my silence as doubt.

“I didn’t even recognize your dad at first, I swear.” Kael reached for my hands. The oven timer went off randomly and I thought it was pretty ironic the way it was beeping and beeping, almost as if my house was trying to help me escape the chaos.

My dad started in on me next. “He was using you to get back at me, Karina. Trying to take you away from me. I had your picture on my desk, everyone saw it. Think about it, how distant you’ve been lately. The missed dinner. Not returning my calls. He put that in your head, didn’t he?”

I thought about it. I thought about it hard. I thought about how easy it was for my dad to twist the truth. He was so good at it. He should have been a politician.

And yet, Kael had told me that my dad was complicated, but I had shrugged it off. And he had told me that I should give myself a break by not going over to my dad’s for dinner. I had shrugged that off too. And what about Kael and the discharge and the house in Atlanta. What about the sudden change in his behavior, how he went from being flaky and unpredictable to constantly at my side. What about the way he told me I could trust him? He peppered my face with gentle kisses after he’d had his way with me. I could throw up just thinking about it.

“Karina, you’re my daughter. I have no reason to lie to you.”

At that, I laughed. “That in itself is a lie.”

“You barely know him. Think about it.” My dad was talking to me like I was a child. Like he was on the verge of telling me that I was overreacting, kids your age are so emotional.

“How easily you’re influenced scares me and he’s irresponsible, Karina. Risking his career to ask questions about something that’s over, done with.”

“I wasn’t asking questions of anyone except Lawson,” Kael said at the same time that I said, “How easily I’m influenced?”

“You brought Mendoza to mental health. Did you not? I have eyes and ears all over this post. Did you forget that?” My dad had given up being the concerned parent. He was pure wolf now.

“He was in his front yard, waving a gun around in the air. He told me he didn’t deserve to live.” The words tore through Kael. I could feel it. I felt everything he felt on top of my own emotions. My back was close to breaking from the weight of it all.

“He told me he was a monster. A monster. Gabriel Mendoza thinks he’s a monster? If he is, we’re all fucking Satan himself.” Kael’s voice was creeping into the darkness that made me split in two. Half of me was terrified that this was going to swallow him whole. He needed me to pull him out of this quicksand, but how could I when I didn’t know who or what to believe. I knew both of them were pulling at me, using me as a pawn to hurt the other. Even if it wasn’t premeditated on Kael’s part—and I honestly couldn’t imagine it being true—I couldn’t completely dismiss it either. There were still lies. Lots of lies.

“Karina, honey. You know right from wrong. You may not think I’ve been the best father to you and your brother, but you know that I would do anything for you and for the soldiers under my command. I’ve dedicated my life to serving this country. I meant no harm when I tried to help them. Tell him that, Karina, if he doesn’t want a dishonorable discharge.” My dad held his hands up like he was praying.

I had only seen him do that once before when my mom was packing her bags, the first time. He followed her around the living room, telling her all the reasons their life was fine. Not good, but fine.

You’ll be fine, he told her.

Everything will be fine.

Between his begging hands and the almost believable devastation in his eyes now as he looked at me, I could see a flicker of what my mom saw in him all those years ago.

“Come on, Karina. You don’t want that for him. It will ruin his future.”

Kael was slipping away from my little living room. He was leaning against the drywall that he had patched up after I tried to hang up a clock and ripped half the wall down. My house, like my personal life, was becoming too much for me to repair.

“He can’t look at his kid’s face without seeing their faces. You know that? It’s eating him up. He’s not right in the head over it. None of us are.” Kael had torn me open, devoured my body and mind in such a short time. I would have done anything to heal his pain any other time since I met him, but not then, when everything was foggy.

“We’re all like that. We all have demons that keep us up at night. He can go in for PTSD if he needs to, but you have to stop poking a sleeping dragon. That’s the last warning. You’re putting us all in danger, even her.” He pointed at me, using me to chip away at Kael.

If my dad thought Kael was deceiving me, why would he think he cared that he was putting me in danger? My dad was a liar. The good kind. Not good for anyone but himself, but still the very, very good kind. My mom told tales about the man she met her senior year of high school and how he wooed her when she served him a stack of pancakes every Tuesday. That’s where the Fischer family tradition stemmed from.

The man she fell in love with had soft eyes and a thoughtful heart. Supposedly, he even called her sunshine, like she used to call me. That man had slowly disappeared, dissolving into a manipulative piece of havoc that I had stumbled in to.

“Think about it, Martin. Don’t jeopardize your future. I’ll make sure that medical discharge goes smoothly as long as you can promise me the same about my retirement.”

There he was scheming in front of me. Asking Kael to ignore the pain of his friend and make a selfish choice to appease my father.

“You’re disgusting,” I told my dad before Kael could agree or disagree to his deal.

“Stay out of this.” He brushed me off. There he was, diminishing my intelligence, my strength to make my own choices. He was feeding off of my insecurities. Was Kael too?

I looked at Kael, then my dad. “Both of you, get out.” My voice was shaky in its delivery, but the words made it to their ears.

“Martin, don’t be a fool and get yourself tied up in something you can’t handle. There will be no more lifelines after this,” my dad continued despite my very blatant request.

“Get out of my house,” I said, louder this time.

Kael begged with his eyes and my dad with his voice. “Get out. Now,” I said as Elodie stepped into the house. She took in the scene in front of her.

“Should I—” she began to ask.

“No. You stay. They were just leaving,” I told her.

My dad was the first to give. To not break character in front of Elodie, I was sure. I didn’t care what it was, only that he walked out of my living room and the door shut behind him.

Kael was harder. He was shaking. I could see his shoulders shaking under his ACUs and it took every last drop of ability within me to repeat it to him.

“Get out of my house,” I said with as much conviction as a broken voice and heart could manage.

“Karina, please listen to me.”

I held up my hand. “If you want me to ever speak to you again, get out of my house and let me breathe.” I refused to raise my eyes to him. I knew better.

I only had a few breaths left in me until I would collapse in his arms, healing us both. I could see the pain burning bright in his eyes as he turned and finally walked out of the door.