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“When I wrote it,” I seethe, “I was in a hospital bed, not knowing if?—”
“You were in the hospital?” His bewilderment is clear. “But she only just received it!”
“I know.” I huff out a bitter laugh. “Our letters always took a while to be delivered. How typical is it that it’d take months for that one to arrive when we’re on the same goddamn continent?”
“What happened? I thought you just hurt your leg in a car crash.”
I take a sip of coffee that went cold a long time ago as I think about the lies I told him when I came home—a car accident, not an aerial collision. Broken tibia-fibula. No mention of conversion disorder. The coma. The shrapnel in my lung…
“I was involved in a plane crash. It fucked me up. Broke my leg, then when I was in the ward, I fell out of bed and shattered my other knee. I was a mess.” I toy with the tumbler before clearing my throat. “What you don’t know, what only Clyde knows because he used to be my emergency contact… there was a time when they thought my arm was paralyzed.”
“What?! I thought you were retiring?—”
“I’d been looking into it, but?—”
“You lied to me!”
“Yes,” I say on a hiss. “I didn’t want to talk about it. I already have to discuss this shit with a therapist. But I’m not the only one hiding stuff. This crap about the refuge, the weed, and then the MC? We’re both as guilty as each other.”
“Wait a minute, you’re seeing a therapist?”
“You going to start singing soprano?”
“Fuck off, Cody. You’d be shocked too if you learned your brother had been lying to you for months.”
“You’d be screwed too if Pops had been whispering shit in your ear about how you’re defective and useless and that your only worth to the family was as a fighter pilot.” I bite off a laugh. “Sitting here, I know it’s bullshit. I know there’s more to my worth than that. But back then, stuck in that bed, months of convalescence ahead of me… it wasn’t so simple.”
“That’s when you wrote her the letter, isn’t it?” he rasps. “Of course it is. That fucker. He has to wreck everything. God damn him.”
“Yeah. But in this instance, it’s on me. I sent it. I could have sat on it, but no. I had to send it. I didn’t want to… I just wanted to give her closure. I never imagined it’d take so fucking long for her to receive it.
“When I think of how worried she must have been… I messed up. That’s on me. I know it.
“I let his bullshit fuck with my mind. I was angry all the time, so fucking furious and lost. I-I got stuck on the fact I might be like him and wanted to protect her from that?—”
“You’renothinglike him. None of us are.”
“I know that now. But back then, not so much.”
Colt’s silence is seething before he bites out, “What are you going to do to fix your fuckup?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re going to try though, aren’t you? To fix things?”
“You know how you feel when you look at Zee? When the family fades away because you’re lost in each other? Doesn’t matter if it’s in The Coffee Shop or at the dinner table, you don’t see anyone else?”
He sighs. “That’s how you feel about her, isn’t it?”
“It is.” I work my jaw. “I’ll make things right. I’ll earn back her trust because I’m notthatman, and even if she won’t have me as anything other than a friend, I’ll take it.”
Silence settles between us, then he rasps, “You really thought we’d give a fuck that you couldn’t be a pilot anymore?”
“Clyde has a way of getting into your head.”
“I should beat the crap out of you for that alone. What’s with the arm? It’s not paralyzed now.”
I hunch my shoulders. “It’s complicated. It was a mind thing, less of a body thing.”