She gave a slow shake of her head. “No. But for what it’s worth, I think he was changing. I think he was growing up, and I hate that he’ll never have the chance to become whoever he was meant to be.” She swallowed hard at the look of grief on Cam’s face.

He turned to stare up at the sky.

She squeezed his hand, and he squeezed back, but other than that, he didn’t move, didn’t talk for a long moment. When he finally spoke, he did so without opening his eyes, voice low and gruff, filled with emotion.

“You know we didn’t spend a lot of time together, that he was too young for me to really connect with given that there was thousands of miles between us. But in the last few years, we got better at it. We called, texted, and there were a few visits here and there.” He paused. “I left my mom’s when I was sixteen, did I ever tell you that? I did the whole ‘angry at the world’ thing for a while.”

“Where did you go?” she asked, because she knew it hadn’t been here, to his dad’s.

“I stayed with friends,” he said. “I could’ve come here, my dad wanted me to, but I was still pissed off at him for abandoning my mom. It wasn’t until later that I realized it wasn’t like that, that he’d legitimately tried, but she was way worse when he came around. I think it was guilt over not being able to raise Rowan. She . . . she wasn’t well. She got a late-in-life diagnosis of being bipolar, and she preferred to self-medicate with alcohol rather than take her meds. She tried rehab a bunch of times, but it never took. Eventually, she went to live in a halfway house, and stayed there until she died.”

“You were already in the military.”

“Yes.”

Piper had spent a lot of years thinking no one really understood what she’d been up against when her parents had died. But now she knew Cam understood, that he got it in a way she wished he didn’t have to. “I can’t imagine how hard it was for you, growing up like that.”

He shrugged. “She did the best she could. Same with Rowan. And I was still way too hard on him.” He shook his head, eyes tortured. “And now he’s gone, and the last thing I said to him was in anger.”

Her throat tightened at the emotion in his voice. “I’m so sorry, Cam. What happened?”

He let out a long breath. “We fought about his future. It’s hard to forgive myself for that, that his last memory was of me being mad at him.”