He opens up the door to the bungalow and we all go inside. When we’d entered Neena’s house back at Fort Noix, I’d been overwhelmed by the smallest of things—the real pillow and duvet, the chest of drawers, clean clothes. But entering Dad’s house is even more surreal. It looks like a completely normal house, like the ones that existed before the war blew them to smithereens. He shows us the living room, the bathroom, the bedrooms, each one furnished and decorated.

“I can’t believe this place,” I say, awestruck by the fact that this will actually get to be our home, that we can live in this place together as a family.

We follow Dad into the kitchen.

“Do you girls like bread?” he says. “Jam?”

“I love jam!” Bree exclaims. “Brooke once found a house in the mountains full of provisions. She brought me back a jar of jam. It was delicious.”

Dad smiles. He seems proud of me, of my resourcefulness and the way I took care of my sister. It’s the best feeling in the world.

We sit down and tuck into the jam sandwiches, relaying stories about the time I managed to get sap from the tree, how I drove his old motorbike and sidecar down the mountainside at 100 miles an hour without crashing, and how I hunted a deer.  But the more we speak, the harder it becomes for me to ignore the dark cloud hanging over us. The unspoken words seem to be swelling around us, crushing down on us. None of us wants to talk about it, to rip the scab off that old wound. But I can’t help myself. I need answers. I need to know why he abandoned us all those years ago.

“Why did you leave us, Dad?” I finally blurt out.

Bree stiffens, immediately awkward. Dad sits silently for a long, long time, his hands laced together on the table. He looks so much older than I remember. Not only is his face more lined and his hair completely gray, but there’s a stoop in his posture that was never there when I was younger. It’s a vulnerability he would once have never allowed me to see.

“I was barely fourteen,” I continue. “Bree was seven. How could you abandon us like that? Why did you choose the war over us?”

Dad doesn’t look at me when he finally speaks. “It’s complicated, Brooke. I know you think I chose the war, but I didn’t. I chose you two, I always did. I chose to give you a future, and that meant leaving you in the present and fighting in the war.”

“But it hadn’t even begun yet,” I shoot back, anger making the volume of my voice rise. “You volunteered. You left before you even needed to.”