His eyes slammed shut for a breath. Two. Three. Then they opened and locked on mine.

“It was hard for him to talk. His airway… It was hard. And when he did, it was between these horrid, gasping breaths. He said, ‘Cam. It’s really you. Take me home.’ He begged me to take him home! And we were sitting there in a filthy combat outpost I didn’t even know was his, in the middle of a fucking firefight I’d sent him into, and I couldn’t do shit to save my little brother. And when…” Cam sucked in a breath and gripped the back of the kitchen chair like it would anchor him. “When he slipped away, it was Mom’s name he called, like he could see her or something. His pulse stopped thrumming against my fingers, and his blue eyes…the pupils… He was just gone. It was two minutes at most. I sat there holding him just like I did that one time he skidded down that last switchback at the ravine and tore his back up when we were kids. Remember?”

“I remember,” I whispered. We’d been nine. Sullivan hadn’t listened and had run ahead. Cam had been eleven and was blamed. Cursed out by his dad when we got Sullivan back to the house.

“I was covered in his blood, holding onto this husk that used to be Sullivan, so angry, and empty, and even envious. I wanted it to be me.”

“Cam, no.” I made my legs obey and took a step, but he backed even farther away.

“I begged God to let me trade places. To take me instead of Sullivan, but you know He didn’t want anything to do with me. Sully was good and kindhearted and stubborn and didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He deserved to live.” A tear tracked down Cam’s face, disappearing into his beard, and I doubted he even felt it.

“He did.” I nodded. “He deserved to live, and he was all those things and more. But, Cam, you deserved to live, too.”

“No!” he shouted, throwing his hands out like he’d shake his own head if he could. “Not like he did. Not when he had everyone to come home to.”

“So did you!”

“You honestly think anyone would have looked at Sullivan on the day of my funeral and told him that it should have been him in that box?” His eyes narrowed.

“Your dad had no right to say that.” I shook my head. My fingertips ached with the need to pull Cam close. To go back to that day and stand beside him instead of across from him. To have said the things I wanted to instead of the things I was supposed to.