The expression of a liar. Because even she knew that Barry Kingston, his father, got up early, sometimes even before five, to pray, read his Bible, make breakfast.

Colt shoved her sleeping bag back into a stuff stack. “I think it’s time we get us all home.”

And despite the morning sun, warm upon her skin, the crackling fire they had built in a makeshift circle of rocks, the smell of percolating coffee, and the scent of spring in the air, she could feel it welling up inside.

The cold, hard, unrelenting ball of fear.

Ranger liked mornings the best. Mostly because in the morning, his eyes didn’t hurt, which meant his migraine from the day before had vanished, and when he looked in the mirror . . . he recognized a man he knew.

The warrior who knew what he was doing, where he was going.

Why he had been put on this earth.

Yes, in that early hour, when his vision wasn’t being slowly Swiss-cheesed into darkness as his macular degeneration claimed nanometers of his eyesight, he glimpsed himself.

And then . . . well, the day started.

But what Ranger was losing in his vision, he seemed to be gaining elsewhere. Like, for example, his ability to hear his beautiful wife’s breathing at night, something like a song that he’d gotten way too used to, way too fast. It still surprised him, sometimes, when he woke up to see her tangled in the bedsheets next to him, the sunlight on her smooth skin, her hair in a wrap, her dark eyelashes soft on her cheek.

Wow, he loved her, and it was the one thing that kept him above water as the darkness closed in. As he dodged the realization that everything he knew of his world, his life, was slowly vanishing.

He’d gone from a decorated Navy SEAL sniper to a chef—albeit, a very good chef, if he did say so himself—and dispatcher for Sky King Air, as well as their new rescue service.

Which so far hadn’t performed a rescue.

Ranger turned off the water in the sink, spitting out the toothpaste, then ran the towel over his hair one last time before he hung it on the hook in the bathroom. He hadn’t shaved and still wore his pajama bottoms, but the entire house was asleep and he didn’t want to wake his wife, so he’d used the hall bathroom to take a quick shower.

He opened the door quietly and headed down the stairs.

Another day to pretend he mattered in this world—well, to more than just his wife.

Noemi pretty much made him feel like he mattered all the time. But he couldn’t help but sense that they all—Noemi, his father, Colt, Tae, Echo, and especially Dodge, who’d given him the dispatcher job—were pandering to him.

Giving the poor man something to do.