That was it then. She was going to stay. And he was going to stay with her. Their only attempt to run the farm together still hung in the air -- hot for days, digging out a new fence, the damn goat running away --

Having a farm had always been Melissa McCormick’s vision, but she’d only started to buy land and get a few chickens before she got sick. Luke remembered what it was like to watch his mother, barely through her mid-thirties and so frail that it was a major accomplishment for her just to sit on the front porch. After everything, Sam was the one most likely to take up the mantle, then probably Matthew. Luke couldn’t and wouldn’t run a farm. He was too irresponsible and hot-tempered. Now, all of a sudden, he was the only one left. Just him, Charlie, and an entire business that depended on them. The truth was, he needed her too. She was his last connection to home, to his brothers, to his family. In many ways, she was all he had left.

[i]I need you.[/i]

His jaw tightened and he looked down into his empty coffee mug. He made a noise that was something between a grunt and a sigh. “I don’t think you want to hear about my last few months. I was mostly in rehab in Germany. Bad food, bad TV, shitty weather.” The scar on his neck was small compared to the one that spiderwebbed closer to his chest. His shoulder, where there was more mottled tissue, had given him the most trouble in Syria. It was so bad that they threatened to send him back to the States to recover. This prospect made Luke furious, and the only way he got them to compromise was by taking care of himself. He had to prove that he could still use his shoulder and arm. The process had been complicated because they had to drill plates into a few parts of the bone. It’d more or less been crushed. He was in rehab when Sam died.

The skin and tissue damage far exceeded anything he wanted to show Charlie, so he didn’t talk about it. Ideally, she would never see it. He didn’t want to know what her reaction would be.

While Luke was attracted to just sitting and catching up, he knew that he couldn’t. He needed to check on the fences, equipment, and animals to see if anything had changed since he was last at the house. He needed to shower, change, and put his bags away. He needed to get used to being in Sam’s space without him. He needed constant things to do or he’d just drink and fuck off. If he sat down with Charlie, and they started talking, and she got going about Sam...Luke wasn’t sure what he’d do then.

“I can’t sit,” he said bluntly. One by one, he went through the fridge, pantry, cabinets, and freezer. “Do you want to eat? Dinner? Are you hungry? I have to go to town anyway. I have a few errands to run.”

One of his errands included stopping by the police station -- and he wasn’t very thrilled by that prospect.