Page 135 of Carry On
CHAPTER 88
LINCOLN
DEAN: I need you to answer me, Lincoln, or I’m showing up mid-shift with my entire crew.
DEAN: I will break down your fucking door.
I’m here.
DEAN: Good. Are you okay?
I’m not okay.
I don’t know when I’ll be okay again.
DEAN: That’s understandable.
DEAN: If you need anything, you text me. Got it?
Iwill.
Itwaseasiertofeed and take care of Peter than it was to do the same for myself. Having him around forced me out of my stupor. I ate, and I texted Dean back. It wasn’t much, but it counted for something.
“I don’t understand how he could do this,” Peter said. He stabbed at the rice on his plate in frustration. His chaotic storm of energy had me crawling out of my skin. Maybe I was just overstimulated and exhausted, but all the feelings he threw out there were overwhelming. I knew he had to process, and unfortunately, I had a part to play in that. “It’s not fair.”
“It’s not,” I agreed softly.
“He was fine,” he continued. “He said he was fine, and Mom said he was fine. Everyone said he was fine! How does someonefinedo this?”
“Your brother has been… struggling for a very long time,” I told him, picking my words carefully. I wasn’t sure how to explain the darkness that Nash battled and still honor the attempts to keep Peter from knowing the truth.
“I was a kid when he came home, but I wasn’t an idiot either,” Peter replied. “I knew something was wrong with him, or at least, I knew he wasn’t the same when he came home. Mom said he had PTSD. She said that he couldn’t go through what he did overseas and come out the same person. But that was years ago, and everyone keeps saying he’s fine. He said he was fine.”
Fuck, this was so difficult to navigate. I didn’t want to be the one to help him through this. I couldn’t even help myself.
“The thing is that PTSD…” I grasped for a good way to describe it to him, except I was exhausted and had no desire to be nice about it. “PTSD is a bitch of a thing, Peter. It’s fucking horrible. It shreds apart all the things you know about yourself until you can barely recognize who you are. And then it just keeps taking… it just… it takes things from you that you had no idea it could even touch. It just keeps taking until you’ve got nothing left.”
I choked up, my eyes burning as I looked away. My chest constricted painfully. Saying those words out loud hurt. But not only that, they pissed me off. Nash deserved better than how the world chewed him up and spit him out.
“Will you tell me about him?” Peter asked, his voice quiet and thick with emotion. It was such a simple but complicated question. It opened a can of worms that I wasn’t quite sure I was allowed to open.
“Peter, I don’t…” I shook my head, lips pressed together firmly as I tried to come up with the right thing to say. “Your brother and your parents have worked hard to… they’ve tried to protect you from the bad shit that your brother went through. If I tell you, there’s just no going back.”
“I want to know,” he insisted.
“It’s not pretty, kid,” I said. “And I don’t know that you’ll be able to look at your dad or anything else the same way again.”
“I’m not a kid,” he retorted. “I have the right to know. I want to know who my brother is… was.”
It was hard to tell him no when he had a valid point.
“Okay,” I conceded.
I pulled up a stool and sat opposite him at the island. For hours, we sat there as I told him about Nash’s childhood and everything that led him to Pine Creek. I gave him as many details as I could about Nash’s time in the Army and the circumstances surrounding his injury. I told him about his battles with PTSD and migraines, his battle with suicide and his homelessness. I even went as far as to tell him the real story about how Nash and I got together, the insurance fraud, and how we fell in love.
And at the end of it all, we found ourselves in a tattoo shop to get four-leaf clover tattoos in honor of Nash.
CHAPTER 89
