His stare found hers and gave her that familiar easy grin he’d always had.
Ava’s eyes went hot with tears, but she didn’t waste time wiping them away as she ran forward and threw her arms around him. He smelled foreign, like wool and burned starch with a slight undertone of mechanical oil.
“My kid sister.” He drew back and took her in with such pride, it made her heart ache.
The five years of war had aged him, carving lines at the corners of his eyes and across his brow. But his gaze still held that jovial sparkle she’d always known, and his smile didn’t bear the wobble of some returned men.
He was home, safe and sound.
The stretch of time between them dissolved as it always did with close siblings, fading amid ready conversation and jaunts down memory lane. The evening found them at the dining room table of the apartment Ava had secured, the jumbled letters of the Criss Cross Words board game laid out before them.
Ava shuffled the letters in front of her, navigating the Q, U, and X around a C until the answer came to her. In a flash, she transferred the tiles onto the board.
“‘Quixotic,’” Daniel read. “Are you serious? Is that a word?”
She put her hands on her hips where she sat. “Of course it is.” It took her a moment to dredge up its meaning from her memory. “It’s something unrealistic or impractical.”
“You always were good at this game, sis.” Daniel leaned back in his chair and took a pull from his beer bottle. “That’s why you needed to go to college.”
Ava’s triumphant play was short-lived at the mention of college. He had always shrugged off not achieving his dream of getting a degree and having sent her to pursue hers instead.
“If I’d known you weren’t going to college because I was, I never would have gone.” She stared at him, still smarting from the decision he made.
He chuckled. “And that’s why I didn’t tell you.”
“You can go back now that the war is over.”
Silence fell between them.
“A lot of men will be going to school again,” Ava said.
“It’s not that.” Daniel set his beer down. “I don’t want to get out of the Army. I’m a Screaming Eagle through and through, sis.”
Ava stared at the board, no longer seeing the letters, but instead the blank months that dragged by as she waited for him to return to DC. “But that means you’ll be relocated again.”
“I know,” he said gently.
She looked up, hating the lump forming in her throat.
“I didn’t know how to tell you, but I’m not a studious kind of guy, not like you or Dad.” Daniel lifted a single shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “I only wanted college because I thought it was what he would want for me. Until I saw you and how much you enjoyed all that studying.” He put his large hands on the table. Pale nicks and scars flecked his calloused fingers. “The Army suits me, Ava.” He leaned over the table, his gaze concerned as he studied her. “You’re not too upset, are you?”
Ava chewed her lip and forced herself to examine the uncomfortable emotion knotting her stomach. It wasn’t Daniel she was upset with, it was herself.
She shook her head slowly. “I think I’m relieved, actually.”
Daniel’s brows shot up. “I’ll try not to take offense to that one.” The flash of his familiar grin told her he really wasn’t hurt by her statement. In fact, he looked relieved too.
“I have been trying to find my normalcy here,” Ava said aloud as she puzzled out the details herself. “But it’s not fitting because I’m not the same person I was before.”