Ray finally found his voice. It felt like dragging shattered glass up his throat.
“He... he got caught in the rail gap at the crossing down the mountain.”
Thomas looked up slowly. His eyes locked onto Ray’s face.
“You pulled him out before the freight came?”
Ray let out a sound that was half a sob, half a bitter laugh at the sheer, overwhelming absurdity of the mundane question.
“You're alive.”
Thomas slowly stood up, bracing his hand on his knee to rise. He looked at Ray, his chest rising and falling heavily.
“Yeah.”
One word.
Twenty years of funerals, night terrors, empty bar stools, folded flags, and agonizing, unanswered questions answered with one goddamn word.
Ray crossed the room in three massive strides.
For a fleeting moment, as Ray closed the distance, Marcus braced himself, thinking Ray was going to crush the man in a hug.
Instead, Ray stopped three feet away.
His large hands curled into tight fists at his sides. The leather of his gloves creaked.
He didn't stop because he hated Thomas. He stopped because the effort of holding himself together, of not shattering into a million pieces right there on the floorboards, required every ounce of his strength.
“You're alive.” Ray repeated it, the words tasting like copper.
Thomas lowered his eyes to the floorboards. “I know, Ray.”
Ray's voice began to rise, shaking the dust from the rafters. “I buried you without a body, Thomas. I stood over an empty casket in the rain.”
Marcus remained near the entrance, entirely silent, making himself as small as a giant man could.
Ray stepped closer, invading Thomas’s space. His voice broke.
“I went to your mother's house. I sat on her floral couch in Ohio for three days. I watched her look out the front window at the driveway every five minutes because she thought somebody would arrive and tell her there’d been a terrible mistake. I watched her die three years later, still believing her son bled out alone in the sand!”
Thomas closed his eyes tightly. A tear escaped, tracking down his weathered cheek into his beard.
Ray's anger, suppressed for decades beneath layers of motorcycle grease and highway miles, finally broke the dam.
“You don't get to stand there in your cozy cabin and say ‘I know.’ I spent half my life wondering if I missed something. I spent a decade wondering whether my best friend died screaming my name in the dark!”
Thomas's jaw trembled violently. He opened his eyes.
“He didn't.”
Ray stared at him, breathing like a cornered animal.
Thomas forced himself to lift his chin and meet Ray's furious, heartbroken eyes.
“He didn’t die alone, Hammer. He was just too ashamed of what he had become to ever come home.”
The white-hot anger burning inside Ray faltered, hit by cold water. He stared at the broken man in front of him.
Thomas gestured weakly toward a heavy wooden chair. He practically collapsed into it, sitting at the table, rubbing both trembling hands over his face.
For several agonizing seconds, the only sound in the cabin was the loud, rhythmic lapping of Ranger drinking water from his metal bowl.
Thomas dropped his hands. He looked utterly exhausted.
“There are things... there are things I can't explain to you in one conversation, Ray. Things that would take days to unpack.”
“Try,” Ray spat out. “Start talking, Thomas. Because right now, I am dangerously close to walking out that door and letting you stay dead.”
“I wasn't supposed to disappear permanently,” Thomas said, his voice hollow. “That wasn't the plan.”