"But wha—what are you doing here?"

Emma's hushed, insistent voice jolted Julia awake; she opened her eyes slowly, filled with unease, and found her head nestled into Emma's lap. For a moment, as she forced herself to control her muscles, she forgot what she was doing on the floor. And then she looked up.

He was standing before her, plain as day, with a hand hovering over Tommy's shoulder and that bashful look on his face that always made her heart melt. He was right there, and yet he wasn't: he was shimmering head to toe in an otherworldly silver glow, his form somehow insubstantial, as if he were being projected before her like a picture show. She recoiled reflexively, her mind rejecting the sheer impossibility of it all, but she found she couldn't turn away.

"I don't know. What happened."

His voice was soft and shaky, his lip quivering beside his mask—whatever was happening, it had not fixed the injuries that had plagued him since the war. She wanted to run to him, throw her arms around him and then slap him across the face for sending them away, but she stayed frozen in Emma's arms.

"Tommy," Julia coaxed the sound from her startled throat, "bath time."

"But I want to stay with Richard."

"Now. No buts."

The boy huffed and stomped his way from the room, leaving the women alone with apparition, or hallucination, or whatever he was.

"Okay," she said definitively, standing on unsure legs and crossing her arms over her chest. "Tell me what's going on."

There had been a light.

There had been the brightest, warmest light he could have possibly imagined. It had pulled him gently from what felt like a deep slumber and beckoned him forward, away from the beach and the boardwalk and into a cocoon of sunshine. He had stepped across the threshold as fearlessly as a good soldier would, and followed it all the way to the familiar farmhouse that held everything he had loved in life. This has to be heaven, and yet the mask still sat on his face and his throat still tickled even without blood pumping through his veins.

He couldn't be sure how much time had passed, but the Sagorskys seemed to have settled in. He watched them for several days, drifting through the walls of the house as effortlessly as a breeze through an open window. Tommy didn't talk much, no matter how much Hugh encouraged him; Paul didn't touch a drop of booze, though he knew Emma always kept a few bottles of bourbon tucked away (a holdover from their own father, no doubt). He was most thrilled to see his sister and his wife, fast friends as he knew they would be, sitting up talking into the wee hours with his niece on Emma's breast and an intimacy between them that he knew they both needed desperately. It calmed him to know that they were safe, and approaching some semblance of happiness and normalcy in his absence.

But somehow this wasn't enough to send him on his way to whatever the next world may be. At first, he had wondered if perhaps this was all that there was, if he was doomed to drift here, so close to them but so far away, for all eternity. Surely there would be others—his father and mother, Gerald, or maybe even Angela or Jimmy—keeping a watchful eye over this patchwork brood, as well. For the first few long, sleepless days, he searched for them around every turn, but he found only the living.

It felt strange and intrusive to watch them like this, though also comforting and familiar. It brought him back to the blinds, tucked away for days on end with a careful eye on his target. He had excelled at rationing his energy and whittling away the hours with little but his thoughts for company. The only difference now was that he was alone even standing so close to them, even as he sat so near to his sleeping wife that he barely had to reach out before his incorporeal fingertips passed through her lovely cheek. The isolation had been disappointing then; now, it was maddening.

He took to watching the baby, little Clara, as she slept in the crib he had fixed up for her during his final visit to Plover. She was a quiet, peaceful child, with a shock of dark hair and eyes so blue you could dive right into them. He longed to hold her, but settled for standing sentry nearby while her mother kept busy tending to the property, as usual. When he first laid eyes on her, he could feel his heart stretch to bursting to accommodate the flood of love he felt for her. At least they have that, he said to no one. At least they have her.

It was long past dusk one quiet night; Emma was tending to the laundry, Julia to the dishes. Richard had observed in amusement a rather one-sided argument between Paul and Hubert, then followed Tommy upstairs when Julia snapped at her father to give it a rest. His old room was just as he'd left it, sparsely decorated with trinkets and trophies of childhood. He was glad they'd given this room to his surrogate son, as if through it he could forge some connection to the boy before time came between them.

Richard crouched on the floor beside Tommy as the boy commanded his toy soldiers, swelling with an odd mixture of pride and guilt when the leader was addressed as "General Harrow." He reached a hand to the boy's face, terrified of the disappointed that would surely come if he tried and failed to make contact. But he was right there, and wouldn't it be so easy just to brush his cheek with a gentle fingertip, gentle as a summer breeze—

That's when Tommy's eyes widened, and Richard knew that something had changed.