The attic is filled with soft afternoon light and the scent of books and memories from the past. The day is slowly fading. The sky is filled with the pale light of winter.

The war is over. December is almost over. And here she is, in the attic of the house her mother grew up in, in the middle of a small town in Texas.

She is trying to find something, anything, that connects her to her past and the life that was hers when she was so much younger. Charlie needs to know if someone left something here that belongs to her as well. Her heart needs to know that there is more than war and impossible long days.

With every new day she spends with Miles or Bass, she remembers more. She keeps asking herself the same questions about who they are and how life changed them into the men who became a part of her life again.

Because she remembers. She remembers Miles. She remembers Bass. She remembers them and how much they had been a part of her life when everything had been so different. She remembers her old home and her life in a city filled with tall buildings that had touched the sky.

She can almost touch the memories, but they are so far away. But a part of them, who they were and who she was, have survived. Her heart needs to know that the memories she carries with her are real.

They are all building their lives again now the war is over and the continent is trying to breathe again. Connor came back to Bass and all of them and met someone. He is happy and she is happy for him. Her mother and Miles are trying to find a way to be together, but guilt is never far behind. Aaron is living in a small house in town with Priscilla. New life is on the way for them and they are expecting their first child in the first warm days of spring.

And then, her thoughts flow to him. They flow to wide shoulders and a black leather jacket. There is someone who knows about war and loss and impossible days. She can see it in the way he hides it behind the steel blue of his eyes and the tension in his shoulders. She can sense it behind the wall of his smug smile and the way his arrogance and crudeness try to push her away before his eyes always pull her back.

She tries to ignore it. She tries to ignore the fact that Bass knows about things that will never be the same and her loneliness. But she can't. It is his loneliness too. She can sense it. He is telling her his story with his eyes when nobody else is watching them.

He is still him. She is still her. But something is happening when their eyes and lives stay connected. They have been fighting their war against the patriots together, both because of their own reasons and reasons they shared. They still barely talk. There are insults and sharp looks when his eyes find hers. But there is also more. She doesn't want to find it, there in his eyes. But she has.

Her thoughts are filled with his eyes when Charlie slowly lets her fingers move over the covers of dusty books. And then, she finds an almost forgotten small wooden box. The last light of the day flows through the attic when she opens it. The box is filled with pictures from her old life in Chicago and her family's life in Jasper. Her father. Her mother. Danny. They are all there.

She doesn't know how the box ended up all the way here in Texas. Maybe her mother had taken these pictures with her when she had visited her parents here in Willoughby. Maybe the blackout had made her forget about the box and the memories inside. It doesn't matter. It is here.

And there, on a late afternoon on a long winter day, she finds the picture she didn't know she was looking for. She has to swallow the tears away that ambush her when she looks at the picture she is holding in her hand. Familiar eyes look at her. New faces and honest smiles greet her. They feel strangely familiar too. And when she turns the picture in her hand, a smile she did not know she had in her caresses her lips and plays with her eyes. Because there on the back of an old photograph, her father's familiar handwriting finds her through time.