Barr Lassiter

Barr Lassiter walks up the gravel path to the house where he was born, expecting two years of war to have aged him past recognition, and finds every familiar object unchanged but every familiar face turned away. His father withdraws without a word; his mother stares into cold ashes; his sister passes him as though he were a stranger. The ache of that rejection drives him back to camp and then back again the next day, where a former playmate waits to tell him what the moonlight would not.