So much for never, ever, ever letting go, Adelaide thinks, feeling a sick little churn in her gut when his arms drop so suddenly. Her brother's words bring up a rise of righteous indignation, but it mixes muddily with conflicted guilt and keeps hot words from her tongue in that first instant. In the time it takes for her to suss out how she can even respond to the question Sarge speaks up, and she looks to him with just a hint of gratitude in her eyes that Rodeo can't see from his angle.
Before their world went to shit - the first time - Adelaide was sixteen years old, and Rodeo and Sarge's friends had just started to tease her for the crush they thought she had on Sarge. Right now crushes are the furthest thing from her mind, with guilt and history and her husband and her son and all of these new sticky conflicts between them - but she still has eyes, and there's no denying that Sarge still looks to her just like a man ought to. She goes up on tiptoe and squeezes around his neck, cheek pressing against his briefly as she takes the moment to keep on appreciating what they all just gained back, no matter how battered and stained it might be. "It's real, real good to see you, Sarge," she says. She doesn't feel like an awkward teenager, just like someone who has a whole lot of old, deep-rooted fondness and appreciation.
And then there's that question.
She looks back to her brother still sort of tucked in next to Sarge, and she shakes her head, drawing in breath while she tries to fit the words together. "You ever been in a really, really loud room?" she asks him, clearly rhetorical. Her voice is soft, but it doesn't hesitate once it starts. She's been thinking about this for so many years. "Like so loud your ears eventually turn it all off, and you just kind of go numb to it, until you finally walk out of the room to where it's quiet, and that's when you realize your ears are ringing so loud you want to scream?" She wraps her arms around herself, looking small and sort of miserable, but at the same time not at all shamed. She swipes a single tear away from her cheek, impatiently. "You were gone. You had to be gone so that I could go try to pretend like something else would ever make me feel alright again. If I'd have been seeing you, Jims, back and forth between what I had and what I really wanted, my ears would have never stopped ringing."