Chapter 1 — Homecoming

I came home from six months of duty with a medal in my bag and a wrongness I couldn’t name sitting in my chest.

For half a year I had lived on video calls and bad coffee, counting the days until I could hold Ingrid again.

But the woman standing in the kitchen of our house in suburban Virginia was not the Ingrid who used to run barefoot down the hall when she heard my key in the lock.

She was thinner.

Pale.

Her hands were tucked deep into the long sleeves of a sweater she wore though the house was warm.

“Welcome home, Anders,” she said.

Not husband. Not my love. Anders.

My own name, handed to me like a stranger’s.

I had rehearsed the homecoming a thousand times in a cot ten thousand miles away.

In the version I played over and over, she heard the car, and she was out the door before I reached it, and she hit me at a run the way she always had, and I dropped my bag on the driveway and held her and that was it, that was the whole reward, that was what all the months had been for.

I had earned that reunion.

I had gone where I was sent and done what was asked and kept myself alive specifically so I could come back and have exactly that, the barefoot run down the hall, the key in the lock, the woman who couldn’t wait the extra three seconds.