At a quarter past seven, the driver of the military transport van dropped my canvas duffel on the gravel driveway.

Thomas, the catering manager my father had hired for twenty years, was hanging strings of white fairy lights along the garage eaves.

“Are those for the memorial service on Sunday, Thomas?” I asked.

He stopped with a plastic zip tie between his teeth and slowly took it out.

“Your mother ordered three dozen rib eyes and six cases of Napa Valley cabernet for tonight, Avery.

She didn’t say anything about Sunday.”

I kept adjusting the canvas strap of the duffel on my right shoulder.

The heavy brass key fob my father gave me before my second deployment overseas was cold against my hip in my uniform pocket.

The brass tag was stamped with the number forty-two, the parcel code for the whole seventeen-million-dollar lakefront property on Lake Anne.

“Is the house full?” I asked.

“Thirty guests,” Thomas said.

“The valet parkers are setting up at the lower gate right now.”

I walked up the blue flagstone steps toward the front porch.

The front double doors stood wide open to let in the cool autumn breeze, which smelled of cold lake mist and woodsmoke.

Chloe was standing by the gilded mirror in the foyer, smoothing a pile of printed silk scarves across a small glass table.

She was twenty-five, in a tailored cream dress that looked like it cost three months of my military pay.

“You smell like diesel, Avery,” Chloe said without turning around.

“The transport had a bad exhaust line,” I said, setting my bag down by the oak bench.