She was wearing a dress three sizes too big.

Her small hands were raw and red.

She was so much smaller than the photographs my sister had mailed me over the past year had shown her to be.

And when she lifted her face and looked at me, it took her several long seconds to understand who I was.

“Daddy?”

I crossed that filthy pen and scooped her up into my arms, and she weighed almost nothing, and a fear colder than anything I had felt in ten years of deployment went through me.

She buried her face in my field jacket and began to cry — but quietly, catching her breath between the tears, holding the sobs in, as though she had learned somewhere that crying out loud was against the rules.