No medals.

No paper trail.

My men and I lived in the spaces between the official history, and we were very, very good at what we did, and what we did left marks on all of us that never fully healed.

And then my daughter was born, and I looked at her, and I understood with total clarity that the man I had been could not raise her.

That man knew too much about how the world actually worked, and had done too much in its shadows, and carried too much that a child should never have to sense in her father.