Rebecca slid the plastic sleeve across the table until it touched my hands.

“Look at the bottom margin of the page,” she said.

I read the typed dates again.

The top half covered the first week of October.

The bottom half focused on the day I had originally been scheduled to come home from deployment.

October twentieth was circled in thick blue ink.

Under the circle, someone had written a short line in sharp, slanted handwriting.

It didn’t have the careful, rounded loops of my forged signature.