Gabriel Torres had been the best of us.

He’d been my wingman and my closest friend, the person who covered my blind side for six years, and I had watched his aircraft fail and fall and I had told myself, every single day since, that I had missed something — that if I had been faster, sharper, better, I could have talked him through it.

I had resigned my commission over that belief.

I had walked out of the only life I’d ever wanted and gone to hide in window seats over dark oceans, all of it built on a lie a stranger had told the world with a forged signature.