Chapter 1 — The Toast

“Let’s toast to Lucy,” my husband said, raising his glass in front of his entire family the night before I deployed.

“While other women stay home raising their kids, she prefers putting on a uniform.

Though at least her paycheck never fails to land.”

His mother, Teresa, was the first to laugh.

Then his sister, Fiona, joined in.

I stood there, frozen, glass in hand, absorbing the little cruelty the way I had absorbed so many over the years, telling myself it was a joke, that I was too sensitive, that this was simply how George’s family talked.

And then I looked down at my five-year-old daughter, Chloe, who was pushing her spoon into a piece of birthday cake without eating any of it, her small face very serious.

“Mom,” she whispered.

“I want you to stay.” And suddenly no one at that table was laughing.

I did not know, that night, raising a glass to my own belittlement while my daughter quietly asked me not to go, that George’s toast was not just an unkind joke.

It was the opening line of something much larger and much colder, a plan that had already been set in motion around me, a plan in which my deployment, my daughter, my paycheck, and the house I had inherited were all pieces on a board I could not yet see.

I only knew that my little girl wanted me to stay, and that I had committed to going, and that I would spend the next weeks telling myself, wrongly, that everything at home would be fine.

Chapter 2 — Go Without Worrying

I had served eighteen years as a military physician, an anesthesiologist, and this assignment was not a whim.

There was a critical shortage of anesthesiologists in the northern district, a real and pressing need, and I was qualified to meet it.

And the person who had pushed me hardest to accept the posting, oddly, insistently, was George.

“Go without worrying,” he kept saying.