I looked at him.

I didn’t say anything.

I was thinking about the flag, folded into its hard triangle, and the young sergeant who had pressed it into my hands and held my eyes for one extra second, soldier to soldier, though my family had no idea that was what it was.

Chapter 4 — The House He Built

They were acting, all of them, as though the house were theirs to reassign, and the strange thing — the thing that would have been funny if it were happening to anyone else — was that it was not their house at all.

It was mine.