So I stood there in my uniform with my children gathered close and I let the silence sit, and I kept my face still, and I did the thing the Army had spent twenty years teaching me, which is to be the calmest object in a chaotic field and let the chaos exhaust itself against your stillness.

The mourners watched.

Elke’s smile began, very slightly, to strain, because a cruelty that draws no blood is an embarrassment to the one who swung it, and I was giving her nothing to work with — no tears, no shouting, no scene she could later describe as the unstable ex-wife making a spectacle at a funeral.

And that was when Romy let go of my hand.

Chapter 5 — Romy’s Words