There was a vow she had made to herself the day she resigned her commission, and she turned it over now in the space of a single breath.

She had promised that she would never again put herself in a place where she could lose someone on her watch, that she was done being the one whose decisions other lives hung from.

She had kept that promise for eighteen months.

It had cost her more than anyone knew, and it had kept her safe, and it had never once stopped being a lie she told her grief.

Because there was an older vow underneath it, made before the one born of loss, and that one did not care what she had decided to feel.