Chapter 2 — What I Did Next

Here is what they were counting on.

They were counting on me to do just what a frightened, enraged husband five thousand miles from his broken wife would be expected to do.

They wanted me to scream into that phone.

They wanted me to make threats — wild, furious, recorded threats that a man whose father owned the police could play back later in a courtroom.

They wanted me to come home and put my fist through Trent Prescott’s face in a hospital corridor, so that they could arrest me for assault, and discredit me, and turn the whole story from what they did to my wife into what the unstable soldier did to a respected developer.

My rage was not incidental to their plan.

My rage was the plan.

It was the one thing they needed from me to win.

So I did not give it to them.

I did not punch the concrete wall in front of me, though every muscle in my body wanted to.

I did not scream.

I did not call Trent Prescott back and make a single threat he could ever use.

I stood in that barracks for three seconds, and I let the rage move through me and out the other side, and I made myself become the coldest, most disciplined version of the man the Army had spent years training me to be.