They knew better than to push. I didn’t tell them much about the details of my work. Not because I didn’t trust them, but because I didn’t need them lying awake at night picturing me in Kevlar every time they saw my byline.
“We just like knowing we’re in the same time zone as you,” Mom said. “You feel closer.”
“I feel closer,” I admitted.
Closer to them.
Closer to … something else, too. The version of myself who’d left that town with a suitcase and a scholarship to Columbia, heart pounding with possibility. The girl who’d believed in bylines and truth and the idea that if you showed the world what was really happening, it would change.
That girl hadn’t known what it felt like to stand in a tent with his hands on her skin.
She hadn’t known what it felt like to be betrayed by him, either.
“Are you eating?” Mom asked.
“Yes.”
“Sleeping?”
“Working on it.”
“Meeting any nice people?” she tried.
A laugh escaped me. “Define nice.”
“No guns,” Dad said.
I thought of Charleston’s suited soldiers, their quiet, lethal confidence.
“Working on that, too,” I said dryly.
We talked for a few more minutes—harmless things. The neighbor’s new dog. The early thaw back home. A book my mother was reading. My father’s ongoing war with the snowblower.
Normal things from a normal life I’d stepped sideways out of years ago.
“You should try to sleep,” Mom said eventually. “You sound tired.”
“That’s because I am.”
“Dream something nice,” she said. “Not tanks.”
I swallowed. “I’ll do my best.”
“We love you,” Dad said.
“I love you, too.”
We hung up, and the room was quiet again.
I tossed the phone onto the bed and slid off the mattress, padding over to the window. I pulled the curtain back just enough to see the street below.
Charleston was starting to stir. A delivery truck idled at the curb. A man in running shorts jogged past, earbuds in. The sky was just starting to lighten at the edges, hints of pink creeping over the rooftops.
I pressed my forehead lightly to the glass.
I’d built a life out of asking questions no one wanted to answer. I’d flown across oceans for less than the digital silence that surrounded this place and these men. And now I was here, half wild with jet lag, haunted by a man who’d once held my body like a promise and then walked away like I was expendable.
It must have been the military men at the gala who’d reminded me of him.
