“And did I tell you we have a new club member?” Tara added with a sly grin.
“No!”
“Mrs. Sheridan.”
“Thebase commander’s wife?”
“Yep. Turns out, the commander’s her second husband. She was married to another military guy before that, and she thinks the ex-wives club is awesome. She’s offered to be either a full member or an advisor, whatever we want or need. She’snotplanning on divorcing General Sheridan, but she does believe in supporting both currentandformer military spouses.”
“Shut the front door.”
“So, anyway, you have to go kick ass in Germany. Because we need you to get back home and put more flyers all over campus and town. Okay?”
Kaci nodded. “I’ll do my best.”
Deployments didn’t leave much downtime,but Lance found a few hours a week to catch up on email. He could also call Cheri toll-free through the base phone system, so he’d been bothering his twin as often as humanly possible.
It helped center him.
Unlike his previous deployments, his head still wasn’t all here. He gritted his way through it, digging deep for his focus, especially when he was flying, but he kept forgetting little things. Getting agitated by a boot string breaking or for leaving his sunglasses in the wrong place or forgetting his password.
He’d thought Kaci was the chaos in his life.
But he was beginning to suspect she’d been his balance.
After all the time he’d put into anticipating getting the hell out of Georgia, Georgia wasexactly where he wanted to be.
Just before Christmas, he did something he knew he’d regret. He Googled Kaci’s name.
Because he had to know.
The top story was written in English, but it might as well have been gibberish. Lance was hardly an imbecile, but all the physics lingo being tossed around made his head hurt. The point, though, was that she’d done it.
She’d made it to Germany.
And from the nontechnical bits he could pick out of the articles he found in his three hours before he was due on the flight line, he learned that she’d aced her presentation.
Groundbreaking.
Game-changing.
Brilliant.
He found an article from back home, written two days after she’d gotten back, summingeverything up in layman’s terms.Biofuels are only half the battle, local physicist says. Kaci’s research was paving the way toward improving engine efficiency, with an eye toward zero net energy loss. She’d been asked to go to Sweden in May and to an energy conference in California in the fall.
Before he could think better of it, he copied the link to the news story and switched to his mail program.
Kaci’sfirst Christmas without Miss Higgs was weird. Momma hovered more than she usually did, as though the loss of the cat had thrown her off too. Kaci wasn’t sleeping well in her old bedroom, and those things she’d always taken for granted—Momma’s rigid posture, the desperate need to get back to her own life, cat hair on the Jell-O mold—were all missing.
She slipped into her old bedroom—still decorated in the muted yellows and blues that Momma insisted were good for her constitution—under the guise of needing a post-Christmas-dinner nap, and pulled out her laptop.
The mashed potatoes had inspired an idea about a key point she was missing with her new hypothesis, and she wanted to write it down before she forgot it. While she was on her computer, she switched over to check email.
And lost her breath.
Wheeler, Lance (Capt, USAF)had sent her a message.
She hovered the mouse over the checkbox beside the message, debating if she should simply delete it.
