King clears his throat awkwardly, shifting his weight with all the grace of a tank trying not to roll over a flower bed. “Uh… I’m just gonna… stand over here…”
Mikhail, thankfully, is already being loaded into a transport, shoved hard enough to stumble. He looks smaller now. Not harmless. Never that. But smaller. Mortal in a way I didn’t think I’d ever get to see.
Jon doesn’t rise to it. He just answers calmly, and that somehow makes it hit harder. “She volunteered. She passed intake on her own merit. She outperformed half the recruits in her class. I didn’t ‘decide’ anything for her.”
“And the feelings?” My dad snaps. “When did that happen, Captain?”
Silence.
I feel Jon hesitate. I know him well enough to hear it even in stillness.
Then he says quietly, “When I realized I trusted her with my life.”
My dad scoffs. “That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only honest one,” Jon replies.
My mom steps between them before it gets worse, placing a hand on my dad’s arm. “Enough,” she says gently, voice firm inthe way only mothers can manage when everybody else in the room has forgotten how to be human. “This isn’t helping.”
She looks at Jon then, really looks at him—not as a captain, not as her husband’s old friend, but as the man standing in the middle of the wreckage with my blood and everyone else’s on his shoes.
“You should come too,” she says.
My dad whips toward her. “What?”
“Home,” she continues calmly. “All of us. We talk. We breathe. We figure this out without shouting in a parking lot while the building’s still on fire.”
He opens his mouth.
Closes it.
Runs a hand over his face.
“…Fine,” he mutters. “But this isn’t over.”
Jon nods once. “I wouldn’t expect it to be.”
My mom turns to me, brushing my hair back like I’m twelve again and she’s checking to see if I’ve cried out all the hurt yet. “You’re not doing this alone anymore,” she whispers.
I swallow hard.
For the first time since everything started unraveling, I realize something terrifying and hopeful all at once:
There’s no hiding left.
***
We don’t ride together and that alone feels wrong.
Jon goes with King and the transport carrying Mikhail, disappearing into flashing lights and radios and clipped voices. I go with my parents, wedged into the backseat of my childhood car like I’ve somehow been folded back into a version of myself that doesn’t exist anymore.
No uniform. No weapon. No command.
Just me. In a sundress. With dried blood on my sleeve I forgot to wash off.
The drive is quiet at first. Not awkward quiet–heavy quiet. The kind that presses on your ribs and makes every breath feel loud. My mom keeps glancing at me in the mirror, like she’s afraid I’ll vanish if she looks away too long. My dad stares straight ahead, jaw locked, knuckles white on the steering wheel. His silence isn’t empty. It’s crowded. Full of questions, anger, grief, guilt, all of it welded together too tight to name yet.
I watch the streetlights blur past and try not to think about what’s waiting. About Jon walking into our house later. About my father trying to sit in the same room with him without reaching for his throat. About my mother asking gentle questions that cut just as deep because she doesn’t mean for them to.
