CHAPTER THREE
Liberty
Five days.
Five days in Ashford Falls, and everything’s fine.
That's what's making me want to tear my own skin off.
The guest house is beautiful.
Hardwood floors that gleam in the morning light.
Granite countertops I'm afraid to scratch.
A bed so soft it swallows me whole every night, and I wake up tangled in sheets that smell like lavender, gasping from dreams I can't remember but that leave me drenched in sweat and aching in places I refuse to think about.
Gracie stocked the fridge with my favorites—stuff I haven't had in years, stuff I mentioned once in an email from Kuwait and forgot about.
There's a brand of sparkling water I used to drink in high school.
A specific type of cheese I loved.
The exact brand of coffee creamer I used at eighteen, before I learned to drink it black.
Details so small, so personal, that finding them made me stand in front of the open refrigerator for ten minutes, skinprickling, heart pounding, feeling like someone had peeled back my skull and gone rifling through my memories.
She remembered. She always remembers.
But Gracie doesn't drink sparkling water. Gracie hates sharp cheese. Gracie wouldn't know what coffee creamer I used eight years ago.
So, who told her?
I should feel grateful. I should feel safe.
Instead, I lie awake at night and listen to the silence press against me like a living thing, and I feel like I'm being watched through walls I can't see.
I've survived mortar attacks. Ambushes.
An IED that flipped our Humvee and left me buried under two hundred pounds of steel and shattered glass, breathing through a gap no wider than my fist, counting my heartbeats because I was sure each one would be my last.
I've held Martinez's intestines in my hands while he screamed and begged me to tell his mother he loved her.
I've watched the light leave his eyes and then got up the next morning and did my job because that's what soldiers do.
None of that scared me like this.
Because in combat, I could see the enemy. I knew where the fire was coming from. I could fight back.
Here, in this pretty little cottage with its lace curtains and fresh flowers, I can't see anything.
Can't prove anything. Can't point to a single concrete threat and saythere, that's what's wrong.
But something is wrong.
I feel it the way I used to feel snipers—that prickle at the back of my neck, that tightening in my gut, that absolute certainty that someone has me in their crosshairs and is waiting for the perfect moment to pull the trigger.
The job interview I had lined up—marketing coordinator at a firm in Charlottesville—went nowhere.
