Chương 2

I had driven six hundred miles from Fort Meade straight through the rolling hills of Ohio, foolishly believing that today might be the day the cycle finally ended. I had pictured walking through the front door of the house I grew up in, setting the documentation down, and watching my father look at me with the pride he had always reserved exclusively for Rick.

What a childish, pathetic fantasy.

When I had walked in an hour earlier, wearing the dress uniform I had meticulously pressed the night before, Dad had barely pulled his eyes away from an ESPN recap on the living room television.

“Shut the door, Claire,” he had grunted without glancing over his shoulder. “Draft’s coming in. AC costs money.”

Mom had stepped out of the kitchen, wiping flour from her apron. “Oh. You’re home. Wash your hands. Dinner will be twenty minutes.” No embrace. No mention of the three years I had spent living in cramped base housing while leading a classified unit.

I had swallowed the familiar lump in my throat, walked into the dining room, and opened the leather folio. “Dad, Mom, Rick… I have something important to share. The Pentagon finally approved my project. Aegis-Seven went into full acquisition. I received promotion orders to Master Sergeant, and… the defense contract bonus came through. It’s twenty million split among our core development team. My personal share after taxes is over four million.”

Rick had looked up from the dining chair where he sat in dirty work boots, peeling the label off a cold beer bottle. His eyes had narrowed into tight, envious slits. “Twenty million? For sitting in an air-conditioned office typing on a keyboard?” He had scoffed, leaning back until the chair’s front legs lifted off the floor. “Must be nice to play soldier on Uncle Sam’s dime. In the real world, Claire, men actually sweat and bleed for their paychecks.”

The sheer audacity of it had struck a nerve I didn’t know I had left.

“My sweat and blood were spilled in the dirt of Helmand Province, Rick,” I had answered, my voice steady, hardened by the military discipline that had kept me alive. “I was running fiber optics through active minefields while you were sitting in this living room complaining that the local construction unions wouldn’t cater to your schedule.”

The dining room had gone instantly suffocatingly quiet.

Dad had shot up from his leather recliner, his face flushed deep purple with fury. “You shut your mouth! Who the hell do you think you are, coming into my house in that monkey suit and disrespecting your brother? You think a fancy title and government money makes you better than this family?”

Before the sentence had finished echoing off the walls, Rick had launched himself forward. The punch caught me square on the left side of my chin. The force threw me backward, my ribs smashing hard against the edge of the table before I crashed to the floor, my vision splintering into stars.

Now, lying on the floorboards with my uniform soaked in my own blood, I looked up into three faces that held no pity, no remorse, and no love.

“Get up,” Dad ordered, gesturing dismissively toward the kitchen sink. “Stop being so dramatic. Clean your face before you ruin the floor. And when you’re done, we’re going to sit down and discuss how that bonus money is going to be handled. Rick has a new hauling business venture lined up, and we’re going to use this opportunity to get our family’s affairs in order.”

My mother finally stepped out of the kitchen, looking not at me, but at the rug. “Rick didn’t mean to hit you that hard, Claire. You shouldn’t have provoked him. You know how sensitive he is about his work right now. You always have to show off. A good sister supports her brother.”

A cold, razor-sharp clarity pierced through the throbbing agony in my head.

Every memory of my life suddenly aligned with sickening precision.

When I was sixteen, I had won first place in the Ohio State Science Fair for an encrypted local network model. When I brought home the trophy, Dad had used it as a doorstop in the hallway because they needed table space for Rick’s third-string all-county linebacker certificate.