I came home from deployment three days early and found my daughter missing from her room, my wife claiming she was at grandma’s, but when I drove there at 2 a.m. and discovered her crying in a freezing backyard hole because “bad girls sleep in graves,” she begged me not to look in the other hole—yet I did, and what I saw changed everything.
The house was dark when Eric McKenzie pulled into the driveway at 0300 hours. Three days early, the deployment had been cut short after a diplomatic resolution nobody saw coming, and he’d caught the first transport out of Kbble. Sixteen hours of flying, another two of processing at Fort Bragg, and then the 9-hour drive…
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