The cold hit me before the silence did. It wasn’t just the ambient chill of a Wisconsin December; it was a stagnant, heavy freeze that settled into the marrow of your bones, the kind of cold that smells like dust and abandonment.
I stood in the entryway of my childhood home, my duffel bag slipping from my shoulder to thud dully against the hardwood. I was still in my Marine Corps winter dress blues, the collar stiff against my neck, my shoes polished to a mirror shine that caught the weak light filtering through the transom window. I had just come from a deployment where the heat could blister your skin in seconds, yet I had never felt a temperature as hostile as the air inside this house.
