Chapter 1: The Threshold of Betrayal
My name is Major Molly Martin. I am thirty-five years old, and twenty-four hours ago, I buried the only man who ever saw the woman behind the medals, the person beneath the starch of the uniform.
The air in Charleston is a living thing. It is heavy, salt-slicked, and clings to your skin like a second uniform you can never quite strip off. After the final salute, after the gut-wrenching, hollow echo of Taps had faded into the humid afternoon, I didn’t go home. I couldn’t. The silence of that house would have been louder than any mortar blast I’d survived in the desert. I spent the night in the sterile, government-issued quiet of my office at the base, surrounded by the scent of floor wax and old coffee. It was a place of order—a place where grief had no regulation, but duty did.
By morning, I felt steady. I traded my dress blues for daily fatigues. They felt like armor. I pulled my Jeep onto our quiet, oak-lined street, where the sunlight filtered through the Spanish moss in dappled, deceptive patterns of tranquility.
