Prologue
Dean
You don’t need her. You have me.
I crouched below the open window of a fallin’ down buildin’ somewhere in Baghdad. Or Mosul. Or one of the thousand gateways to hell we’d been. The old mud-brick house fell in pebbles and stones. Fell from above, shot up from below, flew sideways at my face, stingin’ my skin like the rain whippin’ in the Wyoming wind. Bombs. Gunfire. It pounded all around me and nothin’ but her voice would break through.
She was seven and I was eight. My world crumbled then too. I held onto her hand that day, in my meadow, the little-boy-adventures meadow where my brothers and I played every day of our lives. I held onto the softest hand, lookin’ in the prettiest brown eyes. Even at eight years old, I knew Oly Masterson was special. A little girl with the fight of some obstinate woman from a black-and-white movie, one without sound, and she scrunches her face and stomps her foot, poundin’ her fist in the air. She gets her way. You don’t mess with that woman.
That girl.
You don’t need her. You have me.
She held my hand that day, but really, she held my heart. I never got it back. I figured it was why I could hear her now. Miles and light years and countries and smiles away. Long lingerin’ caresses from her ankle to the soft curve of her neck—lazy—a summer’s breeze of a touch away. But still, I heard her when my heart beat so fast ’cause I thought I might die. Alone. Separated by worlds from my family.
From her.
You don’t need her. You have me.
I wished I did.
I pushed her voice outta my head. Improvise, adapt, and overcome. There was no room in a Marine’s head for a girl. A woman. For regrets. There was only the mission. Only honor, courage, commitment. Country.
She wasn’t part of my mission. She wasn’t part of my life anymore. Hadn’t been for a long time.
But still, even through the fallin’ down rubble and the earsplittin’ sound of the helicopters and gunfire, the punch of bullets into old sun-dried mud stone, I heard her voice.
I wondered, wherever she was with my heart still in her hand, did she feel it throbbin’ and racin’, tryin’ to figure a way out of the mess, tryin’ to find its way back home?
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