A moving and evocative exploration of grief and guilt in the wake of one family’s devastating loss

When former DC journalist Abigail Wolff attempts to rehabilitate her career, she finds herself at the heart of a US army cover-up involving the death of a soldier in Afghanistan—with unspeakable emotional consequences for one family. As the story of what happened comes to light, Abigail will do anything to write it.

The more evidence she stumbles upon in the case, the fewer people it seems she can trust, including her own father, a retired army general. And she certainly never expected to fall in love with the slain soldier’s brother, Gabe, a bitter man struggling to hold his family together. The investigation eventually leads her to an impossible choice, one of unrelenting sacrifice to protect those she loves.

Beyond the buried truths and betrayals, questions of family loyalty and redemption, Abigail’s search is, most of all, a desperate grasp at carrying on and coping—and seeking hope in the impossible.

Praise for Kimberly Belle and The Last Breath

“Painstakingly emotional…will surprise readers to the very end...it’s so worth it!”

—RT Book Reviews

“Belle’s engaging debut brings the reader into [an] emotionally tangled world.”

—Booklist

“Belle’s a smooth writer whose characters are vibrant and truly reflect the area where the novel is set.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“The Last Breath will leave you breathless. This edgy and emotional thriller will keep you guessing until the very end.”

—New York Times bestselling author Heather Gudenkauf

“Powerful and complex with an intensity drawn out through each page, The Last Breath is a story of forgiveness and betrayal and one I couldn’t put down!”

—New York Times bestselling author Steena Holmes

Also by Kimberly Belle

The Last Breath

The Ones

We

Trust

Kimberly Belle

To the women and men who risk their lives every day for our country,

and for the people who love them.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise

Also by Kimberly Belle

Title Page

Dedication

Part One: Murky Truths

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Part Two: Wicked Lies

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

Part Three: The Space Between

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

Acknowledgments

Reader’s Guide

Questions for Discussion

A Conversation with the Author

Copyright

Part One: Murky Truths

1

There’s a thin, fragile line that separates us all from misfortune. A place where life teeters on a razor’s edge, and everything boils down to one single, solitary second. Where either you will whiz past the Mack truck blissfully unaware, or you will slam into it head-on. Where there’s a before, and then, without warning or apology, there’s an after.

For the past three years, I’ve rewound to those last before moments, moments I was still blissfully unaware I was about to be blindsided. I’ve tried to pinpoint the very spot when tragedy struck. It wasn’t when Chelsea took her last breath, though that was certainly a tragedy. No, the tipping point was somewhere in the days leading up to her death, when her story was barreling like a deadly virus across the internet, snowballing and mutating and infecting everyone it touched. Infecting her with words I wrote and sent out into the world. I guess you could say I poisoned her with them.

To the rest of the world, Chelsea Vogel looked like any other white, American, middle-class mother in her early thirties. On the dowdy side of forgettable, one of those women you acknowledge with a bland smile as she pushes her cart by yours in the grocery store, or idles patiently in her car while you hang up the gas pump and climb back behind the wheel of yours. You see her but, for the life of you, couldn’t pick her out of a lineup five minutes later.

But underneath all that dull suburban facade burned a big, bright secret.

I had no idea of any of this, of course, that rainy Tuesday afternoon I walked into her slightly shabby offices south of Baltimore to interview her for iWoman.com, the online news magazine I was reporting for at the time. I only knew that as the founder and CEO of American Society for Truth, Chelsea was an outspoken opponent of gay rights, one who preached about God-ordained sexuality and the natural family to anyone who would listen. And people seemed to be listening, especially once she became a regular contributor on conservative news senders.

“I’m Abigail Wolff,” I told the receptionist, a slight woman by the name of Maria Duncan. “I have an interview with Mrs. Vogel.”

Maria offered me coffee and showed me to the conference room. I noticed her because she was pretty—short pixie hair, a fresh face, clothes that were fashionable but not flashy. But I remember her because two weeks later, she slid me the story that ended my career.

“Here,” she said to me that day, shoving a file across the table before I’d settled into the seat across from her. “This is for you.”

I’d known when she asked me to meet her at a Cracker Barrel in Linthicum Heights just south of Baltimore, it wasn’t to become friends over sweet teas and biscuits. But never in a million years would I have guessed what greeted me when I opened that file. Dozens and dozens of photographs, each one dated and timed, of a naked Maria and Chelsea. In bed, on the backseat of a minivan, atop both of their desks.

“Who took these?” I said, flipping through them. Judging by the low resolution and awkward angles, I was placing my money on a hidden camera, and an inexpensive one.

Maria shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. They’re real. There’s a DVD in there, too, with about twenty different videos.”

I pushed everything back into the file and closed the cover. Maria was well above legal age, probably somewhere in her mid to late twenties. That didn’t mean, however, that Chelsea Vogel wasn’t a predator, or that the affair wouldn’t be one hell of a story...and a byline.

But still. If this story hit, Maria needed to know what she was in for.

“What do you think your family will say when they open up their morning newspaper and see these?”

Her chin went up. “There’s no one to see it. The only family I had left died last year.”

“Your friends, then. Do any of them know you’re sleeping with your female boss?”

“I don’t...” She glanced down at the table, then lifted her gaze to mine, clinging to it like maple syrup, thick and sticky. “I just moved here from Detroit. The people here aren’t exactly friendly.”

I took this to mean she hadn’t made very many friends yet.

I gestured to the envelope between us. “So, what’s this about, then? Is it to get attention? To prove to people that you’re loved? Because I can guarantee you people are going to think a lot of things when they see these pictures, but not much of it’s going to be nice.”

“I don’t give a shit what people think. This isn’t about getting noticed. This is about Chelsea Vogel taking advantage of me. She was my boss, and she used her position of authority to make me think she loved me.”

“So this story is about revenge.”

“No.” Maria’s answer was immediate and emphatic. “This story is about justice. What she did to me may not be a crime, officially, but it was still wrong. She should still be punished.”

“Take it to the HR department. They’ll make sure Chelsea Vogel is fired, and they’ll be inclined to keep things quiet.”

“Chelsea is the HR department, don’t you get it? American Society for Truth is her project. And I don’t want to be quiet. I’m done being quiet. I’m the victim here, and I want Chelsea to pay.”

I told myself it was the righteousness in her tone, the resolve creasing her brow and fisting her hands that convinced me, and not the idea of my name attached to a story that I knew, I knew would go viral.

“I’ll do what I can to protect your identity, but you need to be aware that there’s a very real probability it’ll get out, and when it does, every single second of your life will be altered. Not just now, but tomorrow and the next day and the next. This scandal—and make no mistake about it, this is a scandal for you just as much as it is for her—will follow you for the rest of your life. You’ll never be anonymous ever again.”

She swallowed, thought for a long moment. “I think I still want you to write the story.”

“You think? Or you know?” I leaned forward and watched her closely. Not just her answer but also her body language would determine my course of action.

“I know.” She straightened her back, squared her shoulders and looked me straight in the eye. “I want you to write the story.”

So that’s what I did. I wrote the story.

I did everything right, too. I checked facts and questioned witnesses, volunteers and employees at neighboring businesses and the building janitor. I made sure the evidence had not been digitally altered, compared the dates and times on the photographs to both women’s work and home schedules. I held back Maria’s name, blurred out faces, released only the least damning of the pictures, the ones where there was no way, no possible way Maria would be recognized. I did every goddamn thing right, but within twenty-four hours of my story breaking, Maria’s identity, along with every single one of the photographs and videos in clear, full-color focus, exploded across the internet anyway. Just as, if I’m being completely honest with myself, I knew they would.

Two weeks later, on a beautiful January morning, Chelsea Vogel hung herself in the shower. I wasn’t there when it happened, of course, but that doesn’t mean I wasn’t responsible for her death. After all, those were my words that made her drive those five miles in her minivan to the Home Depot for a length of braided rope, then haul it home and knot it around her neck. I knew when I put them out there that both women’s lives would be changed. I just never dreamed one of them would also end.

Secrets are a sneaky little seed. You can hide them, you can bury them, you can disguise them and cover them up. But then, just when you think your secret has rotted away and decayed into nothing, it stirs back to life. It sprouts roots and stems, crawls its way through the mud and muck, growing and climbing and bursting through the surface, blooming for everyone to see. That’s the lesson here. The truth always comes out eventually.

But I can no longer be the one to write about it.

2

It’s the strangest thing, running into someone famous.

First, you get that initial rush of recognition, a fast flare of adrenaline that quickens your pulse and prickles your skin with awareness. Oh, my God. Is that...? Holy shit, it is him. Your body gears up for a greeting—a friendly smile, a slightly giddy wave, a high-pitched and breathy hello—when you suddenly realize that though this person may be one of the most recognizable faces in greater DC and the nation, to him you are an unfamiliar face, a stranger. You are just any other woman pushing her cart through the aisles of Handyman Market.

And then you notice the red apron, the name tag that proclaims him Handyman, the light coating of sawdust on his jeans, and realize that to Gabe Armstrong, you’re not just any other woman.

You’re any other customer.

“Need some help finding anything?” he asks.

I am not a person easily flustered by fame. I’ve interviewed heads of state and royalty, movie stars and music moguls, crime bosses and terrorists. Only one time—one time—in all those years did I lose my shit, and that was when I interviewed Gabe’s older brother Zach. People’s Sexiest Man Alive, the Hollywood golden boy who chucked his big-screen career to die in a war that, on the day he enlisted, fifty-seven percent of Americans considered a mistake. But when Zach aimed his famous smile on me that afternoon, a mere eleven days before he shipped off to basic training, I forgot every single one of the questions I thought I had memorized, and I had to fire up my laptop on the hood of my car to retrieve them.

But not so with Gabe here, who is not so much famous as infamous. There’s not an American alive who doesn’t remember his drunken performance at his brother’s funeral, when he slurred his way through a nationally televised speech, then saluted the Honor Guards with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s clutched in a fist as furious as his expression.

And his image has only gone downhill since. Cantankerous, obstinate and hostile are some of the more colorful words the media uses to describe him in print, and their adjectives lean toward the obscene when they’re off the record. Part of their censure has to do with Gabe’s role as family gatekeeper, with his thus-far successful moves to thwart their attempts at an interview with his mother or brother Nick, crouched a few feet away when three bullets tore through Zach’s skull.

But the other part, and a not-so-small part, is that he answers their every single question, even “How are you today?” with a “No fucking comment.”

I clear my throat, consult my list. “Where do you keep your tile cutters?”

Gabe doesn’t miss a beat. “Snap and score or angle grinders?”

“Wet saw, actually. I hear they’re the best for minimizing dust.”

“True, as long as you don’t mind the hike in price.” When I shake my head, he continues. “How big’s your tile?”

“Twelve by twelve,” I say as if I’m reciting my social security number.

And that’s when the absurdity hits me. I’m discussing tile saws with Zach Armstrong’s younger brother. One who so closely resembles his big-screen brother that it’s almost eerie. If I didn’t know for a fact that Zach died on an Afghani battlefield last year, I might think I’d stumbled onto a movie set...one for The Twilight Zone.

Gabe motions for me to follow him. “I’ve got a table model with a diamond blade that’s good for both stone and ceramic. It’s sturdy, its cuts are clean and precise, and it’s fairly affordable. What are you tiling?”

“A bathroom.”

He stops walking and asks to see my list, and I know what he’s doing. He’s checking it. Inspecting for mistakes. Looking for holes. If he had a red pen, he’d mark it up and tell me to revise and resubmit.

Gabe glances up through a lifted brow. “What’s the sledgehammer for?”

“To take out the built-in closet. It’ll give me another three feet of vanity space.”

My answer earns me an impressed nod. “Are you planning on moving any fixtures?”

They could almost be twins, really. Same towering height and swimmer’s build, same dark features and angular bone structure, same neat sideburns that trail down his cheeks like perfectly clipped tassels. I take all of it in and try not to let on that I know exactly who he is.

“Nope. Same floor plan, just a thorough update of pretty much every inch. I’m fairly certain I can do everything but the plumbing and electricity myself.”

“I can get you a few referrals, if you’d like.” He looks up for my nod, then returns to the list. I give him all the time he needs, leaning with my forearms onto the cart handle and waiting for his assessment.

Gabe may be Harvard educated, but I happen to know I’ve made no mistakes on that list. I approached this project as I do every other these days: by scouring the internet for relevant articles, handpicking the most important facts and condensing them into one organized document. My bathroom has been content curated to within an inch of its life, and that list is perfect down to the very last nut and bolt.

He passes me back the paper with an impressed grin. “You’ve really done your homework.”

“I’m excellent at research.”

“Almost excellent.” He taps the list with a long finger. “You forgot the silicone caulk.”

I straighten, shaking my head. “No, I didn’t. I already have three tubes at home from when you guys had your buy two, get two free special.”

“What happened to the fourth?”

“I used it last week to re-caulk the kitchen sink.”

Amusement half cocks his grin. He nudges me aside to take charge of my cart. “Come on. We’ll start on aisle twelve and work our way forward.”

And that’s just what we do. Gabe loops us through the aisles, loading up my cart as well as another he fetches from the front as we check off every item on my list, even the items Gabe assures me there’s no way, no possible way I will ever need. I tell him if it’s on the list, to throw it in anyway. The entire expedition takes us the better part of an hour, and by the time we make it to the register, both carts are bulging.

He waits patiently while I fork over half a month’s salary to the gray-haired cashier, then helps me cram all my goods into the back of my Prius.

“Are you sure you don’t need anything else?” He has to lean three times on the hatchback door to click it closed. “Because I think we might have a couple of rusty screws left in the back somewhere.”

“Old overachiever habits are hard to break, I guess.” I grin.

He grins back, the skin of his right cheek leaning into the hint of a dimple. “It was a pretty fierce list. Very thorough. One might even say overly so.”

“I told you I was—”

“Excellent at research,” he interrupts, still grinning. “I remember. But preparation is only half the battle.”

His tone and expression are teasing, and I imitate both. “Are you doubting my competence?”

“Hell, no. Anyone who can make a list like yours is fully capable of looking up instructions on the internet. All I’m saying is, if you happen to run into any problems with the execution and need an experienced handyman...” He cocks a brow and gestures with a thumb to his apron, Handyman embroidered in big white letters across the front.

I laugh. “I’ll remember that.”

This is when he smiles again, big and wide, and it completely transforms his face. It’s a smile that’s just as fierce, just as sexy and magnetic as his look-alike brother’s, yet somehow, Gabe makes it his own. Maybe it’s the way his left cheek takes a second or two longer to catch up with his right, or the way his eyeteeth are swiveled just a tad inward. Maybe it’s the way his eyes crinkle into slits, and that dimple grows into a deep split. Whatever it is, Gabe’s smile is extraordinary in that it’s so ordinary, lopsided and uneven and unpracticed for red carpets and film cameras, and in that moment, I forget all about his famous brother. In that moment, I see only Gabe.

But now we’ve milked the moment for all it’s worth, and it’s time to go.

“Thanks for everything,” I say, reaching for my door. “Really. You’ve been a huge help.”

Gabe waves off my thanks, but he doesn’t turn to go. He stands there while I get settled, watching as I start the engine and fiddle with the gearshift, and then he stops me with a knuckle to the glass.

I hit the button for the window. “Don’t tell me I forgot something.”

“Yes,” he says, that extraordinarily ordinary smile nudging at the edges of his expression. “You forgot to tell me your name.”

“Abigail.” I extend my hand through the window, and his face blooms into a smile I can’t help but return. “Abigail Wolff.”

“Nice to meet you, Abigail Wolff. Gabe Armstrong.”

He shakes my hand, and a surge of solidarity for this stranger-who’s-not-quite-a-stranger spreads over my skin. I want to tell him I get it. I understand how one person’s death can tilt your entire world into a tailspin, how it can make you reevaluate your life and send you scurrying for a dead-end job in a dusty hardware store, how that one choice, that one event, that one split second can change everything.

Instead, I tell him goodbye, shove the gear stick into Reverse and point my car toward home.

3

The good thing about renovating a master bathroom yourself is that it takes loads of time. Six to eight weeks, including demolition and drying, so says the internet, and if there’s one thing I’ve had since Maria, it’s oceans and oceans of time.

It’s not that I’m overqualified for my current position as content curator for the nation’s leading health care website, though I most definitely am. My job is a forty-hour-per-week slog that, on my worst weeks, I can wrap up in less than half that time. Yes, I’m capable of so much more, but I can’t seem to muster up the energy to care. Content curation pays the bills and, as far as I know, has never killed a single soul.

It’s funny. Back when I was working—really working—as a journalist, there was no such thing as free time. When I wasn’t writing or researching or following leads, I was thinking about my next story. In the shower, on the water, during one of my mad sprints through the grocery store. Even my vacations, by definition a break from the daily grind, were not idle, and they were never long. Stolen snippets here and there, half days and federally mandated holidays, spent rowing or climbing or hiking through some forest somewhere, my mind tripping over ideas for my next piece. The harder I pushed myself, the faster my creative juices flowed. I didn’t have time to stop moving. Time is money. Time waits for no one. There’s never enough time in the day.

Now, though, I have more than enough to cart in all the bathroom supplies from Handyman, organize them by the order in which the internet tells me I will need them, line everything along the wall of the upstairs hallway and still be a good fifteen minutes early for my mid-afternoon skim latte date in Georgetown—even though I know it’s just not in Mandy’s DNA to arrive anywhere when she says she will. She pulls up at thirteen minutes past three, just as I’m settling onto a sidewalk terrace chair with two fresh drinks, my second and her first.

“Sorry I’m late,” she calls from across the street. “Client meeting ran way over, but the good news is, I knocked their sixty-dollar argyle socks off.”

“Come on. Socks don’t cost sixty dollars.”

“Not exactly the point here. The point here is—” an SUV whizzes by, stirring up the early-September air with the first of the fallen leaves, and Mandy disappears behind it, reappearing a second or two later with a wide grin “—they loved me. They gave me the job.”

She steps off the curb without checking traffic, without making sure the drivers have slammed their brakes and their tires have screeched to a complete halt. Which they do, of course. Mandy is the human version of Jessica Rabbit, a rowdy redhead with Bambi eyes and bee-stung lips who favors skintight jeans, high heels and flowy, flowery blouses. Stopping traffic is her superpower. There’s not a man on the planet who gets annoyed at the sight of her jaywalking across four lanes of city traffic as she’s doing now.

“She’s happily married,” I say loudly enough so that the one closest to me, a Paul Bunyan type in a minivan, hears me through his open window. He responds by leaning into the dash to get a better look at her ass.

She collapses onto the seat next to me, snatches up her cup from the table. “Did you hear me? Honeymoon Channel wants me to redesign their app. It’s a big deal, Abby. You should be thrilled.”

“I am thrilled for you.”

“Be thrilled for us.” She lifts her drink in a toast, then pauses for a long pull. “I sold your services, too.”

“I already have a job, remember?”

If she rolls her eyes, she’s considerate enough to do it behind her mirrored sunglasses. After Chelsea died, Mandy made no secret of her disgust with my decision to shove my press pass to the back of a drawer, and she’s spent the past three years encouraging me, rather loudly and relentlessly, to get back in there. To write something good, something meaningful, do something more exciting than my current drudgery.

But what Mandy can’t seem to understand is, there’s no shelf life on guilt. Someone died because of me, because of words I wrote. Just because I wasn’t the one to pull the proverbial trigger doesn’t mean I wasn’t to blame. Words, even when they’re carefully crafted, can be just as deadly as a bullet.

“Come on, Abigail.” Mandy shoves her glasses to the top of her head and leans into the table. “I’ve seen your day planner. You row until mid-morning, you take weekly martini lunches—”

“I take them with you.”

She waves off my rebuttal with a manicured hand. “Not the point. My point is, you can do your job in your sleep. In fact, I’m pretty sure you’ve done your job in your sleep, and more than once. You have plenty of time for the one I’m offering.”

I shake my head, confused. Mandy is a technological genius who peppers her sentences with terms like HTML and search engine optimization and JavaScript. Half the time, I have no idea what she’s talking about. Why would she hire me for anything?

“I know nothing about apps,” I tell her, “except how to order pizza off them.”

“No, but you know about writing.” When I don’t respond, she cranks up her pitch a notch or two. “Have I mentioned it’s for the Honeymoon Channel? We’re talking beaches and cruises and European getaways. How is that going to harm anyone, except maybe with jet lag or a sunburn?”

“That’s not the point, and you know it.”

She sighs. “I know, I know. Your muse has vanished, your well’s run dry. But surely you have enough talent still lurking in there somewhere to spit up a few thousand words of catchy advertising copy.”

I turn and stare down the street, not eager to rehash this stale argument—yet again—with my well-meaning best friend. No matter how many times I’ve told her, she refuses to believe my not writing is so much more than just me missing my muse. It’s that I can’t. What happened with Chelsea didn’t just mess me up mentally but also physically. I know this because for the past three years, every time I sit down at a blank computer screen or pick up a pen and paper, my fingers freeze up. My brain shorts out. The words are piled up somewhere deep inside of me, but they refuse to come out to play.

If anything, I’d always thought it would have been Maria. After all those pictures hit the internet, I’d obsessed about her welfare. Did she find another job? Had she made friends, come out of the closet, settled into a normal life? Was she living on the streets? But Maria had gone dark. Her phone was disconnected, her apartment empty, her email address unrecognized.

And then Chelsea surprised everyone by tying a noose around her neck and dangling herself from the showerhead—not an easy task, considering she had to rig the rope just right to support her weight and keep her knees bent as the oxygen stopped flowing to her brain. But she succeeded, and while the rest of the world shook their heads in compassion or tsked their tongues in holier-than-thou judgment, a chain of two words repeated in an endless loop through my brain. My fault—my fault—my fault.

And because Mandy knows me better than just about anyone, she heard them, too.

“Abigail, repeat after me,” Mandy said when I called to tell her the news, now coming up on three years ago. “I am not responsible for Chelsea Vogel’s death.”

“My phone and email are blowing up with people, my freaking colleagues, asking me how her death makes me feel.”

“Tell them it makes you feel unbelievably sad. For Chelsea, for her family, for everyone who ever knew her. Tell them her death is a tragedy, but do not, do not accept responsibility for that woman’s suicide.”

My fault—my fault—my fault.

A loud, exasperated sigh came down the line. “How many times have I listened to you preach about public enlightenment, how it is the foundation of democracy? That, as a journalist, it is not only your job but your duty to seek truth and report it to the world?”

“Yes, but I was also supposed to be sensitive and cautious and judicious in order to minimize harm, which clearly I didn’t, because I’m pretty sure suicide is the mack-fucking-daddy of harm.”

“If Chelsea Vogel didn’t want her dirty laundry aired, then she shouldn’t have had any in the first place. You reported the facts, Abby. Fairly and honestly and comprehensively. Just like you were trained to do.”

“Yes, but—”

And just then, a terrible, awful, horrible thought entered my mind unbidden. It was like an invasive weed that couldn’t be killed, climbing and coiling through my consciousness like kudzu, suffocating every other thought in its path.

And the thought was this: yes, I had been sensitive and cautious and judicious with Maria, perhaps even overly so, but I could have done better by Chelsea. I could have shown more compassion for how she was about to be involuntarily outed not just as a predator but as a lesbian. I could have thought a little longer about her husband’s and son’s response to the news, what would happen when they opened up their morning paper or switched on their morning talk shows. I could have been more sensitive to her right to respond to the allegations, could have been more diligent in seeking her out. I should have done all those things, but I didn’t.

“Yes, but what?” Mandy said.

“I have to go.”

“Not until you answer me, Abigail. Yes, but what?”

I hung up on her then, and she never badgered me about it again—a decided lack of interest that’s very un-Mandy-like. I suspect she heard those words, too. The loud and insistent ones I didn’t know how to smother, the ones telling me that while I might have done everything right with Maria, with Chelsea I did everything wrong.

“Earth to Abby,” she says now, waving a hand in front of my face.

I shake off the memory with a full-body shudder. “Sorry. What?”

“I said just think about it, okay? This job’s a great way to ease back into writing, and I really could use the help. The last copywriter I hired was a total dud. He missed every single deadline.”

“Great. So now I’m your last resort?”

She gives me a teasing half smile over her Starbucks cup. “You know what I mean.”

I nod because I do know what she means, even though my answer is still no. “No offense, but if I ever write again, it will not be for an app. It will be because I can’t keep the words inside. Because the story demands to be told. As awesome as tropical beaches are, I don’t think they qualify.”

But instead of being disappointed as I figured she’d be, she looks as if she wants to stand up and applaud. “Look at you, having a breakthrough.”

I snort. “Hardly. I didn’t say I was going to write. Only that I’m self-aware enough to know it has to be for the right topic. And honestly? I can’t imagine what that topic would be.”

“Maybe BenBird21225 can help you.”

For a moment, I’m confused. How does Mandy know about BenBird21225, the faceless handle who’s been badgering me by email and text for weeks now, his messages increasing in frequency and urgency. I have no idea who he is, why he’s contacting me, how he got my phone number, because the only thing he ever actually says in any of them is that he wants to talk to me.

She points to my phone. “He’s texted you ten times in as many minutes. Who is he?”

I pick up my phone and scroll through at least a dozen shouty texts. Ben wants a MEETING. He has something VERY IMPORTANT to say that must be said IN PERSON. Once upon a time, I would have followed this lead. I would have written back to Ben—asking for more details, setting up a time to talk, feeling him out as a potential source—instead of writing him off as I do now.

I delete them all, every single one, and toss my phone back onto the table.

“He’s nobody.”

4

When the doorbell rings in the middle of the day, nine times out of ten it heralds the arrival of the UPS man or a band of Jehovah’s Witnesses on a mission to save my soul. Today, like pretty much any other day, I ignore it. I’m not exactly in a position to go to the door anyway, my body wedged uncomfortably under the bathroom sink, both hands prying loose a particularly stubborn drain nut. This happens to be a crucial moment, one the internet tells me is best handled equipped with a bucket, a mop and an endless supply of rags.

But when the doorbell rings again, and then again and again and again, I retighten the nut, wriggle myself out, dust myself off and head down the stairs.

The person on the other side of the door is a kid, twelve or thirteen maybe, with long shaggy hair that falls in a honey-colored veil over eyes I can’t quite see. He’s prepubescent skinny, his beanpole limbs sticking out of baggy shorts and a faded Angry Birds T-shirt, his bony ankles tapering off into orange Nike sneakers. White earbuds dangle from his shoulders, the long cord trailing down his torso and disappearing into his pants pocket. He shifts from foot to foot in what I read as either a bout of sudden impatience or the sullen annoyance typical of kids his age, almost-teens with a laundry list of things to prove to the world.

“Can I help you?” I say, glancing beyond him to the street for an idling car. No bike or skateboard, either, and I wonder if he’s one of the neighborhood kids. Once they hit middle school, they shoot up so quickly I stop recognizing them.

“I’m Ben,” he says, and when my brow doesn’t clear in recognition, he adds, “The dude who sent all those emails?”

“Ben. As in BenBird21225?”

“Yeah. How come you never emailed me back?”

There are a million reasons I haven’t emailed him back, none of which I’m willing to go into with a twelve-year-old kid. I settle on the one I think would be easiest for him to comprehend. “Because I didn’t feel like it.”

He makes a face as if I just offered him raw broccoli. “I thought you were a journalist. Aren’t you supposed to, like, follow every lead or something?”

“I’m not a journalist. I’m a content curator.”

“Huh?”

“I mine the internet for content relevant for today’s active seniors.” It’s my elevator pitch, and I typically pull it out only when I want the person across from me to stop talking. It almost always works or, at the very least, results in slack jaws and glazed eyes and a very swift change of subject.

But Ben here doesn’t take the bait. “Like, Viagra and adult diapers?”

“No,” I say a bit defensively, even though Ben’s right. Viagra and adult diapers are relevant to pretty much every senior, even if it’s only just to brag about how their still youthful, virile body doesn’t yet need them. “Do you need a ride? Or for me to call your mom to come get you?”

“I’d love for you to be able to do that, but my mom is dead.” He runs his fingers through his messy bangs, pulling them off his face, and recognition surges. I know those gray-blue eyes. I’ve seen them before. I know the gist of his next words before they come out of his mouth. “She hung herself in the shower.”

From the start, I knew this day would come, though I always thought it would be Chelsea’s husband or one of her three sisters who showed up on my front porch, not her son. After all, journalists are threatened all the time by the people they expose. I’ve been bullied, intimidated and terrorized. I’ve gotten death threats on my car and answering machine, found knives stuck in my tires or front door, and once, a decapitated rat in my mailbox.

I get it, too. I understand why. It’s not a pleasant thing to have your dirty laundry aired for all to see. Chelsea never asked for that crew camped out on her front lawn, for the camera-wielding reporters that followed her around like a pack of hyenas, for the humiliation and discomfort that came with having her transgression plastered across every American newspaper, television and computer screen—and neither did her family.

And once your secret is out there, there’s no taking it back, ever. It’s so much easier to blame the reporter who broke the story than it is to admit your wife or mother or sister molested one of her employees.

But Ben here doesn’t look the least bit vengeful. He slips his hands in his pockets and waits, watching me from under his bangs with an intent expression.

“Look,” I say, my voice coming across surprisingly strong and even, “I don’t know why you’re here or what you want from me—”

“Because you haven’t read any of my emails,” he interrupts. “If you had, you’d know that Maria Duncan is driving around Baltimore in a brand-new BMW convertible. She lives in a condo in some downtown high-rise, the kind with a doorman and a pool on the roof, and she carries a different designer handbag every day of the week. She also has the biggest boobs I’ve ever seen. They’re fucking ginormous.”

“You shouldn’t say the F-word.”

The kid rolls his eyes, and honestly, who can blame him? His mother preached loudly and to anyone who would listen about God’s message of one man and one woman, and then she molested her female secretary. What’s a little curse word compared to his mother’s front-page hypocrisy?

“That’s it?” he says. “That’s your answer, is don’t say ‘fuck’?”

I shrug. “Maybe Maria has a rich girlfriend.”

“She has boyfriends. Boys. A billion of them. And none of them last for longer than a couple of pictures on Facebook and Instagram.”

“So she went through a phase with your mother. So she experimented for a bit. Lots of girls do.”

“You don’t think it’s weird that she’s suddenly so rich?”

“Maybe. But there are plenty of ways to get rich quick. Just because she’s found one doesn’t mean the money is connected in any way to what happened between her and your mom.”

“Okay, then.” He slips the iPhone from his pocket, fiddles with the screen for a few seconds, then flips it around so I can see. “How do you explain this?”

It takes a beat or two for the film to load, and then it’s Maria, all right. I recognize her sharp cheekbones and delicate ears, her ruffled pixie cut, her thin, suntanned frame in a skimpy red bra and nothing else. And Ben was right about the boobs. They are inflated to ridiculous, porn-freak proportions, swaying up and down, up and down to the rhythm of the man riding her from behind.

“Should you be watching this?” I say. Even with the blurring and voice distortion, this video is pornographic, and far too hard-core for a twelve-year-old.

My question earns me another mouth twist. “Please. Nothing can shock me these days.”

I return my attention to the film, and I think how much Maria has learned since her last go-round with Chelsea. The lighting is softer, the images are clearer, the angles less awkward. It almost looks professionally shot, as if all the clip needs is some cheesy background music and a willing pizza delivery man to make it a halfway decent, if not predictable, porn flick.

And then I see the man’s hand, and what looks like an expensive watch winking on his wrist above a wedding band. He says something I can’t quite make out in a voice that’s distorted to be less dark bedroom and more Darth Vader. This isn’t a porn flick. This film is exactly the same as that decapitated rat some asshole once left in my mailbox: a threat.

Because it’s not a very far stretch to assume that whoever this man is, he would prefer his heaving, sweating, married face not be revealed on the internet, and his manicure and jewelry tells me he likely has the money to pay to make sure it doesn’t. Which means that the person who uploaded this film—and after what Ben just told me, my money is on Maria—did so with an intent to harm.

“You should take this to the police. Blackmail is a crime, and it’s punishable by law.”

Ben shakes his head so hard, his hair slaps him on the cheeks. “No way. That dude’s married. What if he has kids? What do you think will happen to them if his identity gets out? I’ll tell you what will happen. They’ll be fucking traumatized.”

This time, I let the “fuck” slide. Ben is right. They will be fucking traumatized, and so will his wife, his friends, his family, his colleagues, everyone he ever knew. The scandal will likely die down quickly, but by then it will be too late. The married man will have lost his family, his job and most likely a good deal of his savings.

Still, though. It’s really not any of my business.

“What do you want from me, Ben? I don’t write those types of articles anymore. I can’t...” I lift my shoulders and search for the words, settling finally on a definitive, “I can’t.”

“I don’t want an article. I only want to know that my mom was not the bad guy here. That she didn’t go after her secretary but the other way around. I want you to tell me that.”

I think about what he’s asking, for me to take another, closer look at Maria, to search for clues that she might have been a not-so-innocent victim of the affair with Ben’s mom, her boss. I think about what it cost him to come here, to the front door of the journalist who outed his mother and ruined his life, requesting not a retraction or even an article refuting my original claims against his mother, but an answer. All he wants is an answer.

But I meant what I told him before. Maybe she’s having an affair with a wealthy married man. Maybe she’s an amateur porn star on the verge of her big break. Maybe the money and film are not connected at all. I don’t know. My point is, there are unlimited possibilities, and the answer isn’t necessarily the one Ben is hoping for.

“What if I can’t tell you that? What if I do a little digging and find my original claims still stand?”

Ben thinks about it for a moment, lifts his bony shoulders. “Then at least I’ll know for sure. I’ll have closure.”

“I don’t know...”

I do know. The thought of reopening that old wound sends an army of fire ants skittering over my skin, biting me not with old guilt, but with new terror. After Maria’s pornographic performance, I’m terrified of what I’ll find. What if Ben’s right? What if Maria really isn’t as innocent as she made me think?

“You owe me.” Ben jerks his head sharply to one side, whipping his bangs off his eyes long enough to bore his gaze into mine. “You owe me everything.”

Those last few words come with a whiptail lash, and I stand there for a moment, waiting for my skin to stop stinging, for the spots to stop dancing in my vision, for the rope to stop squeezing my heart and lungs. But his words don’t settle. The knot around my middle doesn’t loosen.

Because, hell’s bells, Ben is right. I owe him everything.

I sigh, but it comes out more like a groan. “I’ll call you as soon as I know something.”

5

As soon as Ben leaves, I sit down at my desk and pull up Maria’s video, trying to ignore the shoveled-out feeling in my gut as the images light up my screen, trying to quiet the million questions that pull and tug at me, reeling me toward them with the appeal of an impending train wreck. I don’t want to see this clip. I don’t want to see it, and yet I have to look. Ben was right; if nothing else, at the very least I owe him an answer.

I prop both feet on my chair, wrap my arms around my legs and watch from the space between my knees. Now that I’m looking at the video on a bigger screen, I see I was wrong before. The angle is a little strange, as if the camera is wedged only a few feet or so away from Maria’s face and trained up. It gives me a fish-eye view of the left side of her face, her swinging breasts in all their porn-star glory, the man’s heaving chest and his hand as it slaps, over and over and over, a red splotch onto Maria’s ass. I don’t blink, I barely breathe, and I study every pixel for clues.

About halfway through, I drop my feet to the floor, hit Pause and zoom in on the frame. The man is middle-aged, somewhere in his mid-to-late fifties. Flabby skin over muscles fighting gravity, a few stray gray hairs on his chest. I lean in and zoom some more, see his wedding ring is a plain gold band, the watch a classic gold model, unadorned and without flash. He could be one of a million men in this town.

I push Play and watch the rest. There’s a lot of grunting and slapping, mixed in with some dirty talk—him—and exaggerated moans—her—and then, at the very tail end of the video, when the activity crescendos into a loud and rather explosive grand finale all over Maria’s back, I see it. What I missed the first time on Ben’s tiny iPhone screen. What plunges my stomach into the crawl space under my office floor.

Maria looks straight at the camera...and smiles.

The empty hole in my gut fills in an instant, swelling with a churning mush. I push back from the desk with a hard shove. “Fucking hell.”

Could Maria really be that brazen and greedy to have sex with someone, record it, then use it to squeeze some cash out of him? Could she really be so evil and coldhearted, especially after what happened with Chelsea? My nausea rises up, crawling through my stomach and strangling the calm, reasonable voice telling me surely, surely Maria couldn’t be that evil.

I rewind the last ten seconds and watch them again, stopping on the exact moment when her pretty lips twist in so much more than a smile.

They twist in a deliberate taunt.

With her face still filling up my screen, I reach for my phone and scroll until I find the number I’m looking for, the one I haven’t dialed in almost three years.

Floyd picks up on the second ring. At first all I hear is background noise—a shouted command, an explosion, the staccato stream of gunshots. I’d be alarmed, except I happen to know the battleground sounds come from a video game.

“Well, well, well, if it isn’t Abigail Wolff. I thought you’d gone off and died on me,” he says in the rapid-fire Baltimorese I’d forgotten he spoke.

I force myself to slow down long enough for small talk, then summon a tone friendly enough to smother my rolling stomach and hammering heart. “Hey, Floyd. How are you?”

“Not bad, not bad. I played fifteen rounds of Spartan Ops last night and ranked up from twenty-six to thirty-three.”

“I have no idea what any of that means.”

“Halo 4, hon. It’s the bomb.”

Though Floyd and I have never actually met, I’ve always pictured him as the type of guy who lives in his parents’ basement—hair a little too unwashed, social skills a little too awkward, middle a little too mushy from a constant diet of pizza and Cheetos. But if anyone knows how to flush out Maria’s shenanigans, it’ll be him. Floyd is a computer whiz who specializes in financial investigations, and one thing I know for sure is that money almost always leaves a paper trail.

“My bad,” I concede, then steer us on to the reason I called. “As much as I’d love to hear all about your mad PlayStation—”

“Xbox.”

“—your mad Xbox skills, I need you to check on someone’s finances for me.”

“An assignment, huh? I thought you quit.”

“I did.” I search for an explanation, then decide on the truth. “This one’s personal.”

It’s all I needed to say. The background noise plummets into a muted silence, and Floyd’s tone makes a drastic U-turn, from fun and Xbox games to all business. “Give it to me.”

I relate a quick lowdown on Maria, being careful not to reveal any more detail than absolutely necessary. Her name, her moving-on-up lifestyle and very little more. I don’t mention a word about her five minutes of internet fame. If that’s connected to her bank account in any way, I want Floyd to ferret it out by himself.

“You got it,” he says, and I already hear his fingers flying across a keyboard. “I’m kinda slammed, so it might take me a week or two to get to you. I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.”

“Thanks, Floyd.”

“Oh, and, Abigail?” He pauses, and I can hear his smile. “Welcome back, hon.”

* * *

After I hang up with Floyd, I wander through my house, looking for something to take my mind off Maria. I could unload the dishwasher and mop the kitchen floor. I could finish removing the drain in the bathroom and take out the shower pan. I could sort through the million emails in my inbox. Nothing sounds even remotely appealing. Maria’s images replay on a constant loop through my mind, shooting ice water through my veins, knocking me sideways with that smile, because my gut...my goddamn gut is telling me—three years too late—that I missed something the first time around.

I change into shorts and a T-shirt, shove my feet into my sneakers and bang out the front door to burn off my frustration in a long run through the district, but my feet get tangled up in something unexpected on my welcome mat. A large brown envelope. No address, no postage, no writing or stamps on it anywhere at all. I cut a quick glance up and down my quiet street, which is, of course, ridiculous. Whoever leaves an unmarked, unstamped envelope for a person on their front doorstep doesn’t wait around for that person to find it.

And while we’re at it, why me? This is the kind of thing someone leaves for a journalist, not a washed-up ex-journalist turned health care content curator.

I look up as a car slides by. A neighbor from up the street waves from behind the wheel, and I’m too frozen to wave back. I check up and down the street again, even though I know the effort is futile. Whoever left the envelope is long gone.

I carry the package into the house, hook a finger under the seal and rip it open.

At first, what I find inside doesn’t make any sense. It’s about twenty pages of sworn statements, a written transcript of someone’s testimony. Someone by the name of Corporal Daniel Kochtizky, a surname so uncommon that I recognize it from this past year’s news coverage.

Corporal Kochtizky was the medic for Zach Armstrong’s platoon.

I return to the papers, skimming the testimony. The first few pages contain a lot of back and forth on details like name, rank, title, then moving on to dates, locations, logistics of the battle. Pretty standard fare, and nothing I haven’t read before and in a million places.

I skim the testimony, refresh my mind of the details of the army’s most famous soldier, whose death became its worst nightmare.

Zach’s death was like one of those perfect-storm cases, where one little thing sets off a chain of seemingly innocent events that end in disaster. In his case, it all started with a broken-down valve on an armored vehicle that brought the entire platoon—thirty-five soldiers spread out over eleven vehicles—to a screeching halt. A spare part was summoned, the platoon was split, a battle ensued. Zach Armstrong took three bullets to the head. His brother Nick, crouched a few feet away, was the one to recover his body.

But what nobody seems to be willing to talk about, what the US Army has refused to even discuss, is who shot him. Even more suspicious, the army spent the first few months after Zach’s death touting him all over town as a hero. They awarded him medals and posthumous promotions in elaborate, nationally televised ceremonies. They built memorials and slapped his name on bridges and highways. They created scholarships and grants in his name. Meanwhile, nobody else was reported killed or wounded in that battle, not even the enemy.

Jean Armstrong called foul, and she demanded answers in the form of a congressional investigation into not just who pulled the trigger of the weapon that killed her son, but also the army’s subsequent handling of his death. General Rathburn—we’re not technically related, but he is my godfather—is one of the three-star generals being investigated. The other is General Tom Wolff. My father.

I’ve just flipped to the fifth or sixth page when it occurs to me.

This document has not been censored. There are no dark stripes of marker, no blacked-out names or classified details. Every single letter is there on the page, lit up like strobe lights.

I rush through the living room to my office and my computer. After a bit of poking around on the internet, I find the censored version of the same document on the Department of Defense’s website and hit Print.

As it’s rolling out of my machine, I nab a pink highlighter from the drawer and lay the pages side by side, highlighting the blacked-out words on the DOD’s version in pink on my gifted copy. The name of the investigating officer. Others in the chain of command. Comments that could be construed as opinion, the medic’s version of what happened, hearsay and accusations. And then, on page seven, I highlight a name I’ve never seen before.

Ricky Hernandez.

According to the medic, Ricky was present on the scene when Zach was killed, and he was one of the thirty-six eyewitnesses briefed back at the base. Thirty-six. My pulse explodes like a bottle rocket.

So why does every single transcript the army ever released, every news magazine article ever printed and every evening news report ever broadcast maintain there were thirty-five soldiers on the field the day Zach was killed? And now there are thirty-six?

Thirty-six.

The word travels through me like electricity, rushing through my veins at the speed of light. I stare at the pink-striped papers fanned across the surface of my desk, feeling my scalp grow hot, then cold, then hot again with the realization that I’m looking at classified information. Whoever sent it to me is someone with inside knowledge of the operation—a soldier? an army investigator?—and wants me to know the truth. They want me to know about Ricky.

I turn back to my computer, fingers flying across the keyboard. A few hours later I’ve compiled a mountain of papers to sort through. Every document the army and DOD have ever released around Zach Armstrong’s death. Every hit on Ricky and all four Armstrongs—soldiers Zach and Nick, mother Jean, brother Gabe—that my content curation software spits out. Thousands and thousands of pages.

A slow sizzle begins somewhere deep in my gut, heating me from the inside out. What if Ricky Hernandez watched three bullets tear through Zach’s skull on the battlefield that day? What if he saw whoever pulled the trigger? What if he pulled that trigger himself? At first, the warmth feels like a phantom limb, vaguely familiar and not entirely real, and then I remember.

This is what a story feels like.

I toe off my sneakers, lean back in my chair and get comfortable. I’m going to be here awhile.

6

Early Saturday evening, I’m studying my menu in Bar Dupont’s sleek lounge when a rhythmic thump-click, thump-click pierces the chatter around me like the steady beat of a drum. I twist on my bar stool, as do half the people in the place, and find my former boss, Victoria Santillano, coming at me on crutches. She’s wearing an oversize black boot on her right foot and a dragged-down expression, heavy with equal parts crankiness and effort. All long lines and sharp edges, Victoria has always had the hardscrabble air of someone who’s forgotten to exhale, only now she looks pissed about it.

“What the hell happened to you?”

She juts her chin at the dirty martini that, just two seconds before, the bartender slid in front of me. “If that’s vodka, extra cold and extra dirty, I need it far more than you do.”

I signal to the bartender for another and push my still full glass in front of the empty seat next to me. Victoria hobbles up to the stool, flings her crutches against the bar and drinks half the glass in one giant gulp.

“Jesus, that’s good,” she says, smacking her lips.

“Please, tell me that boot isn’t just a scheme to get free cocktails.”

She snorts. “Now that you mention it, it is one of the better perks. But, alas, no. Damn ankle broke in three spots, can you believe it?”

I can’t, actually. Victoria is one of the most indestructible women I’ve ever met. She’s trekked through deserts and jungles, crawled through caves and fields of land mines, chased down thieves and dictators and drug lords, and lived to talk about all of them in front-page, top-billed feature articles. The woman survives on adrenaline and vodka and caffeine, and the only thing I’ve ever known her to break is a nail.

“Were you rappelling off an Afghani cliff? Skydiving into a war zone? Scaling the Kremlin with fish wire and Scotch tape?”

“I fell down the stairs.” Her long, unmanicured finger comes within millimeters of my nose. “And if you tell anyone that’s how I broke my ankle, I’ll have you murdered in your sleep.” She plucks an olive from her glass with two hooked fingers. “So what’s new and exciting in content management these days?”

“Not one goddamn thing.”

“Excellent,” she says, nodding sagely. “Business services, was it?”

“Health care. Health&Wealth.com is the leading health care web magazine for today’s active seniors.”

“Mmm-hmm. Sounds fascinating.”

Victoria buries her nose in her glass, and I do the same with the fresh one the bartender hands me, neither of us quite willing to rehash old arguments. She was there when I broke the Chelsea Vogel scandal three years ago, and she was there two weeks later, after Chelsea was found hanging in her Herndon shower, when I shoved my press pass to the very back of my kitchen junk drawer and handed in my resignation letter. She never questioned my decision to quit. She never, not once, tried to talk me out of it. She just told me to call her when I found my balls.

For the next six months, I sent her every type of ball I could come up with. Soccer balls, baseballs, tennis balls and footballs. A ten-pound bag of meatballs and a monogrammed bowling ball. A framed vintage poster of Lucille Ball. A custom Magic 8 Ball where every side of the triangle popped up as “Hell, yes!” Finally, when I paid a delivery service to dump a box containing a thousand ping-pong balls onto her office floor, she sent me a one-word email. “Uncle,” it said in the subject line, and nothing more. After that, we picked up where we’d left off, with regular email check-ins and cocktails every time she swings through town, which is often.

But we never broach the one subject that hangs between us in gleaming, glittering strobe lights—that by walking away from the Chelsea Vogel aftermath all those years ago, I walked away from my duty as a journalist to seek the truth and report it to the public.

Only now I’ve spent the past thirty-six hours researching an article I’m not writing, looking into a story I’m not covering, and though I’m not certain I’ve found my balls, I have, without a sliver of a shadow of a doubt, found a thirty-sixth soldier. One who was in Zach Armstrong’s convoy of vehicles rumbling down an Afghani street when small-arms fire rained down from the upper level of an abandoned building. One who fought alongside both Armstrong brothers and was returning fire when Zach took three bullets to the head. One whose interview was cataloged and then buried, whose name disappeared from every army account except one—the uncensored transcript I’m not supposed to have.

“What?” Victoria says, studying me with squinty eyes.

“What do you mean, what?”

“I mean, what’s going on here? You have that look about you, like maybe I should check between your teeth for canary feathers.”

My skin prickles, and my scalp buzzes with the thrill of new knowledge I can’t hold in another second. “Okay, so I’m not saying I’m writing anything, but say I know something that no one else knows about the Zach Armstrong story. Something new. Something earth-shattering and groundbreaking.”

“How earth-shattering and groundbreaking?”

“Enough that the DOD buried it.”

Victoria takes in my words like a seasoned journalist who’s seen and heard it all, with a pursed-lipped nod. She reaches for her martini. “I see. And what exactly did they bury?”

“A name.”

She looks up from her glass with an arched brow, the same arched brow I’ve seen her use on rapists and swindlers and serial killers, when she asked them if perhaps they shouldn’t have wiped down the door handle after leaving their prints all over it. “A soldier’s name?”

I confirm it with my own pursed-lipped nod, but I don’t reveal anything more. The thing is, as much as I like Victoria, she is completely ruthless when she smells a story. Even back when I worked for her, when she served as both my boss and my mentor, I was always careful to never reveal too much until I sent her the final copy. I didn’t trust her, not completely, to not run off with my story.

But since Ricky’s name has been wiped from every report the DOD or army has published, I’m fairly certain that no matter how hard Victoria looks, she’ll never find him.

“Where’s my Magic 8 Ball when I need it?” Victoria pounds a fist on the polished maple bar, and her next words pierce the music and bar chatter like a bomb siren. “Hell, yes! I knew it!”

Packed with corporate executives and political insiders, the Bar Dupont crowd is a seen-it-all-heard-it-all kind of crowd, but still. More than a few heads swing our way at Victoria’s outburst.

I try to ignore their curious looks. “Knew what?”

“That you’d be back eventually. Send me what you’ve got whenever it’s ready. If I don’t have a spot for it, I’ll make one. How many words, do you think? Three thousand? Four?”

“Hold up. I never said I was writing anything.”

“Please.” She waves a palm through the air, takes a long pull from her glass.

“Please what?”

She rolls her unmascaraed eyes and thunks her glass onto the bar hard enough to send liquid sloshing over the sides. “Please, stop fooling yourself, because you’re not fooling me. The very fact that we are sitting here, talking about Zach Armstrong, is proof you’re already writing the piece in your head. You didn’t tell me about the additional soldier because you were filling me in on what’s been going on in your life. You were looking for validation, and you knew I’d give it to you.”

Well, hell. Does Victoria have a point? Did I come here looking for her to tell me to write the Armstrong story? It’s a theory I hadn’t thought of yet, though I certainly am now, and the answer is maybe.

The truth is, discovering Ricky’s name has cracked something open inside of me, something that feels as if it’s been hibernating for a really long, really harsh winter and now might be ready to step into the early-spring sunshine. And while I’m certainly not already writing the piece in my head, why not hand him over to Victoria instead?

Because he’s my lead.

At the unwelcome thought, a familiar and greedy rush, as uncomfortable as an old, itchy sweater, warms my blood and coats my skin like a rash.

Victoria must read the indecision on my face, because she drains her glass, signals for another round, then twists on the bar stool to face me.

“I’ll tell you what the wisest journalist I know once said, and that is this. Our profession holds the power to be a force for good, and in the end, credit will go to the ones of us in the ring, the ones covered in sweat and blood and tears, and not the ones watching from the safety of the sidelines. Get out there, and be fully informed, fully aware and fully engaged. Be part of a force for good.”

“You said that, last year in a graduation speech at Princeton.”

“Harvard, but that’s neither here nor there. What matters is the message. Are you or are you not going to be part of the force for good?”

“I was part of the force for good, remember? Until I became the cause of something bad.”

“How many times do I have to say it?” Victoria leans into me, her tone fierce and forceful. “Chelsea Vogel’s death was a tragedy, but you did exactly what you were supposed to do, and that was report the facts. The decisions and actions were all Chelsea’s. She slept with her female assistant, she took her own life. As much as you seem to enjoy playing the part of martyr, you are not responsible for her death.”

“I’m not sure I agree.” I tell her about Ben Vogel’s surprise appearance at my front door, and my taking another, closer look at Maria in light of her nouveau-riche lifestyle and pornographic internet performance. “Only, if what I now suspect is true and Maria is not as innocent as she led everyone to believe, then I’m even more responsible than I thought.”

“Not necessarily. Maybe Maria didn’t realize her sexual prowess until she gained some with Chelsea. Maybe it took seeing how those videos went viral the first time around for her to come up with a plan to do it again, this time for a wad of cash. My point is, Chelsea’s story is not finished. There’s more to tell, and there’s no one on the planet more qualified—or more justified—to tell it than you. Expose Maria as a conniving slut who ruins lives and sleeps with anything with money or power if that’s what she is. Set the record straight.”

“Maybe she’s not a conniving slut at all. Maybe she won the lottery or...I don’t know, found a pot of gold.”

“Only one way to find out.”

Victoria doesn’t say the rest. She doesn’t have to. She’s telling me to dig deeper into Maria’s story, to do the research, to search out the facts. But she doesn’t have to tell me to do that, either. I’ve already got Floyd on the case. No matter what I end up doing with the answer—handing it over to Ben or stuffing it in a box and pushing it to the very back corner of my mind—I already plan to find out.

But still.

“What if I write something, and it happens all over again? What if somebody gets hurt?”

“Somebody always gets hurt, Abigail.” Victoria lifts her shoulders high enough to brush the ends of her fringy bob, then turns back to her drink. “But if you do your job right, nine times out of ten it’s the bad guy.”

7

The next time I walk through its double glass doors, Handyman Market looks more like a haunted house than a hardware store. Orange lights and black streamers and miles of fake cobwebs are slung from every display and shelf unit, hanging above tombstones, cauldrons, smoke machines and every other front yard decoration imaginable. I walk down the middle aisle, past the ghouls and ghosts and glow-in-the-dark skeletons, sidestepping a grinning witch straddling a broom, in search of Gabe. I find him atop a ladder in the electrical department, loading boxes onto a top shelf.

Recognition flashes across his face in the form of that extraordinarily ordinary grin.

“Abigail Wolff is back, and less than a week later, which we all know can mean only one thing.” He swings himself down off the ladder, the metal rungs squeaking under his weight. “You flooded your house, didn’t you?”

I pretend to be insulted. “Do you really have that little faith in my abilities?”

He leans in, and his grin widens. “That bad, huh? Come on. I’ll show you where the shop vac and drying fans are.”

“Ha-ha. My bathroom is demolished, and look—” I hold up both hands, wiggle my fingers in the air “—still have all ten. No water damage, either.”

Well, almost none. There was a little excitement when a pipe snapped clean in two as I was unscrewing the showerhead, drenching me and the bathroom floor in the process, but I had the rags and the mop, and the water turned off in thirty seconds flat. The only real damage done was to my blowout and a wall I was already planning to paint over anyway.

He holds out his hand, palm to the sky. “Let’s see it, then.”

For a moment, I’m confused. “See what?”

“Your list.” He steps closer, and I can smell the detergent on his clothes, the sawdust coating his apron, his shaving cream spicy and complex. “Does it have Find Handyman ASAP written anywhere on it, because I’ll bet it does.”

His sarcasm, his teasing tone, his half-cocked grin. So far I like everything about him, and it’s distracting me. His closeness is distracting me. His thick shock of hair is distracting me. His looks as if it hasn’t been combed in days, but instead of making him look ungroomed, it makes him look really good in a way that makes me uneasy. Especially in light of what I came here to tell him.

A bitter taste pools on my tongue, as if I’m sucking on old pennies. This is going to be so much harder than I thought.

Because if I’ve learned anything from Chelsea’s death, it’s that I have a lot to make up to the universe for my hand in it. When I set in motion events that ended in her lifeless body hanging in the shower, I upset the universal balance just as surely as pitching the planet a few degrees would transform the earth’s climate. In order to tip the karma scale back to good, I have to do good. I have to do what’s right, which means I have to tell someone about Ricky.

And it has to be one of the good guys.

Just say it, I think, glancing around, my gaze skimming over the lone customer all the way down at the end of the aisle, an elderly man sorting through a markdown bin. He doesn’t seem to be paying us much attention, and he probably can’t hear us from here, but I lean in and lower my voice anyway.

“I need to talk to you about your family’s case.”

Gabe freezes in momentary confusion, but it doesn’t take long for him to catch on, and his expression to catch up. The muscles tighten in his jaw, his mouth, the skin around his eyes, and three vertical trenches slash up the center of his forehead.

“My family’s case?”

I nod.

“My family’s case.”

“Yes.”

Gabe takes two small but significant steps backward. “Are you a journalist?”

“I’m a former journalist, and I’ve found something that—”

“Jesus!” he says, and fiercely enough that the man at the end of the aisle looks up in alarm, dumps his items back in the bin and scurries around the corner. “I can’t believe I actually bought your ridiculous bullshit story about renovating a bathroom. Unbelievable! Is your name really Abigail Wolff, or was that a load of crap, too?”

“Okay, so admittedly, my skills at approaching sources are a little rusty, but, yes.” I take a step in his direction, but he holds me off with two palms in the air. “My name is Abigail Wolff, I used to be a journalist, I have the credit card bill to prove I’m renovating my bathroom, and I came here with information that could make your family’s case take a hard left turn.”

“I’ll make this very simple for you, then. My family is in the middle of a federal investigation. None of us are allowed to talk about the case. If you had done any background research at all, you would know that.”

A fleeting frustration zings up my spine, but I swat it away. I remind myself that Gabe sees me as the enemy, as a member of the same media who has painted him and his mother as ferocious and unreasonable. And with valid enough reason. He doesn’t know me, doesn’t know anything about me. No wonder he sees my coming here as an ambush.

The realization pushes a friendly smile up my face, softens my tone to placating. “I don’t want you to talk, I want you to listen to what I have to tell you. Did I mention this information could change the course of your case?”

“You mentioned it, and now it’s my turn to talk. No fucking comment.”

And there it is, I think. The infamous no fucking comment.

Gabe doesn’t wait for me to argue it, just does an abrupt about-face, cursing under his breath and crossing the entire length of the aisle, past the extension cords and rolls of electrical wire and every kind of lightbulb imaginable, in three angry strides. At the end, he hangs a sharp left and ducks around the corner. I hustle to where he disappeared from sight and lean my head around the corner.

“I found a thirty-sixth soldier.”

My revelation stops him as I knew it would, as instantly and absolutely as it stopped me when I discovered it. His back goes ramrod straight, and he turns, that famous Armstrong jaw clenched and tight, those legendary eyes raking me up and down. I can tell he’s trying to decide whether or not to believe me, so I decide to help him out. I step into the aisle with square shoulders and a high chin, looking him straight in the eye.

“I’ve studied every single document that’s been released,” he says, stalking back up the aisle, his boots thumping out ominous notes on the hard floor until he pulls up right in front of me. “Read every single interview and report and transcript there is. There’s no thirty-sixth soldier.”

“That’s because you’ve only seen the censored versions.”

“And you haven’t.” His jaw is set on neutral, but there’s the slightest crease between his brows, as if maybe he doesn’t believe my claims, but he doesn’t quite dismiss them, either.

“I have every single unmarked letter, period and comma of the medic’s transcript, which include the name of a thirty-sixth soldier that was censored from the version the DOD released.” I reach into my bag, pull out a business card and pass it to him.

He glares at it for a second or two, then looks back up. “What does Health&Wealth.com have to do with my brother’s case?”

“Nothing, that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. Send me some times that work for you and your mother, and we’ll set something up.”

“My mother. Of course. There’s no thirty-sixth soldier, is there? This is all just another bullshit ruse to get an interview with her.”

I can’t hold back the exasperated sigh that pushes up from my lungs. “Of course there’s a thirty-sixth soldier. Why would I make something like that up?”

Gabe looks at me as if I might be coated in anthrax, his eyes narrowed into tiny slits. “I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Why don’t you just give the copy to me?”

I don’t tell Gabe that I seriously considered doing exactly that, passing him Ricky’s name and washing my hands of the entire episode. But the more I thought about it, the more I contemplated my reasons for wanting to give the Armstrongs Ricky, the more I realized giving Gabe his name would be like confessing my sins to the priest’s secretary. I need to go straight to the top, which means I need to hand Ricky to his mother.

“Look, Gabe. I realize you’re suspicious of my intentions, and honestly, I can’t say I blame you. Journalists are pretty ruthless when they smell a story, and they’ve crucified you and your mother for daring to take on the US Army, but again, and I’m just being completely honest here, it’s exactly because of the behavior you’ve shown me in the past five minutes.”

He hauls a breath to respond, but I don’t give him the chance.

“You don’t have to explain. I get it. You lost a brother, you’re allowed to be angry. But your mother lost a son, and in my book that means she needs to be in the room when I hand over the name. Believe me or don’t. Call me or don’t. I’ve never met your mother, but I think I know enough about her to know that if she were standing here right now, she wouldn’t let that soldier just walk away.”

And then that’s just what I do. I turn and walk away.

Because even though my skills at approaching sources may be a little rusty, I can still read one like a book, and I know one thing for sure. Gabe might not want to, but he believes me, and he’ll call.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, I’m walking through my front door when the text pings my phone.

Wednesday, 3 pm. 4538 Davidson Street. Gabe

8

Jean Armstrong lives in a traditional brick colonial on a quiet, tree-lined street just outside the western beltway. I ease to a stop at the curb, gazing out my car window at the lace-hung windows, the perfectly clipped boxwood hedges that lead to the front door. So this is the house where the Armstrong boys grew up. Where they took first steps and left for first dates, where they swung from a tire on the hundred-year-old magnolia and roughhoused on the wide, grassy lawn, where only ten months ago, a solemn-faced chaplain and uniformed CNO trudged up to the sunny yellow door, carrying a task heavier than holding the front line.

I reach for my bag and climb out of the car, smoothing my skirt as I make my way to the door. For some reason I didn’t give too much thought to at the time, I dressed to impress. Makeup, hair, heels, the works. Part of my effort is that the more that I read up on Jean, the more I really like her. The few quotes she’s given the media have been so smart and thoughtful, and I’ve always been drawn to smart, thoughtful people. And besides, it’s hard not to feel affection for a grieving mother.

But there’s more to it than just wanting Jean to like me. As much as I hate to admit it, I can’t deny my glossy hair and five-inch stilettos are also a teeny tiny bit for Gabe. To remind him of the first time we met, before my accidental discovery torpedoed our connection, when he seemed to like me enough to ask my name. I don’t know what that says about me that I want him to like me again, but there it is. I do.

I climb the few steps to the door and aim my finger at the bell, but before I can make contact, the door opens and Gabe steps out, swinging the door shut with a soft click. He’s in those same faded and worn jeans, but he’s traded his apron for a T-shirt and nice wool sweater, and accessorized them both with what I’m beginning to recognize as his trademark scowl.

“Here’s how it’s going to go down,” he says without so much as a hello. “We go inside, you give Mom the papers and answer our questions, and then you leave. You don’t get to ask us anything, and you sure as hell can’t use anything we do or say in your article. All of it, every single second, is off the record. Do you understand?”

“I’ve already told you—” and at least a dozen times “—I’m not writing an article.”

He gives me a get-real look. “Right.”

I’m getting awfully tired of his assumptions and accusations, but in light of what happened with his brother, I’m also giving him a long, long rope. I let it go.

“Did you bring the transcript?”

I pat my bag and summon up a smile. “Got it right here. Along with my notepad, digital camera and voice recorder.”

“Jesus, seriously?”

“Of course not. Journalists don’t use paper these days, not since Evernote.” I give him a toothy smile to let him know I’m kidding, but when his scowl still doesn’t relent, my eyes go wide. “Come on, Gabe, it was a joke. I’m not... You know what? Never mind. Let’s just get this over with, shall we?”

“Gladly.” He flings open the front door and takes off in long strides down the hall.

I breathe deeply and step inside, taking in what I can of Jean Armstrong’s home as I follow in Gabe’s fumes toward the back of the house. Light, rambling rooms filled with flowers and painted in warm, sunny colors. Thick carpets and overstuffed couches begging to be sunk into. Smiling family photographs everywhere, decorating the walls and covering corner tables. It’s a home filled with laughter and love, much like the one I grew up in, though you’d never know it from the man marching in front of me.

We emerge in an enormous kitchen on the back of the house, where it smells like flowers and vanilla and something else, something warm and delicious. Jean Armstrong hovers over a whistling teapot at the stove, lost in thought.

“Mom,” Gabe says, his tone warm and obliging, much like the first day we met. It’s such a drastic transformation from the one he used with me just a few seconds ago that I feel almost disoriented, at the same time as this new animosity between us wrings my insides in a way I don’t want to consider too closely. “Abigail is here.”

Mrs. Armstrong switches off the gas. She’s much prettier in person than on screen and in print, her auburn hair richer, her eyes brighter, her skin more glowing. She’s smaller than I expected, too. Her sons must have inherited their height from their father, who died when Zach was still in grade school.

I cross the room and wrap both palms around her tiny, birdlike hand. “I know these are not the happiest of circumstances, Mrs. Armstrong, but I hope you don’t mind me saying, it’s an honor to meet you in person.”

She pats her free hand over mine. “Now, why would I mind you saying something so lovely? I was just making some tea. Would you like a cup?” At my nod, she reaches for her son’s arm. “Gabe, be a dear and get the mugs, would you?” She turns back to me, points me to a washed pine table by a wall of windows. “Have a seat, Abigail. We’ll be right there.”

I head over and drop my bag on the table, looking out at a garden worthy of a Martha Stewart magazine cover. Even now, when most plants should have wilted and shriveled in the last of the Indian summer’s heat, Jean’s garden is still full and lush and filled with color. It’s the kind of garden that can belong only to a master gardener, one who spends the bulk of every dry-sky day coaxing plants out of the ground.

While Gabe pours the tea, I sink onto a padded chair across from Jean. “I assume Gabe’s told you why I’m here.”

Jean and Gabe share a look, then Jean says, “He told me you have information you’d like to share about Zach’s murder.”

Though it’s not the first time I’ve heard Zach’s death referred to as “murder” from one of the Armstrongs, it startles me all the same. I take it in with a nod and move on.

“As I told Gabe earlier this week, I’ve found evidence of a thirty-sixth soldier in Zach’s unit.” I slide the transcript from my bag and across the table. “His name is Ricky Hernandez.”

Gabe flips the papers around, and he and his mother bend over them. I give them all the time they need, sipping at my tea and taking another good look out the window. Jean’s garden really is beautiful, meticulously maintained and wild at the same time. As picturesque as, well, a picture.

Gabe is the first to speak, and the hard edge is back in his voice. “Where did you get this?”

“Someone left it on my doorstep.”

“Who?”

I give him one of his own get-real looks, a pretty decent imitation judging by the way the creases in his scowl fold in on themselves even further. “He didn’t exactly stick around to introduce himself.”

“Then how do you know it’s real?”

“Because, first of all, why would anyone go to the trouble to doctor up a fake version for me? Especially since I’m not a journalist. And second—” I slide another packet of papers across the table, the censored version from the DOD’s website “—it matches up exactly to this one. Word for word, letter for letter. Except for the blacked-out ones, of course.”

There’s a long, stunned silence. Finally, Gabe swipes a palm up the back of his head. “Those motherfuckers.”

Mrs. Armstrong backhands him with a light slap on the chest. “Language.”

I bite the inside of my lip, a smile tickling under my cheekbones. The gesture makes me like Jean even more, and not only because it makes Gabe look so properly chastised. There’s just something sweet about a mother still disciplining her thirty-three-year-old son.

“Okay,” Jean says, returning her attention to the transcripts, “so who’s Ricky?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, was he interviewed?”

“If he was, they didn’t release his transcripts.”

“Was he in the first convoy or second? Where was he positioned when Zach was killed? Did he see it happen, did he see who pulled the trigger, was it him?”

I lift both palms from the table. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I even put him through my content curation software. There were seven and a half million hits for Ricky Hernandez, most of them Facebook and Twitter profiles. A couple athletes, an author, a youth minister, a sound designer, but unfortunately, no soldier. There were a few possibilities in the military databases but none of them our Ricky, which means I’ve kind of hit a wall.”

Gabe snorts. “I thought you were excellent at research.”

I stifle a sigh and smother my rising exasperation with her son in a sugary smile I aim at Jean. “No matter how many times I try to convince your son otherwise, Gabe insists on thinking I’m here because I’m writing an article. But let me assure you, unless he’s somehow relevant to health care for active seniors, my boss at Health&Wealth.com couldn’t care less about Ricky Hernandez.”

Jean’s brow crumples, but I can’t detect even an ounce of the suspicion that darkened her son’s brow when I told him much the same thing. To me, Jean only looks confused. “Then why are you here?”

Because you’re one of the good guys. And despite your son’s volatile temper, I think he is, too.

“Because I don’t know why the DOD buried his name and testimony, but I do know I can’t just sit on him. Maybe he’s nothing, but maybe he’s the person who blows this investigation wide-open. Either way, I believe you have the right to know he exists, and that he was there, fighting in the battle that killed your son.”

“But why?” I must look as if I still don’t understand, because she adds, “Everybody wants something, Abigail. What is it that you want?”

I blow out a long breath, thinking through how to give a simple response to such a complicated question. Where to begin? With Chelsea’s suicide and how I feel responsible? With my karmic imbalance, and my hope that by doing right by the Armstrongs, I can atone for what I did wrong by Chelsea? Those answers are all too complex, and far too lengthy, to condense into a few short sentences.

But my coming here is more than just for atonement.

It’s also because of a sense of righteousness.

Jean Armstrong lost a son, and under what she has always insisted were suspicious circumstances. Now that I know Ricky exists, I’m beginning to think she may have a point.

So even though my father is one of the generals on the other end of her pointer finger, even though by coming here I might be handing her something that could look bad for his defense, I needed to come here anyway. I felt morally obligated to do something that could be construed as immoral...or at the very least, disloyal to both my father and the organization he spent his entire adult life serving.

“I come from a military family,” I tell them both, but mostly Jean. “My father was in the army, as was his father and the one before him. I’m not a soldier, but that doesn’t mean my father didn’t teach me to live by the seven army values. They were hammered into me from the day I was born, and they’re what brought me here today. So, to answer your question, I want a healthy conscience.”

Gabe pushes away from the table so fast, he almost topples backward on his chair. “Un-fucking-believable.”

His mother flaps a palm in his direction, but she never takes her eyes off me.

“You’re General Wolff’s daughter.”

It’s not Gabe’s words that skitter up my body like a battalion of scorpions, stinging my skin and straightening my spine, but his mean and spiteful tone. I feel my face flush and my body heat, but somehow I manage to sit still. I will not apologize for being a Wolff, even though I feel as if I’m being x-rayed, as if my skin is being stripped off to reveal something he clearly finds repulsive.

“Yes.” I lift my chin and superglue my glare to his. “I’m his daughter. General Rathburn is my godfather.”

Gabe stands, his entire body shaking with barely contained fury. “Get out.”

The words fall into the air between us with finality, like Donald Trump saying you’re fired, or a spouse saying I want a divorce. There’s no going back from a statement that absolute.

I reach for my bag, push to a stand.

“Gabe...” Jean says, his name a one-word warning for him to calm down, sit down, pipe down.

“No, Mom. If I had known she was General Wolff’s army brat—” the way he says it—Wolff’s army brat—as if he’s talking about a child molester or a serial killer, crawls across my skin like a bad rash “—I would’ve never let her in the door. She lied to me in order to gain entry into your home, and I want her gone. Now.”

And this is when I’ve had enough, when that little fire that’s been sending up smoke signals from the pit of my belly roars to life, licking at my organs, sizzling through my veins, growing and pulsing with heat. Gabe Armstrong doesn’t know me or my father. He doesn’t know anything about us.

“When would have been the appropriate time to fill you in on my lineage, Gabe? When we were discussing the different types of shower drains? I never lied to you about my name, and I certainly never made a secret about my motivations for coming here.”

Gabe’s gaze slides to me, and it burns me clear to the bone. “No fucking comment.”

“For the last time. I came to give you that transcript, the operative word here being give. And though I don’t need your gratitude, I certainly don’t need all your suspicion and hostility, either.” I give his mother a tight-lipped smile. “Thank you for the tea. Your home, especially your garden, is lovely. I wish you all the best.”

She blinks at me in surprise, and that’s the last thing I notice before I march out of her kitchen, down the hallway and out her sunny yellow door.

9

I’m halfway onto the driver’s seat, residual heat from Gabe’s enmity still pulsing my insides like a back draft, when I hear Jean’s voice, calling to me across her front lawn. “Abigail, wait.”

For a good second or two, I seriously consider ignoring her. Just leaping into my car, ducking my head and gunning it for home.

But now it’s too late. Jean is already halfway down the stone walkway, one hand waving in the air for me to stop, and she’s gaining. I don’t bother disguising my exasperation as I step out of the car and swing around to face her.

“I wanted to apologize for my son’s temper.” She steps off the curb and rounds the back of my car to where I’m standing on the street, keys clutched in a fist. “I really have taught him better. I promise.” Her expression, clear and pleasant, friendly even, sucks some of the steam from my anger.

“Sorry, but shouldn’t he be apologizing for himself?”

“Of course, dear, and he will eventually. It’s just that this rage he carries from his brother’s death...he lets it eat him up from inside. I know that’s not an excuse, but I hope you can at least understand what’s driving his grief. It’s one thing to lose the brother you idolize, another thing entirely when the country he died for isn’t honest about the circumstances surrounding his death.”

I’m kind of taken aback by her matter-of-fact tone, as if she’s talking about a new car purchase or the vacation she just booked to Florida rather than discussing one son’s grief at another’s death. From the start, Jean Armstrong has made no secret of her disgust at the way the army has been neither transparent nor honest about what happened to Zach, but I can’t sense an ounce of her anger now, only concern for Gabe.

Still. I can’t help but point out, “You seem to be managing very well.”

“Yes, well...” She smiles, and I catch a whiff of Gabe in it, the way one cheek is a little slower to rise, how the other folds into a dimple. “All these wrinkles don’t come for free, you see. I’m wiser, but that’s only because I’m ancient.”

Jean Armstrong is older and wiser, definitely, but she’s also got a force about her I can’t quite pin down. The media calls her fierce, and she certainly is when it comes to defending her sons, but it’s more than that. Much more. It’s a force that makes her seem stronger than she should be in her situation, sharper and more intense, as big and tall as any one of her boys. It’s a force that draws me into her field as surely as it must stave plenty of other people off.

“Take a walk with me, dear, would you?” She crooks an elbow in invitation, which is as endearing as it is ridiculous. In my heels, I have a good half foot and twenty pounds on her, and if anyone should be crooking an elbow here, it’s me. But because she’s Jean, because so far I haven’t discovered a single thing I don’t like about her, I toss my bag onto the seat, lock my car and loop my arm through hers.

She leads me around the side of her house, down a lavender-scented path and through a simple wooden gate, into her backyard. If I thought it was impressive before, from the few glimpses I got from her kitchen window, it’s a billion times better up close. Raised beds of blooms nestled between clumps of bushes and swaying grasses. Secret pathways leading to hidden clearings, and trellises dripping in vines. Benches and chairs everywhere, secluded under arbors or tucked behind fragrant plants, providing front-row seats for stargazing or butterfly watching.

“Beautiful,” I say, and the word seems absurdly lacking. “Did you do all this yourself?”

She laughs. “I would say it’s cheaper than therapy, but it would be a lie. That patch of tiger lilies alone could have fed all three of my boys for a month.” I follow her outstretched arm to a tall clump of yellow flowers, their trumpetlike blooms swinging in the breeze under the limbs of a massive oak. “Nick broke his arm in two places on that spot when he was eight. I swear, that boy would’ve lived up in that tree if he could have. I’d come outside and he’d be all the way at the top, waving down at me from the highest branch. It was only a matter of time before he fell out and broke something. I guess I should be thankful it wasn’t his neck.”

Now that I’m out of the spotlight of Gabe’s hateful glare, the knots in my shoulders unwind, and I find myself returning her smile. “He sounds like a handful.”

“He was nothing compared to those brothers of his. Gabe and Zach were the real troublemakers...” She shakes her head, but the gesture is more wistful than sad. “Do you know those two once removed every single item from their chemistry classroom and re-created the lab smack in the middle of the gym floor? I’m talking desks and microscopes and pencils and lab coats, all the way down to the very last petri dish. Don’t ask me how they got into the school on a weekend, because I never knew, and I still don’t want to. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t like the answer.”

I laugh. “I bet their old teachers are still talking about that one.”

“Those two were two peas in a pod. I always said God meant for them to be twins.”

I think about the sudden and overwhelming sense of déjà vu I got when I saw Gabe coming at me at Handyman Market, how for the second time in my life, I found myself getting flustered by those famous Armstrong genes. “They certainly do look the part.”

“That they do.” We round the corner, and Jean gestures to two chairs burrowed in a patch of wispy ferns. “Let’s sit, shall we?”

We settle in, and the early-October sun makes kaleidoscope patterns on my bare shins through the trees. I lean back onto the chair’s warm wood and think for possibly the hundredth time how much I like this woman sitting beside me. That if things had been different, if we’d met under different circumstances, through mutual friends at a party or volunteering for some local nonprofit, Jean and I might have been friends.

“I met him once,” I find myself saying. “Your son Zach, I mean. I interviewed him right before he left for basic training.”

“I know, dear.” I must look shocked, because she laughs at my expression. “I don’t just let anyone in my home. Unlike Gabe, I did my homework before you came over. Don’t take it personally, but I need to know who’s walking through my door these days.”

I think back to her questioning my motivations for coming, how she didn’t look the least bit surprised when I admitted my connections to the army. But if she already knew, then why not just call me out on it? Why not confront me? It occurs to me then that maybe it was something else entirely. Maybe her questions were a test.

“In your article,” she says, “you accused Zach of enlisting as a publicity stunt.”

Yes, I think. Definitely a test.

I twist on my chair and give her my answer. “I didn’t accuse him. I questioned his motivations. Zach enlisted the same year President Obama began pulling out of Iraq, and to fight in a war that a solid majority of Americans didn’t want us fighting. I was only trying to figure out why then, why, if his motivations to serve were as pure as he claimed they were, it took him so long to enlist.”

“You compared him to a Kardashian.”

“True, but then I concluded that his motivations were completely unselfish, and that everything about him was very un-Kardashian-like. I believe I called him the real deal, but only because my editor restricted my use of the word heroic to three.”

“I’m not criticizing you, dear, I’m complimenting you. As the daughter of a three-star general, it would have been far easier for you to praise the pants off my son, but you didn’t let him off that easy. Yourself, either. I imagine your connections with the army made it difficult for you to come here today, no?”

A flutter of guilt where my father is concerned worms its way under my skin. Handing the Armstrongs proof about Ricky might have been the right thing to do, but my father will certainly not see it that way. His loyalty is to his country and the army first, and I’m pretty certain he will see my coming here, to the home of the family who has accused him, loudly and publicly, of misconduct, as a betrayal.

But as for me, my biggest loyalty is to my conscience. My conscience compelled me here. Objectively I know I should be loyal to my father, and that he will never understand, but the conscience isn’t objective. I had to come. I had to do the right thing. Zach Armstrong gave up everything for his country, including his life. I had to tell his surviving family what I found.

“I see,” she says, taking in my expression. “I’m sure once Gabe calms down, he’ll see what this visit is costing you, too.”

I look beyond her and across the yard, over swaying leaves and bobbing blooms, back up toward the house. Under the ruffled kitchen valance, Gabe is posed like a statue—legs wide, arms folded across his chest, big form taking up a good part of the window. I can’t make out his expression from this far, but I’d bet my every last penny it’s not pleasant.

“Anger can be like a buoy,” Jean says, following my gaze. “Sometimes it feels like the only thing holding your head above water, but you have to let go of it at some point. Otherwise, you’ll never make it back to shore.” She turns back to me, smiles. “He’ll get there.”

I don’t answer, mostly because I’m not entirely sure I agree. After what I’ve seen of Gabe thus far—his stubborn suspicion, his firecracker temper—I think he might not let go of that life vest anytime soon. But instead of saying any of this, I pose the question that’s been piling up on my tongue for the past twenty minutes. “Why did you bring me here? Why didn’t you just let me get in my car and leave?”

“We’ve not had the best experience with the media, as I’m sure you know, and the journalists we’ve interfaced with have been far too overzealous to be pleasant. No offense.”

Why do I feel as if she’s on a fishing expedition? As if I’m trying to dodge a hook I can’t quite see?

“No offense taken,” I say. “Journalists can be pretty hard-core.”

“But not you.”

“I already told you. I’m not a journalist.”

“But you were. And to use your own term on you, you were the real deal.” She cocks her head and studies me in a way that makes the breath freeze in my throat, my muscles tense for the head-on collision I can’t see but can sense coming. “That Chelsea woman really did a number on you, didn’t she?”

My breath leaves me in a loud whoosh, and I blink away a sudden burning in the corners of my eyes. I wish I’d grabbed my sunglasses from the center console of my car to hide behind, to protect me from Jean’s superhuman scrutiny. It’s an uncomfortable thing, being seen so clearly by a virtual stranger, one who seems to know the skeleton I’ve tucked away in the back of my closet, knows that much like her son, I cling to my guilt like a life buoy, too. Beating myself up for what happened feels so much easier than actually forgiving myself, or asking for others’ forgiveness.

“Yes,” I say, looking away. “She did.”

“I want to tell the world about Zach. I want to tell his story. And I want you to help me.”

And there it is, I think, the hook. Jean got me so distracted, so flustered and discombobulated with her Chelsea questions that I didn’t even feel it slide into my side. Or maybe it’s more than that. Maybe after stumbling on Ricky, my curiosity has come alive. Maybe Jean’s hook simply doesn’t hurt as much as I thought it would.

“Why me?”

Jean smiles, not unkindly. “Because of all the things we’ve already talked about. Your connections with the army. Your experience with Chelsea. Both those things will make you very careful with your words, with how you choose to frame Zach’s story.”

“I haven’t agreed to frame any story.”

“What if I told you I plan to find Ricky?”

“I would say I have absolutely no doubt you will. But that doesn’t change my answer.”

“Actually, dear, you haven’t told me your answer.”

I open my mouth to say no. Helping Jean write Zach’s story isn’t just sticking a toe into the early-spring sunshine. It’s stepping into the sun at high noon, without clothes or blankets to keep me warm, without SPF or shades to protect myself from the sun’s harsh glare.

And yet I find myself considering the possibilities.

Because all those things that made me want to become a journalist are still there, have always been there, lurking just under the surface. Discipline and determination and temerity and a curiosity that, as evidenced by the very fact that I’m still sitting here, on a chair in Jean’s sunny backyard, just won’t stop.

But do I have the courage to try again, to trust myself not to make the same mistake I made with Chelsea all over again this time around, with Jean? That my words will not do someone harm?

Then again, they wouldn’t be my words, would they? They’d be Jean’s.

So how could any words poison her or her family, when essentially what she’s asking is for me to help her write hers? How would helping Jean be any different from what I’m doing now, with health care? The content would be all hers. I would just be curating it.

Jean reaches across the ferns, wraps her bony fingers around mine. “At least tell me you’ll think about it, will you?”

Before I can stop myself, before I know that I even intended to speak, I find myself saying to Jean, “I will.”

Part Two: Wicked Lies

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