Chapter 12 - WHAT A UNIFORM DOESN'T SHOW
At work, a retired Marine named Harold Jensen waited until I finished changing his bandage before speaking.
“My grandson sent me that video,” he said. “Asked whether I thought the nurse had lost her mind.”
I secured the dressing. “What did you tell him?”
“That an eighteen-second clip usually has a first seventeen seconds somebody doesn't want you to see.”
I laughed despite myself. Harold gripped my hand with surprising strength.
“Those kids think a uniform makes them important,” he said. “It doesn't. It's what you do when nobody's making you that counts.”
After my shift, I found a crowd outside the hospital. A local reporter asked whether I had invented my service record. Ryan had posted that I was “pretending to be special operations.”
I had spent enough years refusing to discuss my past that the accusation landed harder than I expected.
“My service isn't the subject of this investigation,” I told her. “A cadet threatened a guest, and another cadet suffered a medical emergency. Ask about them.”
That night I took a dusty cardboard box from my closet. Inside were photographs, a folded flag from Isaac's memorial, and a letter he'd written before our last deployment.
EMMA, IF YOU EVER GET TIRED, GO HOME. THAT IS AN ORDER FROM YOUR FRIEND, NOT YOUR COMMANDER.
I sat on the kitchen floor with the letter in my lap. I'd told Isaac I would look out for his family. I hadn't understood how long a promise could follow you.
The phone rang just after midnight. A woman with a careful voice said she was April Finch, the missing medical assistant.
“I have proof the backup wasn't stolen by a stranger,” she said.
“Where are you?”
“Somewhere they can't reach me. For now.”
May you like
“April, take that proof to Detective Hart.”
“I will. But first you need to know who told Mercer to shut the courtyard camera off.”
