Chapter 6 - THE COLONEL'S SIGNATURE
Hale read the note twice before handing it back to Chen.
"I signed because I was told the names had been verified," he said. "That doesn't excuse me. It explains why my signature is there."
Olivia stood by the window, staring across the dark training fields. "My mother received a death notice that called me brave. She buried an empty coffin. I went to see her six months later, and she thought she was seeing a ghost."
Hale's expression crumpled. "I didn't know."
"You weren't supposed to. That was the whole point."
"Why didn't you come forward after you were safe?"
"I did. A man who claimed he was from a federal review office told me that if I corrected the record, every child on Mara's list would be exposed. I believed him. For years, I hated myself for believing him."
Captain Chen laid out the present facts. The original casualty summary named Hale as approving officer. A later amendment had added a statement that no civilians survived. It carried another official's initials, but the scanned page was blurred.
"This can be examined," Chen said. "We need the physical records, not stories about them."
Hale agreed to notify his legal counsel and cooperate with an independent inquiry. He did not use his rank to order investigators away from his own actions. Olivia hadn't expected that, and it made her angrier in a different way. Accountability would be slow. Jonah might not have time.
At dawn a video appeared on a public account. It showed the ripped-shirt incident, edited so Olivia seemed to lunge at Ethan before he touched her. A caption called her an unstable fraud who had fooled a decorated colonel.
Within an hour strangers knew her name, her training post, and the town where Tessa lived.
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Then Tessa called, whispering from a borrowed phone.
"Olivia, somebody just came to my door wearing an Army uniform," she said. "He asked me where I keep the photographs of the twelve children."
