The Foundation
I dragged my duffel bag up the stairs, desperate for my first sleep in eighteen months. But my father and brother stood on the porch, holding beers like it was a party. Dad looked me dead in the eye and said I was homeless.
I didn’t scream. I just smiled. When they asked what was so funny, I told them the truth: that house they thought they sold was actually the one thing they never understood.
My name is Meline Lee. I’m thirty-one, a Staff Sergeant in the United States Marine Corps, and until about ten minutes ago, I thought I was standing on firm ground. The cab driver had let me out at the curb, taking his tip with a nod more sympathetic than grateful.
I’d been awake for nearly twenty-four hours, navigating military transport from Okinawa to Seattle, then commercial to Nashville, and finally the long drive into Pine Hollow, Tennessee. I gripped my green duffel bag. It was heavy, but the weight felt good, real.
It was the only thing anchoring me as I stared at the structure I’d called home for five years. The modest two-story Victorian with peeling white paint and wraparound porch—I’d bought it with my reenlistment bonus and a loan that took six months of paperwork. It was mine.
Every creaky floorboard, every drafty window, every square inch. But as I dragged my bag up the concrete path, the picture didn’t look right. The front door looked barred.
Curtains drawn tight on a humid Tuesday afternoon. The real anomaly was the welcoming committee. My father, Dale Lee, leaned against the porch railing, arms crossed—a defensive posture I recognized from a thousand bad childhood memories.
Beside him, sitting on the top step with legs sprawled out, was my younger brother, Trent. Trent held a sweating can of cheap beer. He looked up with a smirk that made my stomach turn.
The cat that had eaten the canary and sold the birdcage for scrap. “Hey, Dad,” I said, voice rasping from dry airplane air. “I didn’t expect a party.”
Dale didn’t smile.
Didn’t move to hug me. Just stared with a look combining pity and hard resolve. “Hey, Maddie,” Trent chimed in, taking a loud slurp.
“Welcome back to the good old US of A.”
I ignored Trent. Something was wrong. My internal radar, honed by years of threat assessment, was screaming.
This was an ambush. “Where are my keys?” I asked. Dale shifted weight.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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