The call to end my final mission came faster than I expected. One moment I was reviewing security protocols at our base in Afghanistan; the next, I was packing my duffel bag. Forty years in uniform had taught me to move quickly, but this felt different.
I wasn’t just leaving a mission—I was leaving behind the only life I’d known since I was eighteen.
After four decades of service, Colonel Shirley Grant was officially retiring, and I hadn’t told anyone, not even my son, Mark. The overnight flight to Miami stretched like an endless ribbon of darkness.
I stared out at the thin line of dawn across the Atlantic, wondering if Mark would be at work when I knocked on his door. I hadn’t seen him in nearly two years—our schedules always pulling in opposite directions.
I pictured his smile, the way his eyes crinkled at the corners just like his father’s had.
When the taxi pulled onto Mark’s street in Naples, something in me shifted. The well-maintained homes looked peaceful in the morning light, but Mark’s house stood out immediately. The grass had grown wild, the mailbox tilted sideways and stuffed with envelopes, all the curtains drawn tight.
The cheerful blue paint I’d helped him choose years ago now peeled in places.
It didn’t look like a home. It looked abandoned.
“Colonel Grant? Is that you?”
Mrs.
Wilson—Mark’s neighbor—stood in her driveway, her face pale.
“I thought I’d surprise Mark,” I said, walking toward her. “Oh, Shirley,” she said, my first name strange on her lips after years of calling me Colonel. “You don’t know, do you?”
My fingers tightened around my father’s pocket watch in my jacket.
“Know what?”
“Mark’s been in the ICU for two weeks.
They took him by ambulance in the middle of the night.” She hesitated, disgust flashing across her face. “And Jennifer’s been on a yacht in the Keys, posting pictures all over Facebook—parties, shopping sprees.
All while Mark’s been…”
Her voice trailed off, unable to finish. I don’t remember getting back into the taxi.
One moment I was standing in Mrs.
Wilson’s garden; the next, I was pushing through Naples General Hospital’s sliding doors. At the fifth floor ICU, a nurse gave Mark’s name with recognition, something in her expression making my stomach drop. “Room 512,” she said quietly.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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