Historical Fiction

Part 1   My name is Sarah Martinez. For as long as I can remember, the dream was the only thing that felt real. It wasn’t a soft, hazy kind of dream you have when you’re half-asleep. It was a sharp, aching need, a pull toward something bigger than myself, bigger than my small Texas…

Part 1: The Still Point I kept my eyes on the reflection in the window. My breath was a two-count in, four-count out. Controlled. The man—Brad—was still talking, his voice rising, trying to fill the space my silence had created. He was the ringleader. Tall, with the soft, unearned confidence of a man who had…

Part 1 It was a perfect Seattle Saturday morning. The kind where the sun finally wins its battle against the persistent marine layer, kissing the damp pavement dry, and the air smells like salt, strong coffee, and the faint, hopeful perfume of possibility drifting up from Pike Place Market. I was holding my son Noah’s…

Part 1 The clinking of silver on porcelain was the soundtrack of my anxiety. At Le Bernardine, even the sounds were expensive. I smoothed my crisp black apron for the hundredth time, my hands shaking just slightly. At 34, I felt like a child playing dress-up in my mother’s clothes. I wasn’t supposed to be…

Part 1: The Night the Empire Burned The glass walls of Meridian Global Systems reflect the Manhattan skyline like a mirror forged from pure light and ruthless ambition. At its heart was me, Nathan Carter , a man who had built an empire from sleepless nights, savage precision, and an unshakable belief that I simply…

Part 1 It started last spring. A shadow at the edge of my vision. I’m fourteen. In Brookridge, Ohio, being fourteen means walking home from school with your friends, complaining about Mr. Henderson’s geometry assignments, and planning which movie to see at the mall on Friday. It’s supposed to be simple. My route home was…

Part 1: The Fortress and the First Crack Sarah stared at her coffee cup, watching the foam slowly dissolve into nothingness, much like her enthusiasm for this entire evening. She had agreed to this blind date only because her best friend, Maya, had practically begged her, insisting that Marcus was different, that he was kind,…

Part 1 That afternoon, the wind had teeth. It was the kind of cold that found its way through the seams of your jacket, a bitter reminder that fall in Chicago wasn’t always gentle. I was just trying to find a quiet moment. Between the two jobs I was working to keep my head above…

Part 1   The National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. is not a place for ghosts. It’s a place for polished brass, for crisp, dark-blue uniforms weighed down by medals, for the clinking of champagne flutes and the bright, brittle laughter of women in diamonds. It’s a place for the living. And then there was…

Part 1   My name is Lana Cross, and I was 22 when my life ended and began in the same 48-hour window. It started with silence. The kind of quiet in a trauma unit that feels wrong, like the air is holding its breath. The evening shift that Tuesday was oddly still. As a…

The mountain doesn’t care if you’re lonely . It doesn’t care if your heart is a hollowed-out, frozen cavern where a family used to live. The snow falls all the same. The wind howls all the same. For five years, that wind was the only voice I knew. It was the only voice I could…

My world is divided into two parts. Before, and After. Before, I was just a father. A husband. A soldier. After, I became a General at Homeland Security, and the guardian of a memory. The guardian of my son, Ethan, who came home from Helmand Province under a flag. Two years. Two years of an…