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 The buzz of the restaurant was a familiar drone. Friday night at The Harbor House. Clinking glasses, low chatter, the smell of garlic and old money. I was Emma Clarke, and this was my life: checking emails on my phone, pushing a piece of salmon around my plate, and waiting for the check…

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…

Part 1   The fog in San Diego that morning was a living thing. It rolled in off the Pacific, thick and heavy, tasting of salt, rust, and the kind of cold that seeps right into your bones. It was a perfect shroud, clinging to the gray hulls of the destroyers sleeping in the harbor,…

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…