The air at 4:30 in the morning has a specific taste. At Naval Base Coronado, it was salt, diesel, and failure. My failure. The floodlights cut the pre-dawn mist, turning the gravel track into a pale, ghostly ribbon. Thirty of them stood in formation, thirty SEAL candidates, their breath fogging and vanishing in the humid…

It started with coincidences. We’d be at the grocery store, and there they were, Michael and Emma, in the cereal aisle. “Fancy seeing you here!” he’d boom, his smile a little too wide, a little too bright for a Tuesday morning. Another time, at the library. Lily was in the children’s section, clutching that stupid,…

The next three days, I didn’t exist. I was a ghost in my own penthouse, haunting the rooms where my son’s laughter should have been. The silence, once a heavy blanket, was now a screaming, echoing void. I didn’t sleep. I just sat in the dark, the golden pocket watch in my hand, its soft,…

My world was reduced to two sounds: the high-pitched, terrified screams of the crowd, and the low, rumbling, terrifyingly powerful grunt of the animal that had me. “CODE RED! CODE RED! RIFLE TEAM, NOW!” a voice I recognized—Mark, the head keeper—was screaming. People were grabbing at my chair, trying to pull me back, but it…