“My sister called me a leech at Thanksgiving in front of my brother-in-law’s commander because I drove an old Honda, never talked about my job, and looked like the easiest person at the table to dismiss—right up until the colonel pushed back his chair and made the whole room understand they had been wrong about me for years”

Amanda opened the door, holding Mason on her hip. “Dad, what are you doing here?”

“We need to talk.”

He sat at her kitchen table, the same table where Jake had tried to talk to her two weeks earlier, and he said, “You called your sister a leech. Your sister, who has been serving this country for 12 years, who gave up relationships, holidays, any semblance of a normal life for a career she can’t even talk about. And you sat at my dinner table and called her a leech because she doesn’t drive a nice car.”

Amanda sat Mason down in his playpen.

“Dad, she lives in a tiny apartment and drives a car from 2013. She doesn’t own anything. She doesn’t—”

“Some people give everything they have to something bigger than a nice car. Amanda, your sister is one of those people. And you need to fix this.”

It was the most Gerald Hart had said about anything in years. He wasn’t a man of speeches. He was a man of short sentences and firm handshakes and leading by example. The fact that he’d driven to Amanda’s house unprompted and delivered what amounted to a monologue told Amanda more about the severity of the situation than any argument could.