Gregory Cole wasn’t just a reserve doctor. He was Patricia Sterling’s partner of six years. He spent Thanksgiving at my dinner table. He had sat on my porch drinking my father’s bourbon, smiling at my daughter while she played in the sprinklers.
“This is a coordinated strike,” I said, the intelligence officer in me laying out the operational map. “They weren’t just taking a vacation. They timed this. If I hadn’t caught an early transport flight on an Air Force C-17 out of Al Udeid, I wouldn’t have landed in Norfolk for another three weeks.”
“Exactly,” Miller agreed. “By the time you walked through your front door on November twenty-first, the emergency custody order would have been granted by default because you failed to appear in court. The house would have been sold to Palmetto Ridge Holdings. Derek would have had legal custody, Lily would have been relocated out of the jurisdiction, and your bank accounts would have been drained dry. You would have had to fight through three different state court systems just to see your daughter, all while fighting for your military clearance.”
I looked down at Lily. Her eyelashes fluttered, but she remained asleep, her chest rising and falling beneath the soft blanket.
They had planned to erase me. Not just divorce me—they had planned to dismantle my life, my honor, my motherhood, and my career, leaving me standing on an empty sidewalk with an AWOL charge hanging over my head while they lived off the equity of the home my father gave me.
My cell phone buzzed against the bedside table.
The screen displayed an incoming call from an unlisted international number.
I picked it up. “Hannah Nolan.”
“Hannah, darling, let’s stop this ridiculous melodrama before you do something truly uncivilized.”
It wasn’t Derek. It was Patricia.
Her voice was as smooth as chilled gin, completely unbothered by the fact that her granddaughter was currently hooked to an IV drip in a military hospital.
“Patricia,” I said, keeping my tone perfectly level.
“Derek is completely hysterical, which is entirely your fault,” she said with a soft, patronizing sigh. “I told him years ago that marrying an enlisted girl with an officer’s complex would end in tears. You are in over your head, Hannah. You always have been.”
“Your son left Lily to starve,” I said.
“Nonsense. The child was perfectly safe. Evelyn was right across the street. A few hours without a hot meal builds character. God knows you let her run wild whenever you’re off playing soldier.” Patricia paused, and when she spoke again, her voice hardened like concrete. “Listen to me very carefully. You will walk into that police precinct and withdraw whatever absurd statements you made to that patrolman. You will instruct the Bahamian authorities to stand down.”
“And why on earth would I do that, Patricia?”
“Because if you don’t,” Patricia purred, “Gregory Cole will submit his complete psychiatric evaluation directly to your commanding general at Fort Gregg-Adams by eight o’clock tomorrow morning. He will testify that you exhibited paranoid delusions before leaving the country. Your security clearance will be revoked by noon. You will be stripped of your rank, dishonorably discharged, and you will spend the next five years fighting to stay out of Leavenworth.”
A chilling silence settled over the hospital room.
“You chose your uniform over my son, Hannah,” Patricia whispered. “Now you have neither.”
***
