PART 1
For thirty-eight months, I believed every dollar I wired home was protecting the woman I loved.
I was wrong.
My name is Caleb Warren.
I was thirty-four years old when my Army unit received unexpected orders that allowed several of us to rotate home early from an overseas deployment.
Nobody in my family knew I was coming.
Not my mother.
Not my younger sister.
Not even my wife, Naomi.
And that was exactly how I wanted it.
For almost three years, my entire life had existed through phone screens, rushed video calls, care packages, and bank transfers.
Naomi and I had been married for six years before I deployed.
She was the kind of woman who left coffee warming for me when I worked late, remembered the birthdays of people I had forgotten, and somehow made a tiny rented duplex feel like the safest place in the world.
Before I left, I made her a promise.
