is back in his voice. “Where did you get this?”
“Someone left it on my doorstep.”
“Who?”
I give him one of his own get-real looks, a pretty decent imitation judging by the way the creases in his scowl fold in on themselves even further. “He didn’t exactly stick around to introduce himself.”
“Then how do you know it’s real?”
“Because, first of all, why would anyone go to the trouble to doctor up a fake version for me? Especially since I’m not a journalist. And second—” I slide another packet of papers across the table, the censored version from the DOD’s website “—it matches up exactly to this one. Word for word, letter for letter. Except for the blacked-out ones, of course.”
There’s a long, stunned silence. Finally, Gabe swipes a palm up the back of his head. “Those motherfuckers.”
Mrs. Armstrong backhands him with a light slap on the chest. “Language.”
I bite the inside of my lip, a smile tickling under my cheekbones. The gesture makes me like Jean even more, and not only because it makes Gabe look so properly chastised. There’s just something sweet about a mother still disciplining her thirty-three-year-old son.
“Okay,” Jean says, returning her attention to the transcripts, “so who’s Ricky?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, was he interviewed?”
“If he was, they didn’t release his transcripts.”
“Was he in the first convoy or second? Where was he positioned when Zach was killed? Did he see it happen, did he see who pulled the trigger, was it him?”
I lift both palms from the table. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I even put him through my content curation software. There were seven and a half million hits for Ricky Hernandez, most of them Facebook and Twitter profiles. A couple athletes, an author, a youth minister, a sound designer, but unfortunately, no soldier. There were a few possibilities in the military databases but none of them our Ricky, which means I’ve kind of hit a wall.”
Gabe snorts. “I thought you were excellent at research.”
I stifle a sigh and smother my rising exasperation with her son in a sugary smile I aim at Jean. “No matter how many times I try to convince your son otherwise, Gabe insists on thinking I’m here because I’m writing an article. But let me assure you, unless he’s somehow relevant to health care for active seniors, my boss at Health&Wealth.com couldn’t care less about Ricky Hernandez.”
Jean’s brow crumples, but I can’t detect even an ounce of the suspicion that darkened her son’s brow when I told him much the same thing. To me, Jean only looks confused. “Then why are you here?”
Because you’re one of the good guys. And despite your son’s volatile temper, I think he is, too.
“Because I don’t know why the DOD buried his name and testimony, but I do know I can’t just sit on him. Maybe he’s nothing, but maybe he’s the person who blows this investigation wide-open. Either way, I believe you have the right to know he exists, and that he was there, fighting in the battle that killed your son.”
“But why?” I must look as if I still don’t understand, because she adds, “Everybody wants something, Abigail. What is it that you want?”
I blow out a long breath, thinking through how to give a simple response to such a complicated question. Where to begin? With Chelsea’s suicide and how I feel responsible? With my karmic imbalance, and my hope that by doing right by the Armstrongs, I can atone for what I did wrong by Chelsea? Those answers are all too complex, and far too lengthy, to condense into a few short sentences.
But my coming here is more than just for atonement.
It’s also because of a sense of righteousness.
Jean Armstrong lost a son, and under what she has always insisted were suspicious circumstances. Now that I know Ricky exists, I’m beginning to think she may have a point.
So even though my father is one of the generals on the other end of her pointer finger, even though by coming here I might be handing her something that could look bad for his defense, I needed to come here anyway. I felt morally obligated to do something that could be construed as immoral...or at the very least, disloyal to both my father and the organization he spent his entire adult life serving.
“I come from a military family,” I tell them both, but mostly Jean. “My father was in the army, as was his father and the one before him. I’m not a soldier, but that doesn’t mean my father didn’t teach me to live by the seven army values. They were hammered into me from the day I was born, and they’re what brought me here today. So, to answer your question, I want a healthy conscience.”
Gabe pushes away from the table so fast, he almost topples backward on his chair. “Un-fucking-believable.”
His mother flaps a palm in his direction, but she never takes her eyes off me.
“You’re General Wolff’s daughter.”
It’s not Gabe’s words that skitter up my body like a battalion of scorpions, stinging my skin and straightening my spine, but his mean and spiteful tone. I feel my face flush and my body heat, but somehow I manage to sit still. I will not apologize for being a Wolff, even though I feel as if I’m being x-rayed, as if my skin is being stripped off to reveal something he clearly finds repulsive.
“Yes.” I lift my chin and superglue my glare to his. “I’m his daughter. General Rathburn is my godfather.”
Gabe stands, his entire body shaking with barely contained fury. “Get out.”
The words fall into the air between us with finality, like Donald Trump saying you’re fired, or a spouse saying I want a divorce. There’s no going back from a statement that absolute.
I reach for my bag, push to a stand.
“Gabe...” Jean says, his name a one-word warning for him to calm down, sit down, pipe down.
“No, Mom. If I had known she was General Wolff’s army brat—” the way he says it—Wolff’s army brat—as if he’s talking about a child molester or a serial killer, crawls across my skin like a bad rash “—I would’ve never let her in the door. She lied to me in order to gain entry into your home, and I want her gone. Now.”
And this is when I’ve had enough, when that little fire that’s been sending up smoke signals from the pit of my belly roars to life, licking at my organs, sizzling through my veins, growing and pulsing with heat. Gabe Armstrong doesn’t know me or my father. He doesn’t know anything about us.
“When would have been the appropriate time to fill you in on my lineage, Gabe? When we were discussing the different types of shower drains? I never lied to you about my name, and I certainly never made a secret about my motivations for coming here.”
Gabe’s gaze slides to me, and it burns me clear to the bone. “No fucking comment.”
“For
