came with the job. In his twelve years of service, he’d missed family holidays before, twice while deployed to combat theaters. But today, it chafed. The reason he had to be parted from his family wasn’t something critical, like combat overseas. It wasn’t an essential task, like security or law enforcement here on post. There was no natural disaster to respond to, no citizens who needed immediate help.
Instead, Aiden was looking at a week without his girls because of a training exercise. A pretend deployment. That was what the army did when they weren’t at war: they pretended they were at war.
Bad attitude, Nord. Check yourself.
They rehearsed their wartime missions.
Better.
But the week before Christmas was just about the worst time to schedule a monster-sized training exercise that could have been scheduled for any other week of the year.
That’s not a bad attitude. That’s a fact.
It wasn’t his call to make. The schedule had been set by someone much higher up. He would stand at this window and get his head in the game because today’s meeting mattered. It was their last opportunity to fine-tune their plans before the simulation began tomorrow at dawn.
Those plans were Aiden’s responsibility. He was the battalion operations officer, known as the S-3. The S-3 wrote the orders. The S-3 designed the training that kept the entire battalion in readiness for future missions, and the purpose of this week’s exercise was to test that training.
The battalion consisted of four military police companies here at Fort Hood, including the 584th MP Company, where Aiden had first served as a young lieutenant. Back then, he’d led a platoon of thirty soldiers. Now, twelve years and six other posts later, he was once more at Fort Hood, serving as the operations officer for roughly six hundred soldiers.
Out of six hundred soldiers, the order of command responsibility went from the battalion commander to the executive officer to him, the operations officer. The CO to the XO to the S-3. Put bluntly, if the commander and the executive officer were to die, Aiden took over command of the battalion. That had never happened, never come close to happening in real life, but during these training exercises? Yeah. They’d pretend to kill off the CO or the XO at some point, and Aiden would take over the battalion.
In other words, he had to be here.
His children did not. It was better for them to go have fun with his sister than it would be for them to stay in the house with a sitter, wondering why Daddy didn’t come home for ninety-six hours straight. He’d done the right thing by letting his sister take them away.
Aiden looked out the window at the dead grass and jingled the two pennies in his pocket.
“Okay.”
“Okay?” India asked, just to be sure Helen meant it.
“I agree you should break up with Gérard-Depardieu-Pepé-Le-Pew, but not because he wants you to meet his family. It’s because you can live without going to Paris with him. That is proof that he is not a man with whom you will ever be madly in love. You might as well end it now.”
“Thank you very much for your approval.”
“It’s what you called me for, isn’t it?”
India was startled into silence. Maybe it was.
“I should go,” Helen said. “We’re starting a monster-sized training exercise tomorrow. I won’t see daylight for a while. Show me the view before I hang up. Pretty please. Make me jealous.”
This was the traditional way they ended their calls. Helen was crazy for all things European. Ironically, her friend was also one of the few soldiers whom the army had never stationed in Germany—not yet, at least—so she used India to get a little peek at Europe now and then.
India held her phone up as she walked toward her window, a rectangle cut out of stone walls that were almost two feet thick. The square beyond was a mix of old and new, eighteenth-century spires soaring into the sky with the flashing green cross of a modern pharmacy sign below. It was a great view. If India squinted to block out the modern traffic that rolled over the old grey stones, she could imagine herself living in a past century, looking out this same window.
Undoubtedly, other women had looked out this same window in past centuries. Other women would do so for a century after India left, too. She was just a brief visitor, one who would leave nothing behind. Buildings lasted. People disappeared. She was just passing through.
India stood by the two-foot-deep stone casing and felt small.
“Bye now,” Helen said. “Fun talking to you.”
“Wait. I just—I just—” India’s heart was beating a little too fast. She felt so insubstantial. Insignificant. But everyone was just passing through, weren’t they? Everyone looked out their window and felt a little...untethered.
Not her friend. Helen was part of something.
“I want to see your view for a change.”
“Mine? A boring army base in Central Texas? It’s just brown in December.” But Helen obligingly turned her phone so that India could see out of Helen’s second-story, modern office window. The view of brown grass and miles of flat land was anything but boring to India. Soldiers in camouflage and absurdly comfortable-looking combat boots were walking on the sidewalk below. A civilian pickup truck drove by on the smooth asphalt road. Then another pickup truck. Another. Texans sure drove a lot of pickup trucks.
India felt herself beginning to smile. She’d forgotten just how big American trucks were compared to European vehicles. She hadn’t been home—or rather, back to her native country—in four years.
Helen turned her phone back around. “It’s pretty sad compared to a medieval town square, isn’t it? I swear, India, I’m going to show up on your doorstep with Tom one of these days and surprise you.”
“I’d love it, but I don’t know where you’d sleep. My place isn’t even big enough for two people.” Not that Gerard-Pierre had let that stop him from moving more than a few of his things here. He kept clothes here, toiletries. Books. A laptop. He liked to work at her high-top table and enjoy her view of the old city square. He liked her television. Since her job meant she always needed to go to sleep before he did, he’d stay out on the couch and watch shows. More often than not, he’d fall asleep on her couch. In the mornings, she had to tiptoe out of her own apartment with her pumps in her hand, so she wouldn’t wake the man who found her apartment more convenient than his own.
She looked at the note again. It had been written on her notepaper. It had been taped to the door with her tape. The tape dispenser had been left on her high-top.
Her man was a mooch.
“Actually, if you wanted to visit, you and your husband could take the bedroom. It won’t hold a queen-size bed, but I do have a full in there. I could sleep on the couch.”
Because Gerard-Pierre
