Chapter 2 - What Sarah Had Been Searching For
Ethan didn't question Sophie again until they were inside his truck.
He had packed only Sophie's medication, two changes of clothes, her stuffed rabbit, and the burgundy field case.
Sarah stood beneath the porch light while he backed out of the driveway.
She never once asked where they were going.
At Inova Fairfax Hospital, Sophie's fever turned out to be an infection caught early enough to treat without admission. Her immune system was still fragile after months of treatment for a blood disorder, and Ethan spent four hours beside her bed while antibiotics dripped into her arm.
When Sophie finally slept, he opened the envelope.
It contained six photocopied pages and a handwritten note.
The note came from Colonel Rebecca Sloan, his former commanding officer.
Ethan had not spoken to her in nearly eight years.
The first sentence explained why she had contacted him.
An old Army procurement complaint had been reopened.
The complaint involved defective load-bearing equipment purchased for two training brigades more than a decade earlier.
Three soldiers had been seriously injured.
One had never fully recovered.
Ethan had been the logistics officer who refused to sign the final inspection report.
He had also been the officer whose career quietly collapsed afterward.
Sarah knew he had served.
She knew he'd left the Army after “a disagreement with command.”
That was how Ethan had always described it.
What she did not know was the name of the supplier.
Whitmore Industrial Systems.
Her father's company.
Ethan stared at the words until the letters blurred.
When he'd met Sarah at a charity run in Arlington four years earlier, Whitmore had been her mother's surname from a previous marriage. Ethan had never connected her family to the contractor in his old case.
He had learned the truth only six months after their wedding.
And he had kept it from her.
Partly because her father was already dead.
Partly because Ethan wanted to believe old damage could remain buried.
Mostly because Sophie had just become sick, and Ethan had not wanted another crisis.
His phone vibrated.
Sarah.
He let it ring.
Then another message appeared.
Claire knows who you are now.
A second followed.
You should've told me before I married you.
Ethan read it twice.
Then a third arrived.
And before you brought that case into my house.
Ethan looked toward Sophie's hospital bed.
Sarah had called it my house before.
But the house wasn't hers.
Not entirely.
May you like
Ethan had paid half the down payment.
And suddenly he understood why Sarah had spent the last two months insisting his name come off the deed.
