Chapter 3

Hours passed. Or maybe it was minutes.

I lay on the floor, a heap of pain and humiliation. The grit of the ashes was in my teeth, a constant, vile reminder.

Slowly, painfully, I pushed myself up. Every muscle screamed in protest. My reflection in the shattered glass of a picture frame was a monster's. A swollen, bruised face, caked in gray dust.

I stumbled through the wreckage of my apartment. Smashed furniture, torn photos, the stench of stale beer and urine. My life, utterly demolished.

In the back of the closet, half-buried under a pile of fallen clothes, was an old wooden footlocker. It had belonged to my father. It was the one thing they hadn't touched, the one thing that had survived.

My fingers trembled as I undid the latches. The hinges creaked open.

Inside, resting on faded velvet, were two medals. Heavy, gold, hanging from pale blue ribbons studded with white stars. The Medal of Honor. One was my father's, awarded posthumously for his actions in the Gulf War. The other was Andrew's father's, for his in Vietnam.

Next to them were two neatly folded American flags. The burial flags that had draped their coffins.

A memory surfaced, pushing through the fog of pain and grief. My father's funeral. I was a little girl, lost in a sea of uniforms. A tall, kind-faced man, my father's best friend, had knelt down in front of me. He was a captain then, his name was Clark. He had pressed a Hershey's bar into my hand.

"Your father was the bravest man I ever knew," he'd said, his voice thick with emotion. "The United States Army does not forget its own. If you ever, ever need anything, you find me. You hear me, Gabrielle? Anything at all. That's a promise."

I hadn't thought of that promise in twenty years. It seemed like a lifetime ago, a child's memory. But now, it was all I had left.

He was a general now. General Clark. At the Pentagon. I'd seen his name in the news a few years back.

A desperate, insane idea began to form in my mind. The legal system had failed me. The city had abandoned me. There was no one left in Chicago to help.

But the United States Army does not forget its own.

I looked at the Medals of Honor. At the flags. They represented a different kind of law, a different kind of honor. A promise made in blood and sacrifice.

I closed the footlocker.

With a resolve I didn't know I possessed, I stood up. I found a small, empty urn I had bought, one I had hoped to put the ashes in before... before. I carefully, reverently, began to gather what I could of Andrew and Caleb from the floor, my tears falling silently onto the dust.

I took the last of my money from a broken cookie jar. I didn't even bother to wash my face or change my clothes.

I walked out of my ruined apartment, carrying the footlocker in one hand and the small urn in the other, and headed for the bus station.