To: Aldo Moretta

From: Gloria Parker

Subject: Just hi!

Hi Aldo!

I bumped into Harper at Remo’s last night, and she gave me your email address. I thought I’d say hi. Okay, I’m lying. I don’t feel right starting off our email relationship with a lie.

I went to Remo’s with the sole purpose of forcing Harper to give me your email address. I hope you don’t mind. I know you didn’t want to have some long-distance thing going. But I missed you. Is that okay? I mean, I know it’s weird to miss someone that I don’t know well…

Anyway, if it’s not okay, ignore this whole thing and pretend it’s a spam message from an erectile dysfunction supplement company…wait, that’s weird. Don’t do that. Good news! I’m as awkward in email as I am in person! #consistency.

Your plants are doing well, and wildlife has yet to break into your house and claim it as their own. In other town news, I’m organizing this year’s Fourth of July after Merle broke his hip. I’m not sure if it was my people-leasing OCD or a genuine desire to shut Georgia Rae up about the parking space she’s complained about for the last seven years.

I feel…good. Work is fun and challenging, and I think exactly what I need. You’ll be happy to hear that I haven’t broken down and sobbed on any near strangers lately, though I might be holding out for you to come back.

I hope all is well with you. I don’t know if it’s okay to ask questions like where are you, what are you doing, do you miss home?

Good luck. Be safe. I’m thinking about you.

Love,

Gloria

He re-read the email for the 4,000th time. The email he’d never replied to. He’d gotten it two weeks after it was sent. After “the incident,” three surgeries, a touch-and-go infection, and his first torturous rounds of physical therapy that left him weak and gasping.

“Put that thing away before you crash this plane,” his mother bellowed from his elbow in her first-class seat. A retired couple on their way home from a three-week stay in Europe had given up their seats after spotting Aldo in uniform and on crutches. He’d refused the wheelchair.

He couldn’t say why that pissed him off. But most things since arriving in Germany half a limb short had. As far as he could tell, the bastards that had tried to kill the better part of his team—and nearly succeeded with him—had planted their hatred inside him. It thrived in the pit of his stomach, a bright red rage curled around dark, wispy tendrils of something even worse. Fear.