“Morning, Doctor Myers. Luncheon will be ready at one o’clock. Your father asked me to confirm the time with you.”

Cynthia paused and turned. “Lunch?”

“Your father has the Army guests coming.” Mabel stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked up at her. “Will one o’clock be satisfactory?”

Her heart started beating a little more rapidly. “Great. One is great.”

She continued up to her room. Had her mother intentionally not told her? Maybe her father assumed her mother had told her, and vice versa.

Rick and his team would come here for lunch? It was one thing to be present in an orchestrated and scripted ceremony along with other people before the microscopic inspection of the press. It was quite another to have the men unscripted in her home with just the Secret Service, her, her parents, and their private staff.

As she put on makeup, she applied some concealer to hide the shadows under her eyes. The constant nightmares had started to annoy her. She should be stronger than this. Why had her experiences affected her this way? What, subconsciously, did she still fear?

She sat back in the chair and closed her eyes, intending to rest for a moment. Suddenly, she heard a gun cock in her ear. Her eyes flew open, and she met the black eyes of Chukuwereije. “Tell me, Doctor, how you let my son die,” he hissed.

Cynthia gasped as she woke up, her heart pounding. The president’s quarters in Katangela faded away. She sat at her makeup table in her parents’ home. The warm April breeze came in through her open window, making the curtains flutter.

She looked at the clock and saw she’d lost seventeen minutes—just long enough to fall into the beginning of REM sleep. Pressing her fingers below her eyes, she willed the panic away. “God,” she whispered, “I need You. Chase these demons out in Christ’s name.”

The maid had left a bottle of water on her nightstand. She drained half of it, refreshed her lipstick, and called down to let the Secret Service know she was ready to go to the White House.

Chapter
Twenty-one

In the East Room of the White House, Cynthia stood next to the president as he awarded medals to the members of the US Army Special Forces Operational Detachment Alpha. He read each citation and secured the medal, then personally thanked each man, spoke a personal message, and moved on to the next soldier.

Cynthia barely recognized their clean-shaven faces as they stood in their dress uniforms. She spoke to each of them, then introduced them one by one to her father, who was on her other side. Each man had something personal to say that made her smile or laugh or want to hug him.