He took a job at a chain electronics store selling home computers just to keep some money coming in. He’d become bitter and defensive. It had been a bad time. He’d shut down, only surfacing to lash out at his wife and daughter. To his shame, he’d fought with Nicole about everything. Anything. And God help her if she broached the subject of selling the house. That ignited fights that lasted for days and left him in an angry, pulsating silence. Knowing he was failing. Fearing Nicole had hitched her happiness to the wrong man. Fearing that she knew it too, he read resentment in her every action.

It went on like that for months, and things were unraveling fast when his former commanding officer alerted him that Potestas, a local biotech company, was looking for an IT director and put in a good word for him. Potestas was small enough to fall beneath even Benjamin Lombard’s attention. Or so he’d assumed until a month ago. The work was entry-level IT: mindless and dull. He flew through the interview process and gratefully accepted a salary offer that he would have scoffed at only a year earlier. But with a wife and daughter and a crippling mortgage, Gibson didn’t dare risk making a counteroffer. Suddenly health insurance and a steady paycheck seemed like a gift from above. Job satisfaction and his dreams of spoiling his wife would just have to wait.

Ex-wife, he reminded himself. They’d been divorced for almost a year, and still he couldn’t bring himself to say it.

Ex-wife.

It wasn’t that he’d meant to go looking for trouble, but he hadn’t put up any resistance when trouble found him. He just let it happen. Through all those deployments in the Corps, cheating on his wife had never once crossed his mind. Ironically, it started after he got the job at Potestas. The job hadn’t magically fixed the cracks that had appeared in their marriage, and he’d been too stubborn and prideful to set to fixing them. Instead, he’d gone to a happy hour with a sales rep named Leigh.

In retrospect, he saw it for what it was: a temporary refuge. Cowardice, pure and simple. Leigh liked him and was nice to him. She didn’t need anything from him except a drink and a laugh. The man who had slept with Leigh was a mystery to him. Even now, it was hard to reconcile that man with who he thought he was.

To her infinite credit and his eternal gratitude, Nicole wasn’t cruel or vindictive. Her lawyer was fair, and while their marriage ended, it never extended to his relationship with his daughter. Compared to the stories that he’d heard, he’d gotten very lucky. But then anyone who knew Nicole was lucky.