Chapter 1 - The Woman in Lavender
"THAT MEDAL BELONGS TO MY SON!"
Charlene Ruddock's voice cracked across the Fort Riley gym before the general could finish reading my citation. Two hundred soldiers turned in their chairs. The brass band stopped breathing. And my stepbrother, Brody, folded over his knees like somebody had punched him in the stomach.
I stood under the lights in my dress blues, a black brace wrapped around my left forearm. The Soldier's Medal waited in General Paul Haskett's hand. Six years late. Six years of silence, and my stepmother had picked the exact second to break it.
"She stole his story," Charlene shouted. Her lavender dress shook. "My boy went into that river. He saved those men. Everybody in Salina knows it."
"Ma'am," a sergeant said from the aisle, "please take your seat."
"Don't touch me. I want the truth."
So did I. God help me, I had wanted it for years.
My name is Erin Lennox. I was thirty-eight, an Army major, and I could give orders in a sandstorm without raising my pulse. Yet Charlene's finger aimed at my chest made me seventeen again, standing in my father's kitchen while she explained why Brody's needs mattered more than mine.
Brody did not look at me. He was thirty-two now, broad-shouldered, wearing the good jacket he used to sell pickup trucks. His hands were shaking.
"You told people that, Charlene," I said. "I didn't."
"He told me himself."
General Haskett looked down at the photograph in my right hand. Sergeant First Class Dwayne Tillman had given it to me in the parking lot that morning. A medic had snapped it at sunrise after the flood. I sat in the mud, left arm splinted with a tent pole. In my lap lay Brody, twenty-six and blue-lipped, wrapped in a gray blanket. One of my hands was pressed against his chest, checking each shallow breath.
"May I?" the general asked.
I passed him the picture. His mouth tightened.
"I put that blanket on him," he whispered. "I remember the blood in his hair."
He placed the unpinned medal on the podium and walked to the edge of the stage.
"Mrs. Ruddock, I was at that river at dawn. I saw your son. And I saw who carried him out."
Charlene went still.
The general turned to Brody. "You wrote a sworn statement that morning. In your own hand. Do you want to tell your mother what it says, or shall I?"
May you like
Brody looked up at last. There were tears in his eyes, but that wasn't what frightened me.
He whispered, "Before I answer, General, ask Erin why she went back the fourth time."
