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Yes, he was feeling his nerves. What happened next might well change the entire trajectory of his life.
Would Command offer him a contract?
Bear scat and rattle snakes aside, he and Max had got the job done.
Was it enough?
That depended a lot on what Team Alpha had said in their assessments.
And that Halo had no control over. You click, or you don’t.
Last week, this job and the possibility of uprooting his life weren’t even on his radar.
Things moved fast in the kind of life he led.
It was the way Halo liked it. He liked the challenge of a storm.
Chapter One
September One
Norfolk, Virginia
Mary Williams elbowed her way through the kitchen door with a bag of groceries cradled in one arm. Just shy of a place to set her things down, the handle on the paper bag, dangling from the fingers of her other hand, snapped. Reflex was the only reason Mary was jostling and diving to grab the brown paper before the contents hit the floor.
She missed the bag but succeeded in catching the lip of the door frame with her flipflop. Stumbling forward, she came to rest draped across the kitchen bar stool.
Surprisingly, Mary managed to keep that one bag hugged to her, the ice cream cold against the side of her breast.
Oof.
As Mary pressed the surviving bag onto the counter, she mused that one of the benefits of living alone was there were no witnesses to her moments of klutz.
She didn’t need to add insult to injury. Today had been one of those days. Nothing really bad happened, but there were just enough hiccups that she was looking forward to a hot bath with a glass of wine and a book with enough drama to make her own life seem organized and uncomplicated.
Climbing back on her feet, Mary looked around at the fallen soldiers strewn over the floor. The egg carton was the first thing she grabbed up, thinking that with the price of the darned eggs, if they were all broken, she would be eating scrambled with cheese for dinner that night.
But it was all good. “All good,” Mary said aloud to emphasize that mindset, reaching out to swing the door shut.
Limping from the whack she’d given her big toe, Mary kicked off her shoes and reached for the food on the floor. Blackberries in one hand, a jar of chocolate spread in the other, Mary stopped to stare vacantly out her kitchen window. A single yellow leaf had detached from the limb and floated down.
Mary sighed—not fatigue, not sentimentality, just a general release.
Autumn was here, her favorite season. Flannel and fleece. Pumpkin spice and bowls of hearty stew. Flames flickered in the outdoor firepit as she chatted with friends, the knees of her pants burning against her skin as the cold tiptoed its way down the back of her collar.
She loved it, all of it.
The kids going back to school was the most fun.
But that was no longer true in her life. Her twin boys graduated from university last May and moved to the West Coast to follow their careers in technological-something-she-didn’t-quite-understand. Not a backward glance, no sentimental “We’ll miss you, Mom!” Just gone.
Mary got it. It’s what she’d done at eighteen. She eked out a few more years of having her twin boys around her than she’d given her own parents. They’d at least come home for summers and holidays while they were at the university. Mary figured she’d get the boys back in the new form they constructed for themselves when they got to be around thirty like she had with her own parents. Around thirty-one or so, she began to reach out a little more, going slowly with what she shared and how she shared it to see if they could be trusted to have an adult relationship with her instead of the parent-child one that she’d fled and shucked.
Yes, Mary got it. She wanted that space and freedom for her boys. It was survival biology, part of human DNA.
Still, it hurt like hell—a profound aching misery—how easily her boys slid from her life.
Mary got on her hands and knees to reach for the bottle of shampoo that had rolled under the kitchen table. This funk she was in might well be the anticipation of her birthday, knowing she was living through the last hours of her thirties.
