Chapter 17 The Colonels Files
The cab dropped her at a low brick building with a wheelchair ramp cutting across the front lawn like a scar. Silver Spring. Building C. The address Gideon had texted from a number she didn't recognize, the words clipped and reluctant: Come if you want. But I'm warning you—it's not pretty.
Marlene paid the driver with two twenties and a ten. Her last fifty dollars. She didn't count what remained in her passport.
The building's front door was propped open with a cinder block.
Inside, the hallway smelled like boiled cabbage and disinfectant, the industrial carpet worn down to the backing in a path that led toward the stairwell.
A man in a wheelchair sat near the mailboxes, staring at nothing. He didn't look up when she passed.
Apartment 14. Ground floor. End of the hall.
She knocked.
The door swung open before her knuckles hit it twice.
The man standing in the doorway was not Gideon.
He was taller. Broader through the shoulders.
Silver hair buzzed short against a skull that had the same shape as Gideon's, the same hard jaw, the same deep-set eyes.
But where Gideon's eyes were brown and hungry and haunted by things he'd seen, this man's eyes were gray and cold and haunted by something else entirely.
"Who are you?" Marlene asked.
"I could ask you the same." The man's voice was gravel over gravel. He didn't move from the doorway. His arms crossed over a chest that had once been powerful and was now running to softness. "But I already know. You're the waitress."
The word landed like a slap. Waitress. Said the way someone might say vermin.
"Marlene Cross." She lifted her chin. The dog tags swung against her sternum, visible above her sweater. "I'm here to see Gideon."
"Not today."
"The hell I'm not."
She stepped forward. The man didn't move. His bulk filled the doorway, and his face was set in a expression she recognized—the same one her father wore when she'd asked for things he'd already decided she couldn't have.
"He doesn't want to see you," the man said.
"He texted me his address twenty minutes ago."
"Because you wouldn't stop pushing." The words came out flat. Hard. "Because you tracked him across two continents and wouldn't take the hint. He sent you that email. He told you not to come. He told you to go to California. But you couldn't leave well enough alone, could you?"
Marlene's hand tightened on the strap of her bag. "Who are you?"
The man's jaw worked. For a moment, she thought he wouldn't answer. Then his arms uncrossed, and he straightened to his full height, and something in the way he held himself was so familiar it made her chest ache.
"Colonel Thomas Gideon. Retired." A pause. "Marcus is my son."
The hallway stretched between them. The radiator at the end of the hall clanked—that same sound, the one that had followed her through every significant moment of the past four months. The man in the wheelchair near the mailboxes laughed at something no one else could hear.
"Your son," Marlene said slowly, "called me from a hospital bed in Germany. He told me he couldn't walk. He thought I'd already left for California, and he called me anyway, and he cried on my answering machine. So I flew to Germany. And then I flew to Maryland. And I am not leaving until I see him.
"
"He doesn't want—"
"Let him tell me that himself."
Something flickered in the colonel's eyes. Not respect. Not warmth. Something closer to recognition—the look of a man who'd underestimated an opponent and was recalibrating his strategy.
"He's asleep," the colonel said. "The medication they gave him at discharge knocks him out for hours. You can come back tomorrow. Or the next day. Or not at all. I'd prefer not at all."
"Why?"
"Excuse me?"
"Why would you prefer not at all?" Marlene stepped closer.
She was a full head shorter than him, her travel-rumpled clothes and unwashed hair a stark contrast to his crisp polo shirt and pressed khakis.
But she'd faced down her father across a hardware store counter.
She'd faced down Harold Vance's eviction notice.
She'd crossed an ocean on the strength of a voicemail.
This man—this cold-eyed colonel with his crossed arms and his clipped words—was just another gatekeeper.
"You don't know me. You've never met me. What do you have against me?"
The colonel's expression didn't change. "I know enough. I know my son walked into some backwater diner in the middle of the night and met a waitress who—"
"You."
The word came from behind the colonel. From inside the apartment. A voice Marlene would have recognized anywhere, even thinned by pain, even roughened by exhaustion.
Gideon.
"Get out of the doorway," Gideon said. "Let her in."
The colonel turned. The movement gave Marlene a view past his shoulder—into a sparse living room with a hospital bed pushed against the far wall. And in that bed, propped up on pillows, his legs covered by a thin blanket, his left arm still in a sling, was Gideon.
His face was thinner than she remembered.
The hollows under his eyes had deepened into bruises.
His hair had grown out, falling across his forehead in a way that made him look younger and older at the same time.
But his eyes—those brown eyes she'd catalogued in the diner, in her bed, on the video call—were fixed on her with an intensity that stole her breath.
"Marlene." Her name on his lips was a exhale. A relief. A prayer.
She pushed past the colonel without waiting for permission. Her bag hit the floor. Her knees hit the edge of the hospital bed. And then her hands were on his face, her palms cupping his jaw, her thumbs tracing the new lines around his mouth.
"You're here," he said.
"I told you I was coming."
"I told you not to."
"When has that ever stopped me?"
A sound escaped him—half laugh, half sob. His right hand came up to cover hers, his fingers cold, his grip weaker than she remembered. But it was his hand. His skin. His touch.
Behind her, the colonel cleared his throat. "Marcus—"
"Leave." Gideon didn't look at him. His eyes stayed on Marlene's face, tracing her features like he was memorizing them all over again. "We'll talk later."
"Your medication—"
"Leave."
The word cracked through the room like a gunshot. Marlene felt Gideon's hand tighten on hers, felt the tremor that ran through his arm. The colonel stood in the doorway for a long moment, his gray eyes unreadable. Then his footsteps retreated down the hallway. The door clicked shut.
"Your father," Marlene said.
"Unfortunately."
"He's the one who's been hiding you." The realization settled over her like cold water.
"The discharge with no forwarding address. The flagged file. The voicemail you left from Germany—you called my landline because you thought I'd already left for California. But you didn't call again after that. You didn't email. When I got to Walter Reed,
they said your file was under administrative review."
She pulled back just enough to look at him. "He was keeping me away."
Gideon closed his eyes. "He showed up at Landstuhl two days after the attack. Flew over on the first military transport he could pull strings for. I was still in surgery for my spine when he arrived. By the time I woke up, he'd already talked to the doctors.
Already arranged the transfer to Walter Reed. Already decided—" His voice broke.
"Already decided how this was going to go."
"How what was going to go?"
"My recovery. My discharge. My life." He opened his eyes.
The brown was darker now, shadowed by something she hadn't seen before—not the hollow grief of his tours, but something closer.
Something sharper. "He's been controlling everything since I was eighteen years old. Enlisted to get away from him. Thought I'd finally escaped. But when they pulled me out of that ditch in Afghanistan, guess whose name was still on my emergency contact forms?"
"Gideon—"
"He told me you wouldn't come." The words spilled out of him now, faster, like a dam breaking.
"He said I'd met you in a diner at midnight. That you were a stranger. That you didn't really know me, couldn't really love me, wouldn't really cross an ocean for a man who might never walk again. He said—" A breath.
Ragged. "He said you were using me. That you saw a lonely soldier and an easy way out of your small town."
"That's not—"
"I know." His hand squeezed hers. "I know it's not true. But I was—Marlene, I was in a hospital bed, and I couldn't feel my legs, and the last thing I'd seen before the explosion was Kowalski's face, and I thought—I thought maybe he was right. Maybe I'd imagined everything.
Maybe the diner and your apartment and the way you looked at me were just—things I'd made up. Things I'd wanted so badly I'd convinced myself they were real."
"The dog tags," she said.
"What?"
She pulled the chain over her head. Dangled the tags between them. The embossed letters caught the dim light from the window— GIDEON, MARCUS T. —and she watched his eyes track them, the way they'd tracked them on the video call a lifetime ago.
"You gave me these," she said. "You stood in my doorway with a packed duffel and told me you wanted me to have them so you'd have a reason to come back. That was real. This is real."
She pressed the tags into his palm. Wrapped his fingers around them.
"And I didn't cross an ocean because I was looking for an easy way out of Grady. I crossed it because you called me crying, and I heard your voice break, and I knew—" Her own voice cracked.
Splintered. "I knew I'd burn down the whole world to get to you."
Gideon stared at the tags in his hand. At her fingers wrapped around his. At the way their hands looked together—his scarred and calloused, hers pale and trembling.
"I told him not to let you in," he said quietly. "When you texted me from the hospital. I told my father not to let you in. I said—" He swallowed. "I said you deserved better. Someone who could walk. Someone who could hold you the way I held you that night. Someone who wasn't—broken."
"Gideon."
"I was trying to protect you."
"You were trying to protect yourself." She leaned closer, her forehead nearly touching his. "You were scared. I was scared too, when you walked into my diner and ordered coffee and looked at me like I was something worth looking at. I was terrified. But I didn't run. And I'm not running now."
His breath shuddered out of him. The hand holding the dog tags lifted, trembling with the effort, and pressed the cool metal against her sternum. Against her heart.
"Put them back on," he said.
She slipped the chain over her head. The tags settled against her chest, warm now from his grip.
"I'm not going anywhere," she said. "Your father can lock every door in Maryland. He can flag every file in the VA system. I don't care. I found you once at the end of the world. I'll find you again."
Gideon's hand slid from the tags to her jaw. His thumb traced the curve of her cheekbone—that same gentle gesture, that same surprising tenderness.
"I missed you," he said. "Every minute. Every single minute."
"I know." She turned her head and pressed her lips to his palm. "I was counting."
The radiator in the corner of the apartment clanked on.
Outside, the November sun climbed higher over Silver Spring.
And somewhere down the hallway, Colonel Thomas Gideon stood in the building's entrance, staring at the cinder block that propped open the door, his gray eyes unreadable, his jaw set in a line that had once commanded soldiers and now commanded nothing at all.