He didn’t blink.
He simply stared.
Caleb hadn’t noticed yet.
He was focused on balancing his weight carefully on the crutches, shifting one foot forward with cautious precision, because even after years of surgeries the metal rods in his leg still ached whenever he stood too long.
He had come to Fort Mercer for one reason only.
Closure.
Or at least that’s what he told himself on the long drive over.
Three years earlier, he had left this place on a stretcher, unconscious and bleeding, after an explosion in a convoy outside Kandahar had turned his life into something unrecognizable.
In the months that followed, he woke in hospital rooms across two continents, piecing together fragments of memory that never quite aligned.
And somewhere in those fragments was the memory of a dog.
