When She Came Home Read Free Page A

lives so America can be free.” He looked disgusted. “If you knew how tired I get of listening to that crap.”
    His vehemence stung her. “I thought you loved my father. He loves you.”
    Rick laughed. “But he’d love me so much more if I were a Marine.”
    They had always talked in the dark. It had been their way from the beginning.
    “What are Glory and I supposed to do without you?”
    He was calmer than he had been, more hurt than angry. But this was harder to bear. She wanted so much for him to understand.
    “On the plane that hit the Pentagon there were a bunch of kids on a National Geographic field trip. And there were two little girls. Sisters. I imagine I’m their mother and I know they’re going to die and I can’t help them.”
    He rested his index finger on her mouth. “Just stop. It isn’t your fault those children died and it’s not your job to save the world.”
    “Your folks live in Massachusetts, Rick. We’ve flown in and out of Boston ourselves.”
    “There are dozens of flights every day.”
    “But it could have been us. We could have been at yourfolks and had Glory with us….” She sagged under the weight of the images. “It can’t happen again. Ever.”
    War was men’s business and the General knew how to call in favors. Though he could not undo her enlistment, he made sure that after officers’ training and the Basic School, his daughter was separated from her unit and posted to the small finance office at the Marine Corps Recruitment Depot in San Diego, about twenty minutes from Ocean Beach. Most nights she was home from the shop in time to fix dinner. She became a fixture at the MCRD, and every day it rankled, it gnawed, it galled her that while her friends were in Iraq and Afghanistan, she was a paper pusher in her hometown.
    Glory was just finishing first grade when the opportunity arose for a ten-month deployment in Iraq, what the Marine Corps called Temporary Additional Duty. Frankie would be posted to a Forward Operating Base as part of a joint effort to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. She told herself, she told Rick and her father, that the TAD was only ten months.
    “I have to do this.”
    Rick looked grim and clenched his jaw. The General stopped talking to her.

Chapter 3
    October 2008—San Diego, California
    F rankie had been home from Iraq for almost two months, back at the MCRD, a captain now and adjutant to the chief financial officer, Colonel Walter Olvedo. She and Olvedo were meeting in his office on the day the call came from Glory’s school. Frankie’s phone vibrated against her thigh but she didn’t touch it.
    The situation in the office had reached near critical, and she and the colonel had been trying to have this meeting for weeks. The surge announced by the president had created problems for the previously insignificant San Diego Office of Financial Affairs. It had tripled in size and now handled not only payroll for the MCRD but other bases in southern California as well. Also—and this was new—a number of sensitive classified matters came across Frankie’s desk. Seven of the nine young Marines in the office hadinadequate clearances and insufficient financial training to deal with these and were inclined to be careless unless Frankie rode them hard and constantly. Olvedo had sent a dozen messages up the pipeline requesting more qualified personnel, but with everything that was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, no one had time for anything as far from the line of fire as Frankie’s shop.
    “Is that your phone buzzing, Captain?” Olvedo had heavy black brows that made him look cross most of the time despite his pleasant and easygoing disposition. “It sounds like a killer bee.”
    Olvedo’s wife had once been a career Marine but after their third child was born she left the service to go back to school to become a teacher. His mother-in-law lived with them and helped out with childcare. He knew Frankie couldn’t ignore a call