I stood in my parents’ kitchen still wearing the boots I had put on in Germany and I turned that word over and looked at it. I had spent the previous month running NATO exercises in conditions that left my muscles failing at the end of every day. Before that I had spent years in places where the sand worked its way into your teeth and the night sky was so vast it seemed designed to communicate your irrelevance. I had earned every promotion, every commendation, every breath I had taken in uniform. I had made choices, hundreds of them, to live smaller and save harder so that I could come home to something that was unambiguously mine.
And they were telling me Andrew had it hard.
“You sold it,” I said. The words came up like something being dragged from deep water. As soon as they were out I felt the thing they described become real in a way it had not been until I named it. “You sold my Corvette.”
My father set the knife down. He rubbed his forehead the way he had always rubbed it when I said something that inconvenienced him.
“You’re a soldier, Emily,” he said. “You’ve got money. You’ll buy another one. Andrew only has one youth.”
