Seventy-Two Hours
Part One: The Driveway
My brother-in-law threw me out of my own lake house three days before I was due back on active duty. He called me a parasite in front of twenty of his relatives, laughed at the clothes I was wearing, and told me to get off the property. I didn’t argue with him. I smiled, picked up my duffel bag, and walked to my car.
Because Ryan had no idea who owned the house he was standing in. And he certainly had no idea who was about to come up the driveway.
My name is Emily Carter. I’m thirty-eight years old, and I’ve served in the United States Army for eleven years. Three weeks before that weekend, in a small ceremony in a conference room with bad coffee and a flag in the corner, I’d been promoted to full colonel. I command a specialized operational unit. That’s about as much as I’m allowed to say about it outside of authorized channels, and it’s usually more than I do say.
To my family, I was just Emily. The quiet younger sister with a vague government job, a closet full of khakis and navy T-shirts, and a habit of disappearing for months at a time without much explanation. Holidays missed. Birthdays sent from overseas with odd postmarks, if they arrived at all.
I never corrected their assumptions. I didn’t need my family’s admiration. What I needed, more than anything, was one place in the world where I could just be a person. Not a rank. Not a call sign. Just Emily, drinking coffee in her pajamas.
That was why I bought the lake house.
Part Two: The House
Four years earlier, after my second long deployment, I’d spent nearly everything I’d ever saved on a cedar-sided house on the Lake of the Ozarks in central Missouri. Eleven years of salary, deployment bonuses, and living like a monk in barracks and rented apartments, with no car payment and no vacations, had added up to more than I’d realized.
It wasn’t a mansion. People who hear “lake house” picture something out of a magazine, all glass and infinity pools. Mine had three bedrooms, a wide wraparound porch, a stone fireplace that drew beautifully on cold nights, and a kitchen where the morning sun came through the east windows and lay across the pine floorboards like spilled honey. There was a dock with one Adirondack chair at the end of it and a hammock strung between two old oaks.
But it was mine. Every chair, every window screen, every coffee mug had been paid for with money I’d earned. I’d sanded the deck myself on my first leave after closing. I’d hung the curtains in the bedroom. I’d planted the hostas along the walk.
When I was deployed, a property management company in Osage Beach looked after it. They checked the pipes, mowed the lawn, and kept an eye on the security cameras. When I was home, which wasn’t often, I came here.
That Friday, I’d been away for seven months. I had seventy-two hours of leave before reporting back to my command for a new assignment, the details of which I couldn’t discuss with anyone. All I wanted was coffee on the deck at sunrise. A long walk along the water. One night of sleep without an alarm.
I’d been dreaming about it for weeks.
Instead, when I turned off the county road onto my gravel driveway at four o’clock on Friday afternoon, I saw four pickup trucks, two SUVs, and a minivan. My driveway was completely blocked. There were cars parked on the lawn, on my hostas.
For a second, I honestly thought I’d turned into the wrong drive.
Then I heard children shrieking with laughter. The front door was standing wide open. Country music was pouring out of the windows. Someone had dragged my deck chairs down the hill to the shoreline and lined them up along the water.
Part Three: Twenty People
I parked along the shoulder of the county road. I took my black Army-issue duffel bag out of the back seat and walked up the gravel drive to my own front porch.
Inside, there were nearly twenty people.
Kids were climbing over the back of my couch and jumping from the armchair to the ottoman. Grocery bags covered every inch of the kitchen island: hot dog buns, chips, a case of Busch Light, a twelve-pound bag of charcoal. An older man in a John Deere cap had his feet up on my coffee table, shoes and all. A woman I didn’t recognize was drinking iced tea out of my blue ceramic mug.
That mug. I bought it at a little pottery shop in Branson during my first leave after a very bad deployment. I’d stood in that shop for twenty minutes holding it in my hands because it was the first thing in months that had made me feel anything. Nobody else used it. It lived on the top shelf, alone.
And standing in the doorway between the living room and the kitchen, with his arms folded across his chest, was my brother-in-law.
Ryan Mitchell was forty-three. Broad-shouldered and stocky, with a sunburned neck and a goatee and a red plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up over thick forearms. He ran a residential contracting business in Springfield, Missouri. Or he had, until about a year ago.
He looked me up and down. My faded navy T-shirt. My khaki pants. My worn-out running shoes. My dark hair pulled back in a low ponytail. The black duffel bag over my shoulder.
Whatever he saw didn’t impress him.
“What,” Ryan said loudly, “is this freeloader doing here?”
Part Four: “Get Out”
The room got quieter. Not silent, because the music was still going and a toddler was banging a wooden spoon on a pot in the kitchen, but quieter. People turned to look at me.
I stared at him. “Excuse me?”
Ryan gave a short bark of a laugh. “You heard me,” he said. “We’re having a family reunion. My family. You weren’t invited. Get out.”
A couple of people chuckled. A teenage boy by the fireplace held up his phone, probably filming.
I kept my voice level. I’ve spent eleven years learning to keep my voice level. “Ryan,” I said. “This is my house.”
He smirked. “Jessica said we could use it,” he said. “There are almost twenty of us here, and you’re one person. Don’t make everything about yourself, Emily.”
He pointed past me, out the open front door, toward the road.
“Drive back to base,” he said. “Or wherever it is you go.”
For a second, I genuinely wondered whether I’d misheard him. Whether seven months away had done something to my ability to understand plain English.
Then I looked past his shoulder.
My older sister, Jessica, was standing beside the kitchen island. Forty-one years old, with shoulder-length chestnut hair and a gray cardigan, the same cardigan I’d bought her two Christmases ago. She was staring down at her hands on the countertop.
“Jessica,” I said quietly. “Can we talk?”
She sighed without looking up. “Emily, please don’t start.” 