PART 5
Chapter 5
The next seventy-two hours were a relentless blur of flashing lights, harsh hospital fluorescents, and stern men in cheap suits.
Lily was admitted to the pediatric ward for severe exposure and observation. By the grace of God—and Buster's thick, waterproof coat keeping the worst of the wind and rain off her frail body—she avoided frostbite. But her core temperature had dropped dangerously low.
I didn't sleep. I sat in a plastic chair beside her bed for two days straight, holding her small hand. Buster was curled up on the cold linoleum floor beneath the bed, his chin resting on his paws, refusing to eat until she woke up.
When her eyes fluttered open on the second morning, warm and safe, I leaned over and kissed her forehead.
"Are we going home, Daddy?" she asked softly, looking around the strange room.
"No, baby," I said, smoothing her hair. "We're going to get a brand new home. Somewhere better. Just you, me, and Buster."
The military, usually slow with paperwork, moved with terrifying speed when one of their own was targeted. Once my chain of command found out a civilian had forged a high-level Department of Defense casualty notification, the FBI and military investigators took over. The local police handled the felony child endangerment charges, but the federal government came down like a hammer on the wire fraud and forgery.
I sat in a sterile conference room with a JAG officer who laid it all out for me. Sarah and Brad had been planning it for eight months. They tracked my deployment dates. They knew Lily was the sole beneficiary of my estate if I died, so they engineered a fake will and a fraudulent trust, making Brad the sole executor.
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They would have gotten away with it. They were hours away from wiring the funds offshore. The only reason they failed was because my unit was rotated back stateside two weeks early due to a sudden shift in theater operations, and my phone had died during transit, preventing Sarah from tracking my location.
I never set foot in that house again. I gave my keys to a military moving crew. They packed my belongings and Lily's toys, put the property on the market, and I took Lily to a quiet, long-stay hotel two towns over to breathe and plan our next move.
