Isabel took another sip of her coffee before she put the cup down and began focusing her camera and setting up the first shots. As she worked, a sense of peace filled her, and Isabel’s skin tingled with happiness.

“And you thought you’d lost it,” she spoke aloud to herself softly, letting her voice fill the empty space around her. “Well, not lost it,” she muttered as she sighted through the telephoto lens and focused on a huge bison bull backlit by the rosebud-hued sky. “Just lost the peace in it.”

Ironic, really, that the collection of photographs USA Today had called Peace? had made her lose her perspective on the subject.

“Afghanistan will do that.” Isabel clicked off several frames of the bison.

In retrospect she should have known the assignment was going to be a tough one. But she’d gotten cocky. Hell, she’d been a photojournalist—a successful, award-winning photojournalist—for twenty years now. She wasn’t a dewy-eyed twenty-something anymore. She was a fearless forty-two, which was part of her problem. Overconfidence in her ability had blinded her to the realities of what really seeing would do to her.

Of course, it wasn’t like she hadn’t been to war zones before—Bosnia, the Falklands and South Africa had all come before her lens. But something had been different in Afghanistan. I’d been different. Somehow I’d lost perspective and darkness and chaos slithered in, Isabel admitted to herself as she changed the angle of the tripod and shot several frames rapidly, catching a young calf frolicking around its grazing mother.

It had started with the soldier, Curtis Johnson. He’d had kind brown eyes set in a face that was young and more cute than handsome. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five, and he’d flirted outrageously with her as he escorted her to the jeep she’d be riding in—the one smack in the middle of the convoy of supplies they were taking from the U.S. airbase to one of the small native settlements just a few miles down the potholed road.