No way she could have known…

Didn’t matter. She was stuck on those three seconds. If she hadn’t left her weapon behind, Operation Northern Route would have ended in that barroom. Janey would be alive, and Ace and Holly-Colonel Holland Wood. There would have been no attack on the Prairie Island Nuclear Plant.

He’d never seen her like this. Ever. Sure, he knew there was a downside to her job. He’d spent his time in special ops in the old days. He knew that killing people-or losing people-leaves a harsh sudden vacuum in the world. And sometimes this could rush into it. But you never thought about it, and you never voiced it. Now. Jesus. He was numb, blindsided, like he’d lost his place. His voice shook, searching for reference.

“Nina, hey kiddo…”

“Fuck you, Broker. Leave me alone.”

He studied the conflicted stranger who now occupied his wife’s body. Her taut face had lost its tone and aged ten years since breakfast, now just a clay mask of melancholy and fatigue. He could smell the rank sweat. More than fear; hopelessness, dread. Most of all he saw her shattered eyes, green splinters of pain jammed inward.

She took the cigarette from her lips and dunked it in the coffee cup, in the process scattering ash across the black type that spelled ARMY on the front of her sweat suit. Then she got up from the table, walked past him, went through the living room and up the stairs. As the bedroom door slammed shut upstairs, Kit cautiously stepped through the kitchen door and dropped her backpack on the floor.

“What’s wrong with Mom?”

“She’s just tired, honey; her arm is hurting her.”

Kit arched up on tiptoe, absorbing the tuning-fork tension still vibrating in the smoky air. She arched up more when she spied the pistol on the counter and the loaded magazine on the table. She measured the distance between the forced calm of her dad’s words and the hard, controlled look in his eyes, the way his body had changed. Then she regarded him with a wary cynicism no eight-year-old should have. She knew what it meant when her mom or dad adopted this physical tone. Stuff happened fast. Bad stuff. They sent her to stay with Grandpa and Grandma.