Someone had packed up my whole life while I was gone.

And they’d used trash bags to do it.

Then my mother spoke from behind me.

“You’re back earlier than we expected.”

---

My name is Kate Hollis. I’m a captain in the United States Army. I’d just spent nine months running logistics for a battalion in a place where the dust got into your teeth and the nights were so dark you could see every star there ever was.

I want to tell you that I’d been looking forward to coming home.

I had. But not because of my family.

I’d been looking forward to the house.

It sat at the end of a quiet street on the west side of Colorado Springs, twenty minutes from Fort Carson. It was a two-story brick house with a wraparound porch and a big backyard that ran right up to a line of old pine trees. My grandfather, Walter Hollis, built half of it with his own hands in the 1970s. He added the porch. He added the workshop in the garage. He planted the pine trees when they were no taller than me.

I spent every summer of my childhood in that house. Every holiday. Every time things got bad at home, which was often.

My grandfather was the only person in my family who ever asked me what I thought about something and then actually waited for the answer.

He died when I was twenty-four. I was at a training course in Georgia. I got the call on a Tuesday and flew home on a Wednesday and stood at his grave on a Friday in my dress uniform, and I didn’t cry until everyone had gone back to the cars.

A year later, a lawyer called me. He said there was paperwork to sign. My grandfather had set up a trust years earlier. When I turned twenty-five, the house passed out of the trust and into my name.

Just mine.

Not my father’s. Not my sister’s. Mine.

My family knew I “had the house.” That’s how they said it. Kate has Grandpa’s house. Like I was borrowing it. Like it was a sweater I was keeping warm until somebody more important needed it.

They never asked how it worked. They never asked to see anything. And I never pushed it, because pushing things in my family never ended well.

For six years, it was my home. When I was stationed at Fort Carson, I lived there. When I deployed, I locked it up and asked a neighbor to watch it, and I came home to it.

This time, before I left, my mother had called me.