Chapter 2 - The Deployment Call
Forty-eight hours earlier...
Major Caleb Rourke was leading a convoy outside Erbil, Iraq.
The desert heat reached one hundred and nine degrees.
His radio crackled.
"Major, Red Cross emergency communication."
Caleb immediately stopped walking.
Emergency messages almost never reached deployed personnel unless someone was dying.
He accepted the encrypted satellite phone.
"Major Rourke?"
The voice belonged to a Pennsylvania sheriff.
"Your daughter has been critically injured."
Caleb stopped breathing.
"What happened?"
"There was a house fire."
His knees nearly gave out.
"Is Lily alive?"
A pause.
"Yes."
"Where is she?"
"Pennsylvania Children's Burn Center."
Caleb closed his eyes.
"I'm coming home."
By sunrise the Army had him aboard a military transport.
During the fourteen-hour flight he received only fragments.
House fire.
Severe burns.
Grandfather rescued her.
Mother unavailable.
Investigation pending.
Nothing made sense.
Lily hated fire.
She refused candles.
She cried during Fourth of July fireworks.
She had never gone near the basement furnace.
Something was wrong.
When Caleb finally reached the hospital...
The first person blocking his daughter's bed...
May you like
...was Warren Blackwell.
👉 Caleb expected to find doctors around Lily's bed—but instead found the one man determined to keep him away from his own child.
