Chapter 3 - The Funeral I Never Had
I hung up.
Donna asked if I was okay.
“Wrong number.”
It wasn’t.
I finished my shift.
That mattered.
Panic makes people visible.
Routine hides them.
At four-thirty, I left through the kitchen door, drove my ten-year-old Subaru across town, and checked every mirror twice before going home.
Nobody followed.
At least nobody obvious.
My apartment looked untouched.
I still checked the doorframe.
Windows.
Closet.
Bathroom.
The old habits came back too easily.
Then I opened the lockbox beneath my bed.
Inside were two things from my previous life.
A military challenge coin.
And a photograph.
Me.
Ranger.
Two other handlers.
One dead.
One missing.
The photograph had been taken four days before our final mission.
Officially, I died during that mission.
Unofficially, I survived long enough to discover the operation had been compromised from inside.
Colonel Vale was the person who helped get me out.
He arranged false casualty paperwork.
A new identity.
A clean financial trail.
Maine.
He told me I would be safer if even friendly people believed Evelyn Hart was dead.
I agreed.
Because somebody had tried to kill our team.
And we never proved who.
For three years, Vale contacted me exactly twice.
Both times through one-time channels.
Both times to say the threat remained unresolved.
Now he had called the diner directly.
That meant either he had become careless.
Or desperate.
My phone buzzed.
Unknown number.
One message.
Do not contact Morris. Do not approach Ranger again.
I stared at it.
Then another.
The dog didn’t find you by accident.
I sat down.
That changed everything.
Caleb had not wandered into Reed’s Diner randomly.
Someone sent him.
Or someone sent Ranger.
The difference mattered.
Then I remembered the way Caleb looked when he said Evelyn Hart was dead.
He knew the official story.
But perhaps he knew more.
I opened my laptop.
No secure systems.
No illegal access.
Just public information.
Sergeant Caleb Morris existed.
Military working dog handler.
Multiple deployments.
No obvious connection to me.
Then I found a training photo from six months earlier.
Caleb standing beside Ranger.
Behind them was another man.
Colonel Adrian Vale.
My protector.
My handler after I disappeared.
The person warning me not to contact Caleb had personally met him.
That meant Vale had lied about at least one thing.
May you like
And if Ranger’s arrival wasn’t accidental, my hidden life had not been discovered.
It had been activated.
