PART 1

“Who did this to you?” I whispered. Her tears fell as she said, “Your mother and your brother forced me to sign everything over.”

I came home from duty with a medal in my bag and suspicion in my chest. My wife looked at me as if my shadow had learned to hurt her.

For six months, I had been stationed overseas, living on video calls and bad coffee, counting the days until I could hold Elena again. But the woman waiting in our house was not the Elena who used to run barefoot down the hallway when she heard my key. She stood in the kitchen, thinner, pale, her hands tucked into the sleeves of her sweater.

“Welcome home, Alejandro,” she said.