Snowstorm of Our Past novel · Chapter 26 of 32

Chapter 26: What It Costs

The colonel held his eyes for a long moment.

Then he nodded once and walked back to his chair.

Nobody clapped. Nobody spoke.

Clint stood alone at the microphone in the snow.

Then he walked back to the colonel's wife and took his son, and the baby grabbed his collar with both fists.

The chaplain pulled the white cloth off the stone anyway, because nobody had told him not to.

The name was carved deep in the gray granite. SSG DALE DWYER. Under it, a line about giving his life.

The colonel looked at it and said, "We'll have that ground off by Monday."

The team drove home in two trucks.

The kid didn't say a word until we were past the old barracks at Camp Hale.

Then he said, "That was the greatest thing I've ever seen."

The schoolteacher told him to have some respect.

Then she said, "It really was, though."

Clint's resignation went through in three weeks.

The Army let him resign instead of facing a court-martial for the beacon.

The CID agent said it was because he'd walked into their office on his own with every bank statement.

He lost his pension. He lost his rank.

He lost his house on post, the one with the red door.

He sold his truck.

At the end of April, my lawyer called me into her office over the bank on Harrison Avenue.

She slid a paper across her desk.

"His lawyer sent this over this morning."

It was an amendment to the divorce settlement.

Seventy-five thousand dollars, paid to me in full.

"Half of what he gave her," my lawyer said. "It came out of your joint account. He says it was your money too, and he had no right to it."

I read it twice.

"He's paying it all at once?"

"From the truck and his savings." She took off her glasses. "Mallory, he's got about nine hundred dollars left. I asked."

Keep reading free with an account. Start Snowstorm of Our Past from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.