The Good Sister (33 page)
Authors: Drusilla Campbell
Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #General
He rested his index finger on her mouth. “Just stop. It isn’t your fault those children died and it’s not your job to save the world.”
“Your folks live in Massachusetts, Rick. We’ve flown in and out of Boston ourselves.”
“There are dozens of flights every day.”
“But it could have been us. We could have been at your folks and had Glory with us….” She sagged under the weight of the images. “It can’t happen again. Ever.”
War was men’s business and the General knew how to call in favors. Though he could not undo her enlistment, he made sure that after officers’ training and the Basic School, his daughter was separated from her unit and posted to the small finance office at the Marine Corps Recruitment Depot in San Diego, about twenty minutes from Ocean Beach. Most nights she was home from the shop in time to fix dinner. She became a fixture at the MCRD, and every day it rankled, it gnawed, it galled her that while her friends were in Iraq and Afghanistan, she was a paper pusher in her hometown.
Glory was just finishing first grade when the opportunity arose for a ten-month deployment in Iraq, what the Marine Corps called Temporary Additional Duty. Frankie would be posted to a Forward Operating Base as part of a joint effort to win the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. She told herself, she told Rick and her father, that the TAD was only ten months.
“I have to do this.”
Rick looked grim and clenched his jaw. The General stopped talking to her.
LSO BY
D
RUSILLA
C
AMPBELL
Bone Lake
Blood Orange
The Edge of the Sky
Wildwood
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Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Drusilla Campbell
Excerpt from
When She Came Home
copyright © 2013 by Drusilla Campbell
Reading Group Guide copyright © 2010 by Hachette Book Group
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First e-book edition: October 2010
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ISBN 978-0-446-57510-2