The silence in the private hospital room was a heavy, starched-white blanket. It was punctuated only by the quiet, rhythmic beeping of a heart monitor, each pulse a small testament to the life that Captain Eva Rostova was fighting to hold onto. Her body, usually a vessel of coiled strength and readiness, was now a landscape of pain, mapped out in sterile bandages and the deep, purpled geography of bruises.
Shrapnel from a roadside bomb had torn through her leg during a patrol, and the battle she was fighting now was one of quiet, agonizing recovery. But the shrapnel was not the most painful thing in the room. Her mother-in-law, Eleanor Thompson, sat in the visitor’s chair, a monument to disapproval.
Eleanor had always seen Eva’s military career not as a source of pride, but as a personal affront, a profound failure in her primary duties as a wife to her son, Michael, and a mother to their two children. She wasn’t speaking to Eva. She was performing for an audience of one: her son, who stood uncomfortably by the window, trapped in the no-man’s-land between the two most important women in his life.
“I told you, Michael,” Eleanor began, her voice a theatrical sigh, loud enough to cut through the room’s hushed atmosphere. She looked pointedly at the bandages on Eva’s leg. “I always said this would happen.
A woman’s place is in the home, creating a safe, warm environment. Not running around in the dirt, playing soldier.”
Eva’s eyes were closed, but her jaw was tight. Every word was a fresh application of salt to her wounds.
Eleanor warmed to her theme, her voice dripping with a cloying, false sympathy that was more corrosive than open hatred. “She just doesn’t understand the duties of a wife, the responsibilities of a mother. And look at her now… broken.
Who is going to take care of you and the children now, Michael? It all falls on you. Again.”
The injustice of it was breathtaking.
Eva, a decorated soldier who had willingly placed her body between danger and her comrades, was being shamed and belittled by a woman whose greatest battle was fought over the seating arrangements at a dinner party. In her moment of greatest vulnerability, the attack was not coming from an enemy combatant, but from within her own family. Michael shifted his weight by the window, the picture of a man drowning in his own inadequacy.
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