The November wind in Virginia cuts straight through you, settling into the spaces between your ribs and making a home there. It whipped through the church courtyard that morning, carrying dead red oak leaves across the greystone path, but the chill in the air was nothing compared to the frost radiating from the people surrounding me. I stood there in my Army dress blues—the dark blue coat pressed to perfection, light blue trousers with the gold stripe running straight down to my spit-shined shoes.
On my left chest, my rack of ribbons and medals caught the weak autumn sunlight. Each one represented a piece of my life given in service: the Army Commendation Medal, the National Defense Service Medal, the deployment patches from Afghanistan. This wasn’t a fashion statement.
It was an order from the man we were burying. My name is Cecilia Moss, a retired sergeant first class of the United States Army. I thought I knew what a battlefield looked like.
But that morning at the funeral of my father-in-law, Colonel Andrew Morrison, decorated Marine and the only person in his family worth the air he breathed, I learned that the cruelest wars aren’t fought with weapons. They’re fought with words, with silences, with the casual cruelty of people who have never known a day of real sacrifice. I felt the eyes on me—the heavy-lidded, judgmental stares of the Virginia old money crowd.
I heard the whispers behind lace fans and gloved hands. To them, my service stripes didn’t represent sacrifice. They represented working class.
The rust belt dirt I’d tried to scrub off for twenty years. They looked at my uniform as if I were the parking valet, or part of some circus act hired to entertain them. A sleek black Cadillac Escalade rolled up to the curb, tires crunching softly on gravel.
This was the lead car, the family car. The rear door opened and Samantha Morrison stepped out. At seventy-five, she was still a terrifying force of nature, draped in black furs that probably cost more than my entire military pension.
She adjusted her wide-brimmed hat, her eyes scanning the crowd until they locked onto me. I took a step forward, intending to join my family, to stand beside my husband at this moment of grief. “Stop right there.”
Samantha’s voice wasn’t loud, but it possessed a razor-sharp frequency that cut through the murmur of the crowd.
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