No Rank Visible
I pulled into the driveway and cut the engine before anyone inside could hear it. The hood clicked as it cooled. I sat for a moment with my hands on the wheel, feeling the grit under my fingernails and the tight pull in my shoulders that never really went away, the residue of years that didn’t leave clean.
The house looked the same. Fresh paint, trimmed hedges, the kind of place that tried very hard to look successful from the street. Music thumped faintly through the walls.
Laughter spilled out every time the front door opened. I checked my reflection in the rearview mirror. No makeup.
Hair pulled back. Plain jacket, plain boots. No medals, no ribbons.
Just a name tape sewn inside the collar where no one could see it. I had learned a long time ago that the things that mattered most were not the ones other people could read from across a room. Inside, the smell of catered food hit me first.
Champagne, grilled meat, something sweet and expensive. The living room was packed with people I recognized and people I didn’t, phones already out, recording everything that moved. In the middle of it all stood my sister, Tiffany, glowing under ring lights like she’d been born with a filter attached to her face.
Her fiancé, Brad, stood nearby in a tailored jacket wearing the confident smile of a man who’d practiced it in the mirror. Someone had just introduced him as a military man. He nodded as though he’d been promoted on the spot.
I slipped in along the wall. I’d learned to do that a long time ago. Tiffany noticed me anyway.
She always did, because I was the one person in any room whose attention she could never quite calculate. Her smile froze for half a second before reshaping itself into something sharp. “Oh my God,” she said loudly.
“You actually showed up.”
Phones tilted my way. “This is my sister Sarah,” Tiffany announced, wrapping an arm around me like we were close. “She’s been away five years.
No calls, no posts, no updates. We hardly knew where she was.”
“Good to see you, too,” I said. Her eyes moved down my clothes and back up again, the inventory completed quickly and without result.
“So what rank are you now?”
I shrugged. “Still working.”
Brad leaned in, curious and grinning. “You Army or something?
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