He thought he was breaking a soldier by throwing her identity in the mud. He thought her silence was submission, a weakness he could exploit in front of everyone. But in the suffocating Carolina air, under the watch of twenty-two others, a single moment of casual cruelty wasn't an ending—it was a reckoning he never saw coming. The air at Fort Sheridan hung thick and heavy, smelling of Carolina pine and the damp, black earth left behind by a morning squall. It was the kind of air you could almost