When they left, the room felt strangely empty. I could hear faint laughter from the nurse’s station down the hall. Somewhere, a TV played an old sitcom. It was surreal, like the world outside had moved on, while mine was now under federal review. An hour later, the door opened again. This time it was Peter. He looked pale, his voice shaking like he hadn’t rehearsed this one.
“Emma, your mom’s losing it out there. She’s saying they’re accusing Lauren of assault. You know that’s ridiculous, right? It was an accident.”
I stared at him.
“You saw the blood. You saw her hand.”
“She didn’t mean it.” He said quickly. “She was drunk, emotional. You know how she gets.”
“I know exactly how she gets.”
He tried to soften his tone.
“Emma, you’re military. You understand discipline. Family sticks together. Don’t let outsiders ruin that.”
I wanted to laugh. Outsiders? The C wasn’t outsiders. They were the law I’d spent years serving under the one system that didn’t crumble under pressure.
“Peter,” I said evenly. “The moment I pressed Delta 6, this stopped being a family issue.”
He froze like the words physically hit him.
“You’d really do that to your own sister?”
“She did it to herself.”
He exhaled sharply, muttered something about talking sense into mom, and walked out. A few minutes later, Sarah returned.
“They’re already trying to frame this as an accident, aren’t they?”
“Of course,” I said. “That’s their training.”
“Then we’ll respond with ours.”
She sat down, flipping through a stack of files.
“C will handle the initial evidence chain. My office will prepare a legal package for the district court. You’ll need to testify, but we’ll keep it clinical. No emotion, no theatrics.”
“That won’t be a problem,” I said.
“I figured,” she replied.
For the next few days, the investigation moved faster than I expected. C agents visited the house, documented the scene, photographed the screwdriver, even pulled the security footage from the neighbor’s camera that showed the emergency response vehicle arriving at exactly 022 a.m. The timestamps matched my Delta activation to the second. Meanwhile, my family scrambled to rewrite the story. Mom left me voicemails full of emotional gymnastics. How Lauren was so sorry. How we can’t let this ruin the family. How the media will twist it. Lauren herself didn’t call. Not once. Back at the hospital, a young soldier from my unit dropped off flowers. No note. Just a folded page with four words written neatly across the top. We got your back. It was the only message I believed. By the time I was discharged, the wound was healing cleanly, but the paperwork had only just begun. Sarah met me outside the hospital with a government vehicle and a folder labeled Sid Caldwell case 47B.
“Officially, this is under federal review,” she said as we got in. “Unofficially, they’re terrified of you.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Because I pressed the code,”
“because you did everything by the book,” she said. “Most people panic. You didn’t. You followed procedure like you were reading from a manual. They can’t fight that.”
We drove in silence for a few minutes past rows of identical brick houses and two green lawns. Sarah broke it.
“You know what happens next, right?”
I nodded.
“They’ll hire a lawyer. Probably local. Try to frame it as a misunderstanding.”
“Exactly. They’ll expect a family fight. They won’t expect a federal one.”
