Cold Blooded Killer
Copyright© 2026 by Megumi Kashuahara
Chapter 22
Colorado Springs, Colorado, June 2015
Walters signed her discharge papers on a Tuesday morning.
He sat across from her in the office with the two chairs and the small table and the one photograph on the wall — the landscape she’d never asked about and now did, on the last day, because it felt like the right time.
“Montana,” he said. “Where I went after Delta. Before all this.” He looked at the photograph. “I needed somewhere with distance.”
She understood that.
“The entries,” he said. “The ones we worked. How do they sit.”
She thought about it the way she thought about everything — honestly, precisely, without ornament.
“In the ground,” she said. “Not gone. In the ground.”
He nodded.
“The loop.”
“Comes sometimes. Softer. The rifle goes down.”
“The waiter.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“He still looks at me,” she said. “But I can look back now.”
Walters held her gaze for a moment. Then he picked up his pen and signed the bottom of the discharge form and slid it across the table.
She looked at it.
“Outpatient,” he said. “Twice a week. Dr. Manning has a referral ready for a therapist in Colorado Springs who has worked with operators. The work continues — it doesn’t stop at discharge. You know that.”
“I know.”
“The prazosin stays for now. Reyes will manage the medication going forward.” He paused. “The sertraline is working. Don’t stop it because you feel better. You feel better because it’s working.”
“I know.”
He looked at her for a long moment. The former Delta operator who had buried his own skeletons and retrained and sat in this office across from people who were where he’d been and helped them find the key they’d been holding the whole time.
“Park,” he said.
“Walters.”
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. The same thing that had moved there on the first day when she’d read him in fifteen seconds and named his background and he’d almost smiled.
He stood up. She stood up. They shook hands across the table — the handshake of two people who had been in the same darkness and come out on the other side of it and understood each other completely without needing to say so.
“Take care of yourself,” he said.
“You too.”
She picked up the discharge folder and walked out of the office and down the hallway and through the front door of Mountain Springs Recovery into the Colorado morning.
Sam was leaning against the car.
Of course he was.
He had two cups of bad coffee in metal cups and he handed her one without being asked and she took it and drank it and it was terrible and she didn’t say so and they stood in the parking area for a moment looking at each other.
“Ready,” he said. Not a question.
“Yes.”
They got in the car.
The drive home took twenty minutes.
She watched Colorado Springs move past the window — the streets she’d grown up on, the Training Center visible briefly between buildings as they passed, the neighborhood getting familiar the way home gets familiar when you’ve been away long enough that familiar feels earned rather than assumed.
She didn’t say much.
Neither did he.
The not saying much was its own language. It had been since Kandahar.
He pulled into the street in front of her parents’ house and cut the engine and they sat for a moment in the car with the Colorado afternoon around them.
“How does it feel,” he said.
She looked at the house. The front porch. The Japanese maple her father had mentioned needed trimming and still hadn’t trimmed. The same shutters and the same porch light and the same front walk she’d come up with her duffel on a February afternoon that felt like a different lifetime.
“Like I’m allowed to be here,” she said.
He looked at her.
She looked back at him.
“That’s new,” she said.
He nodded slowly.
They got out of the car.
Her mother opened the door before they reached it.
Of course she did.
She stood in the frame the way she’d stood in frames her whole life — straight, composed, the urologist’s bearing — but her eyes were doing something her posture wasn’t and she stepped forward and put her arms around her daughter and this time Min-Ji’s arms moved immediately and completely and she held on and her mother held on and neither of them said anything for a long moment.
Her father appeared behind her mother in the hallway. He looked at his daughter and something moved across his face that he didn’t put away this time.
He let it stay.
Jenny was on the couch visible through the doorway and she stood up when she saw them and her face did the complicated layered thing it did and she didn’t try to find a joke and didn’t try to manage it.
She just crossed the room and joined the embrace in the hallway and the three of them held on — Min-Ji and her mother and her sister in the doorway of the house on a Colorado afternoon with her father’s hand on all of their shoulders.
Sam stood back and gave it the space it needed.
They sat in the living room.
Her mother made tea and brought food nobody had asked for and set it on the coffee table and sat beside her husband on the couch with her hand in his the way she’d held his hand through everything — the immigration, the practice, the community dinners, the kitchen table night, the 0300 hallway, all of it — and looked at her daughter sitting across from her in the living room of the house they’d built and felt something settle that had been unsettled for a very long time.
Min-Ji sat beside Sam.
Not touching. Just beside him. Close enough that the proximity was its own statement.