Chapter 10: What Comes Home

The debrief came the next morning, after a night of sleep that had surprised her by actually arriving — deep, dreamless, the kind of sleep her body had apparently been rationing itself for twelve days and finally allowed to spend all at once. She woke disoriented by how clean the sheets felt, how quiet the tent was without the low drone of a generator or the sound of footsteps that might or might not be coming for her, and it took her a full minute of lying still, staring at canvas instead of mudbrick, to remember where she was and why.

A woman in uniform introduced herself as Major Ellis, an intelligence officer, and sat down across from Megan with a notepad she barely glanced at during the hour that followed, her questions gentle but exacting, the kind of gentleness that came from experience rather than softness — Ellis had clearly done this before, had learned exactly how much space a person needed before a question could land without doing further damage.

“You don’t have to tell me everything today,” Ellis said, early on. “Just what you can. We can always come back to the rest.”

Megan told her about the crash, about Ruiz, about the four men in the desert and the compound and Hassan and Abu Talib, her voice flat and clinical in places, cracking in others, and Ellis wrote almost nothing down, listening instead with a stillness that made the telling feel less like an interrogation and more like being witnessed. When Megan reached the part about the seventh day, she stopped, throat closing, and Ellis said, quietly, “You can skip ahead. I have enough to work with. You don’t owe me the details unless you want to give them.”