She’d tried to leave that behind when she left the 10th Mountain Division to apply for SOAR, and mostly succeeded. Oh, she’d overheard conjectures that she didn’t hit the town bars because she was a Mormon or had a lover back home who had made her promise never to enter a bar. In some tales her lover was male, other times a woman, and a few other typically Army suggestions involving both higher numbers and lower life forms that she chose to ignore.
She actually had no one waiting at home, but by not commenting on the rumor of a hidden lover, it had grown and kept most of the unwanted attention away.
Danielle didn’t go into bars because they were loud, smelly, and her mother was an alcoholic. She’d asked Danielle to lean close for what she knew were her mother’s last words—she’d asked for
