and the husband had no intention of letting anyone live.
That night, my partner, a thirty-five-year-old father of four, a twenty-two-year-old mother, her little girl, and a very disturbed twenty-five-year-old young man all lost their lives.
How I managed to make it out alive is still a mystery.
My parents, world renowned doctor, Beth Marshall, and Supreme Court Judge, Patrick Marshall, incorrectly assumed their prodigal son would come running back home and do their bidding by becoming a son they could be proud of and brag about over mint juleps and games of Canasta once I left the Navy SEALS. They wrote me out of their lives once again when I chose to become a cop instead. My parents' blatant disapproval of my life choices and their constant need to remind me about how I wasn’t living up to their expectations pushed me further and further away until the only contact I had with them was the occasional greeting card on birthdays and major holidays.
Unfortunately, the distance I put between myself and my parents over the years also affected my baby sister. Gwen never agreed with their opinions of me, but at that time in my life, contact with her just brought the pain to the forefront. In order for me to excel at my job, I needed to remove all the negativity. I had thought Gwen was well taken care of and that was all that mattered. Even though I cut off contact long before that fateful SEAL mission, I still kept up with the news. I read all about her famous plastic surgeon husband and saw pictures of the smiling, happy couple at events throughout the years. I never really cared much for my brother-in-law the one time I met him at their wedding seven years earlier. He was pompous, had no sense of humor, and our parents treated him like the son they always wanted.
“What time does your flight leave?” Gwen asked, looking up at me while I spun her around the dance floor, trying not to trip over the train on her Vera Wang wedding gown.
I removed my hand from her waist and checked the time on my black, waterproof tactical watch required by the SEALS.
“In about two hours. I need to get going. Don’t want to miss my first mission as a big, bad Navy SEAL,” I told her with a smile and a wag of my eyebrows as the song we were dancing to slowly came to an end.
My father's loud, booming voice echoed through the vaulted ceilings in the ornate banquet hall. “Son! My favorite man in the room. Come over here. There are a few people I want you to meet.”My shoulders tensed as I turned my head in his direction. We hadn't spoken one word to each other since I flew in the day before for Gwen’s wedding. I should have known he wasn’t talking to me. My eyes narrow in undisguised irritation as I watch my father throw his arm around Gwen’s new husband’s shoulder as they shared an obnoxious laugh, continuing to walk past us and towards a group of men I had never met.
“Hey, look at me.”
Gwen’s soft voice forced me to tamp down my anger, and I turned around to meet her bright blue eyes.
“Nothing he says or does means anything. Your happiness – that’s all that matters,” she told me with a smile as she pushed a stray piece of long blonde hair behind one ear.
Swallowing the lump in my throat, I smiled. “That’s a two-way street, Gwenny.”
“I know. Don’t worry. I’m happy. I found my Prince Charming, just like mother always wanted me to.”
Not wanting to place any type of wedge in Gwen’s relationship with our parents by forcing her to choose sides or clouding her happiness by voicing my opinion of her husband, I spoke to her less and less until one day we just weren’t speaking at all anymore.
I felt like shit after the SEAL mission―physically and mentally. After losing my partner and watching two young people die right in front of me a few months later, I fell into a black hole of booze and women that I still couldn't remember half of.
Three months ago, Gwen showed up out of the blue at my townhouse at four o’clock in the morning. Aside from the initial shock at seeing my sister standing on my doorstep after she'd traveled over a thousand miles in the middle of the night, the two black eyes she hid behind dark