Chapter 1: The Long Way Home
Seventeen years is a lifetime. It is enough time for a child to become an adult, for a sapling to become a shade tree, and for a jagged wound to heal into a white, numb scar.
My name is Elias Davis, and for nearly two decades, I have existed as a ghost in the history of the Davis family.
I sat in the back of a rented town car, watching the familiar landscape of Connecticut roll by. The iron gates, the manicured lawns, the oak trees that had stood since the Revolution—it all looked exactly the same. It was a terrifying stillness, a preservation of a world that had rejected me.
I checked my watch. 1800 hours. The reception would be starting.
I wasn’t supposed to be here. When I was nineteen, my father, Richard Davis, had given me an ultimatum. I stood in his study, a room that smelled of cedar and scotch, and told him I had enlisted in the Army. I told him I wasn’t going to Yale. I wasn’t going to take over the hedge fund. I wanted to serve.
He didn’t yell. Richard Davis never yelled; he considered raising one’s voice a sign of poor breeding. Instead, he looked at me with a cold, devastating disappointment.
“If you walk out that door to be a grunt,” he had said, swirling his drink, “don’t bother coming back. You are embarrassing this family. You are choosing to be nothing.”
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