Inside the ballroom, someone called us for dinner.
Dad started toward the door.
I followed.
Then he stopped.
“Laura?”
“Yes?”
“I am proud of you.”
There were a hundred answers I might once have wanted to give.
Where were you ten years ago?
Why couldn’t you say that before?
Do you know what it cost me not to hear it?
All of them were true.
But another truth existed now too.
He had said it.
Not because I had become a colonel.
Not because General Hale knew my name.
Not because a room full of influential people had finally understood the daughter Charles Whitmore had dismissed.
He said it quietly on an empty terrace when nobody else could hear.
I looked at him.
“Thank you, Dad.”
His eyes grew suspiciously bright.
“So,” he said, clearing his throat, “do colonels still change dressings?”
I narrowed my eyes.
“Careful.”
“I’m genuinely curious.”
