Part 1

I spent forty-eight hours digging children out of a tornado. Then I walked into my father's birthday party still covered in dirt and somebody else's blood. He looked me up and down in front of thirty guests and said, "Just looking at you is an embarrassment to this family." I told him the blood wasn't mine. Then I told him whose it was, and the whole room went silent. Twenty minutes later, a four-star general on the television in his den said my name. And my father saw the face of the little girl in my arms for the very first time. PART 1: Not My Blood The first thing my father noticed was the blood on my sleeve. Not the flag on my shoulder. Not the bruise on the side of my neck. Not the fact that I was standing on his white marble floor after two days without sleep, smelling like diesel and wet insulation and mud. Just the blood. The party was already going strong. Thirty guests under the big crystal chandelier in my father's dining room in Little Rock, Arkansas. Prime rib. Cigars. My sister Rachel's vanilla perfume floating over all of it. My father lifted his glass of bourbon so the whole room could hear him. "Take a good look at yourself, Erin," he said. "Just looking at you is an embarrassment to this family." The room went so quiet I could hear rainwater dripping off my jacket onto his marble. My name is Erin Lennox. I'm forty years old, a lieutenant colonel in the Arkansas National Guard. I command a battalion trained for one thing. When a building falls down on people, we go in and get them out. On Friday afternoon at 3:41, a tornado hit the little town of Cotter Springs, two and a half hours north of that dining room. It went straight through the elementary school. My soldiers and I got there at nine o'clock Friday night. We didn't stop until Sunday at five. Then I got in my truck and drove straight to my father's seventy-first birthday party. I didn't stop to shower. I didn't stop to eat. I'd been awake so long the lines on the highway were swimming. Because I had promised my sister I'd come.