Chapter 128
Dante’s POV
Three months is a long time when you have nothing to hold onto except a shell in your pocket.
I carried that auger shell every single day. Through briefings, through cold nights at sea, through fourteen hour watches where my mind should have been locked on the mission and kept drifting back to a beach in Santorini and a girl with bare feet and wildflowers arranged on a faded blue cloth. I had submitted my reassignment request the same week I shipped out. It came through faster than I expected, which should have surprised me. It didn’t. Some part of me had already decided that if it didn’t come through, I was going anyway.
But the letters came first.
She wrote to me seven days after I left. I don’t know how she got the address. I think she asked Father Elias,
