He barely looked at me before skepticism settled in. His spotless coat, his tone—it all said the same thing: he didn’t believe I belonged where my record said I did.
“Assigned to SEAL operations?” he asked, leaning back. “Doing what exactly?”
“Medical support.”
He smirked. That one reaction told me everything.
The questions that followed weren’t meant to understand—they were meant to confirm his assumptions. Field deployment? Combat exposure? Trauma care under fire? To him, it sounded like exaggeration.
Then he asked about my left arm.
I rolled up my sleeve.
And the room shifted.
The scars weren’t subtle. They ran from my forearm up past my elbow—twisted, layered, unmistakably violent. Burns. Shrapnel. Surgical grafts. No one looked at that and thought “accident.”
Rowe’s expression hardened—not with concern, but suspicion.
He stood abruptly, grabbed my wrist before I could react, and examined the damage up close.
“Where did you really get this?” he demanded.
I pulled back immediately. “Don’t touch me.”
