Before I tell you about the book, let me tell you about the woman.
Sloane doesn’t arrive on the page fully formed. She arrives at Parris Island as a teenager with a martial arts background and something to prove, something she doesn’t yet have the words for. The Marine Corps gives her discipline, language, intelligence tradecraft, and lethal capability. It also gives her a place to hide.
Behind the squared shoulders and the marksmanship scores is a girl who, as a young teen, had her trust shattered by someone who should have protected her. That wound, buried under years of deployments and deliberate distance, is the engine of everything that follows.
By the time we meet Sloane at the beginning of this story, she’s leaving the Corps after twelve years. Not in disgrace. Not with fanfare. She’s just done. Bone-deep done. She drives west alone, looking for something she can’t name.
She finds it, or it finds her, through a wrought-iron gate at the edge of a walking trail in Billings, Montana.