Pattern of Life

Sergeant Maya Okafor has thirty-one days left in the Marine Corps and exactly one rule: leave before anyone can leave you. Four years of finding targets from nineteen thousand feet have taught her to keep a clean perimeter around her own heart — and all she wants now is out. Clean, fast, unattached.

Then she's pulled onto a target package with Sergeant Wyatt Cole: the all-source analyst who never sleeps, never lets a thread go, and never lets anyone close. He needs her eyes on the ground. She needs to feel nothing at all for a man she has no future with.

Neither of them gets what they want.

In a freezing plywood room at the edge of the Iraq war — over stolen coffee, 0300 watches, and a secret that could end them both — two people who are experts at not needing anyone discover the one thing the Corps never taught them: how to stay. But Maya's clock is running out, the war's cost lands closer than either of them expected, and some doors, once you close them, don't open twice.