“What are you going to do now?” Silas asked, and for the first time, the question didn’t feel like a demand for a tidy answer.
I told him I didn’t know because everywhere I looked in the house, I saw Terrence and Mia, and I could still hear my mother’s voice. Silas told me that I had skills most civilians would kill for and that I shouldn’t let grief make my world smaller. He told me to build something of my own, something that nobody else could ever claim as theirs.
He stayed until nearly midnight, and before he left, he told me to call him any time of the day or night if I needed backup. After his truck pulled away, I stood in the quiet kitchen and looked at the stack of military paperwork and death certificates. I felt the smallest spark of a new strategy, and I knew the battle had finally changed.
Part 5
Rebuilding wasn’t a cinematic montage, it was mostly spreadsheets, panic, and being too tired to cry at the end of the day. Three months later, I resigned from the Army, a decision that felt like I was betraying the only institution that had held me up. General Vance asked if this was what I wanted or just what I could survive, and I told him it was what I needed to build.
I named my company Rossi Security Solutions because Terrence always said that if your work was good, you didn’t need a flashy name. I rented a windowless office in a beige building near downtown Austin that smelled like dust and old copier toner. I set up a folding table and a secondhand desk, building my own website late at night with YouTube tutorials.
The grief still ambushed me in places like the grocery store, but the work gave the pain a much needed direction and schedule. The first big challenge was being taken seriously by male clients who assumed I was just a secretary. One factory owner called me sweetheart, so I slid a site map across his desk and named every single one of his security blind spots.
By the time I finished explaining his unsecured loading docks and camera dead zones, he wasn’t smiling anymore. He asked where I had learned all of that, and I simply told him I learned it during my time in the Middle East. I got the contract, and after that, I stopped trying to be likable and focused on being the most useful person in the room.