My brother, a police officer, arrested me during Sunday dinner, right in front of our family. “You’re under arrest for impersonating a military officer and theft of government property,” my own brother snarled as he slammed my face onto the cold marble floor of our grandmother’s dining room, his knee digging into my back. As he snapped the handcuffs onto my wrists, the door suddenly burst open. A four-star general and his men marched in. “Lieutenant!” he roared. “Step away from the general right now.”

General Reed saluted. Sharp. Crisp.

“Brigadier General Jordan Hayes,” he said, loud and clear for all twenty-three relatives to hear. “Ma’am, we’re here to extract you.”

The dining room froze. The only sound was the hissing of Grandma Margaret’s oxygen tank and the quiet clink of Mark’s badge falling from his numb fingers onto the rug.

And just like that, the trial Mark had prepared for me became his own reckoning.

Mark stepped back like the air had betrayed him. His lips parted, but no words came.

Around us, the silence was no longer stunned. It was heavy, accusatory, suffocating. My cousin Paige dropped her fork; it clattered onto her plate like a gunshot. Uncle Robert leaned forward, squinting, as if trying to convince himself he wasn’t witnessing a hallucination.

My father looked like he might be sick. And my mother… my mother had covered her mouth with one trembling hand, as if that could hide the fact that for years she’d nodded along to every doubt Mark ever voiced about me.

Mark’s eyes locked on mine. Panic flickered behind them.

“You… you let me do this,” he said hoarsely. “You knew who you were. You could have stopped this.”

I tilted my head, rubbing my wrist. “You didn’t want the truth, Mark. You wanted a confession.”

He opened his mouth again, but General Reed stepped between us, a monolith of authority.

“You conducted unauthorized surveillance on a federal officer,” Reed said coldly. “Including staking out her residence, photographing her movements, and hiring private investigators with no security clearance. You jeopardized multiple operations in the field.”

“I thought she was lying!” Mark shouted, desperate now. “She never told us anything! We all thought—”

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