I had been home nearly eleven years before Kamryn took her first breath and I still hadn't unpacked. Not my bags. Not my war. Not the silence I'd weaponized to stay functional. I wasn’t dodging bullets anymore, but I was dodging sleep, dodging closeness, dodging myself. They said I was home. But no one ever pointed to where that was. I knew how to clear buildings. I didn’t know how to sit still in a quiet room without pacing it like a fire team stack. I learned to fold laundry with the same precision I folded trauma. Crisp edges. Tidy piles. No mess in sight, but nothing actually clean either. I lived a lot of life before her. Jobs. Mistakes. Lovers I kept at arm’s length even when I held them close. I played the part. Laughed on cue. Went through all the motions of normal. But I was still deployed just to a battlefield no one else could see. And then she came. Not like a rescue. More like a reckoning. Kamryn didn’t make me whole. She made me honest. For the first time in over a decade, I had something in my arms that didn’t flinch when I flinched. That didn’t see the ghosts and didn’t need to. She just needed me. So I started to unpack. Slowly. Deliberately. One buried belief at a time. That I had to be invulnerable. That pain made me broken. That love made me weak. She taught me what armor couldn’t: That real strength is the ability to stay not just in the fight, but in the room, in the moment, in her life. I had a head start on healing. But I was still lost until I heard her heartbeat and realized mine hadn’t stopped—it had just gone underground.