My sister was still holding her champagne glass when Colonel Grant Hale looked across the ballroom, stopped in the middle of a sentence, and said the two words my family had spent years treating like a joke.
“Black Viper?”
For a second, I thought Allison hadn’t heard him.
She was laughing too hard.
My older sister had always laughed with her whole body. Head tilted back, shoulders bouncing, one hand usually touching whoever happened to be standing closest to her, as if every joke she made deserved an audience and physical confirmation.
That night, the audience was nearly seventy people.
Allison had just been promoted to major, and our parents had rented the private ballroom of a hotel outside Fort Belvoir for the celebration. There were gold ribbons around the cocktail tables, framed photos from her career arranged beside the bar, a sheet cake with her new rank insignia piped in frosting, and a giant banner congratulating her from the logistics battalion she served with.
My mother had cried twice before dinner.
My father had introduced Allison to people who already knew her.
And I had spent most of the evening near a window overlooking the parking lot, holding club soda with lime and trying to make myself small enough to survive three hours without becoming part of one of Allison’s stories.
I almost succeeded.
Then someone asked what I did.
Allison answered for me.
“Oh, Claire does intelligence stuff.”
She waved one hand vaguely.
“You know. Computers. Reports. Secret squirrel things.”
A few people chuckled.
I smiled because that was easier than correcting her.
A lieutenant standing beside Allison asked, “What unit?”
Before I could answer, Allison leaned closer with a grin.
“Don’t bother. She’ll give you the classified-information speech.”
“That’s not what I was going to say.”
“Oh, come on, Claire.”
Her grin widened.
“You’ve been doing this mysterious routine since you were twenty-two.”
My jaw tightened.
I could smell citrus from somebody’s cologne and the buttery hotel rolls stacked behind me.
Allison took another sip.
Then she said, “She even has a call sign.”
That got attention.
Someone laughed.
“A call sign?”
Allison’s eyes found mine.
There was a brightness in them I recognized immediately.
She was enjoying herself.
“Black Viper.”
She lowered her voice theatrically.
“Very dramatic.”
The circle around her laughed again.
I didn’t.
I watched the condensation slide down my glass.
“Actually,” Allison continued, “I heard about Black Viper once.”
That made me look up.
She had no reason to have heard anything.
My work didn’t cross hers beyond vague references, sanitized reports, and stories passed through people who rarely understood what they were repeating.
Allison mistook my attention for nervousness.
Her smile sharpened.