Excerpt of Missing by Sharon Sala

That inner part of a soldier that tells him when he's being watched was going off big-time in Wes Holden's head. His face was hidden beneath a layer of menthol-scented shaving cream, which gave him a false sense of anonymity, yet, despite his disguise, they'd found him again. As he looked up, his eyes narrowed to slits, staring first at his own reflection in the bathroom mirror, then into the room behind him. When his gaze centered on the woman standing in the shadows, he stifled a groan.

He should have known.

It was Margie.

The fear on her face was palpable. He knew he'd caused it, but unless he changed what he did and ignored who he was, he didn't know how to help her. He'd known her since childhood, had loved her since high school - and, for the last fifteen years, had called her his wife.

He started to acknowledge her presence but changed his mind. There was tension between them that had nothing to do with his most recent tour, which had sent him first to Afghanistan, in search of Osama bin Laden, then, after the president had declared war, into Iraq.

Like every soldier's wife, Margie knew that he served his country at the risk of his own life. But this time it had been different. This time they were at war. Every day she'd watched the news on CNN in silent desperation, partly hoping to see his face, partly praying, if the filming was in the midst of conflict, that he was nowhere around.

The day she'd answered the door to find two army officers and an army chaplain standing on her doorstep, she'd started to scream. It had taken valuable minutes of their visit to calm her down long enough to explain that her husband, Colonel John Wesley Holden, wasn't confirmed dead - only missing.

Missing in action.

Three words that had almost brought sanity to an end.

The next month of her life had been a blur of fear and numbness. She admitted to Wes later that, if not for the presence of their son, Michael, she would have gone mad.

At that point Wes quit thinking about the weeks he'd spent as a POW, not certain he would ever see his family again, and shifted his focus from her face to his own.

There were still whiskers that had to come off before his meeting with a base psychiatrist at 0900 hours, and while the pace of life might be slow and easy in Georgia, it was a different story at Fort Benning.

Before he could resume shaving, he heard the sound of running feet. Moments later, he heard Margie cautioning their son not to run in the house; then Mikey burst into the bathroom, landing with a none-too-gentle flop on the closed lid of the commode.

"Easy, buddy," Wes said. "You almost missed the landing pad."

Five-year-old Michael John Holden giggled, then shoved the hair out of his eyes as he gazed longingly at his father.

"Daddy?"

Wes pulled the razor through a patch of shaving cream and whiskers, twisting his chin to accommodate the blade.

"What?"

"Someday will I have whiskers like you?"

Wes hid a grin as he sluiced the razor beneath a steady flow of hot water.

"Yeah... someday, but not anytime soon. You have to grow up some more before you get whiskers."

"Is it as long as Christmas?" Michael asked.

Pain wrapped itself around Wes's heart as he looked down at the earnest expression on his little boy's face.

"Yeah, Mikey, it's at least as long as Christmas."

Satisfied with the answer, Michael settled back for his front-row seat for the ritual they shared, where Daddy shaved and Mikey watched, interspersing the moment with a constant barrage of comments and questions that soon had Wes laughing.

Mikey was so enthralled with the process that Wes finally caved in, took the blade out of an extra razor, handed it to his son as he stood him up on the lid of the toilet seat, then put some shaving cream on Mikey's face.

"This is just for practice, okay, son?"

"Okay," Mikey said, then took the razor with all the ceremony due a first shave and peered at himself in the mirror. "Look, Daddy, I'm 'most big as you."

"Yeah, buddy, you sure are," Wes said gently, then watched his son scraping the shaving cream off his face with the empty razor, twisting his chin as Wes did, and grimacing with great élan. A few minutes later, he pronounced himself done and settled back down on the toilet seat with a wet washcloth to his face while Wes finished his own shave.

Wes's thoughts wandered, trying to come to terms with the fact that when he'd left for Afghanistan, Michael had been barely four and his biggest interest was watching Bob the Builder. Now he'd come back to find him only months away from his sixth birthday and concerned about growing whiskers.

It was enough to stagger a normal man. For Wes, it enhanced his guilt about leaving his family, and reinforced his concern about the nightmares and flashbacks he'd been having.

Post-traumatic stress disorder.

PTSD.

A nice four-letter acronym for a bitch of a problem.

Fancy words for trying not to go crazy from the hell of war.

He'd accepted the diagnosis with little emotion. It was his opinion that army doctors, like all doctors, preferred to categorize their patients' health issues. It was easier to treat them if their symptoms fell within certain parameters, so they gave everything a name. Wes would like to give the name back, but he had yet to figure out how to shake it.

It should have been simple.