Opening
Chapters 21–25 plunge the Zarkades family into crisis as war follows Jolene Zarkades home. Her rehabilitation tests her body while trauma fractures her identity, marriage, and motherhood. With Michael Zarkades learning how to support her and a fellow veteran offering a lifeline, the section turns from collapse to the first fragile steps toward healing.
What Happens
Chapter 21: soldier girl
At the rehab center, Jolene hits bottom. Exhausted, in pain, and furious at her body, she tries to quit therapy. Conny, her dreadlocked physical therapist, refuses. He pushes her past every limit, reminding her she once survived boot camp and flight school. To cut through her isolation, he shares his own grief—his son died—so he knows how darkness swallows people. Jolene lets that truth in and submits to the day’s brutal work: stretches, sit-ups, and learning to transfer herself with precision.
Michael arrives as technicians fit Jolene for a temporary prosthesis. The clinical ritual—measurements, plaster, sockets—is almost unbearable for her to watch. Michael’s presence steadies and unsettles her at once, surfacing memories of their good years and the ruins of what’s left. He wants to make amends; she can’t trust that hope. With Conny’s voice in her ear, Jolene stands on the new leg and, shaking, walks the length of the parallel bars. Michael, moved and helpless, helps her back to her room and confesses the regret that haunts him: he should have told her he loved her before she deployed.
Chapter 22: Welcome Home to Our Hero!
Nights bring Jolene back to the crash and to her best friend, Tami Flynn. Days bring milestones and dread. The cast comes off her arm—she still has some function in her hand—and two letters arrive: one from a civilian amputee, another from a soldier named Sarah Merrin, who fears her husband will leave. Jolene recognizes their pain and adds them to an invisible list of people she can’t help. The ripple effects of war at home—The Impact of War on Soldiers and Families—tighten around her.
The family throws a triumphant homecoming. A security light detonates a flashback; the hero’s banner feels like a lie. Lulu Zarkades and Betsy Zarkades fizzle from joy to confusion as Jolene struggles to smile, to stand, to be “Mom.” The strain of Motherhood and Identity defines the night. She refuses Michael’s help and retreats to a new downstairs bedroom, where the mirror shows a stranger she can’t reconcile with the soldier she once was.
Chapter 23: I'm Having... Trouble
Determined to reclaim ordinary life, Jolene rolls into the kitchen to make breakfast. The space betrays her—counters too high, drawers out of reach—and a splash of water triggers a vision of a bleeding soldier. Pain spikes. A pot crashes, soaking Betsy and the floor. Jolene erupts, swearing at her children. Betsy fires back: “Why did you even come back?” Jolene flees to her room as Lulu sobs for her dad. The moment lays bare the onset of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).
Mila Zarkades urges gentleness with herself, but Jolene can only see the fear in her daughters’ eyes. Michael comes home to two shaken girls and Jolene passed out, a half-empty bottle of wine on the nightstand—an alarming echo of her family’s history with alcohol. That night she wakes thrashing and screaming. Michael tries to hold her; she accidentally punches him. The girls are terrified. When the terror ebbs, Jolene finally names it: “I’m having … trouble.” She asks if their children are safe with her. The admission is small—and seismic.
Chapter 24: A Soldier's Heart
Jolene drills herself on walking, refusing Michael’s help and falling hard. The girls keep their distance, watching a mother they don’t recognize. Michael, wearing a black eye she gave him in her sleep, seeks guidance from Chris, therapist to his client Keith Keller. He learns what PTSD looks like in a home, removes weapons, and is told to listen without judgment. The lesson—Marriage, Love, and Forgiveness—begins to reshape him.
Then another blow: Captain Ben Lomand arrives with official news—Jolene’s physical profile ends her flight status. She loses the cockpit, the calling that built her identity. Outside the house, the fallout spreads. Betsy gets in a fistfight after kids mock her mom. In the car, she admits she’s scared of who her mother has become. That night Michael finds Jolene pretending to sleep, the acid burn of wine on the air. She recedes from them all, and the family frays.
Chapter 25: We'll Always Be Soldiers
Jolene slides into a numbing routine—wine, pills, silence—until Michael forces a disruption: she must attend the Keith Keller trial’s opening. In court, he reframes the case around “a soldier’s heart,” the wound no one can see. He looks at Jolene and says, “I’m proud of her service.” For the first time, the man who resented her career honors it, and something in her softens.
Afterward, Michael introduces Jolene to Keith. A veteran recognizes a veteran. He urges her not to choose the isolation that ruined him: “Come home to the people who love you.” That night, Michael kisses her and slips her wedding ring back on, asking for another chance. Jolene goes to bed without alcohol, clutching a new resolve. She makes a promise to Tami and to herself: tomorrow she starts over. The chapter closes on the first real possibility of coming home.
Character Development
Jolene’s spiral exposes the cost of war on the body, mind, and family; her turn toward help is earned, not easy. Michael shifts from guilt to action, learning how to stand beside someone in pain. The girls’ reactions—anger, fear, loyalty—show the family as both casualty and cure.
- Jolene: From defiance and despair to the first glimmer of acceptance. She endures rehab, survives a disastrous homecoming, confronts her nightmares, and—after Keith’s counsel and Michael’s public pride—chooses to try.
- Michael: From passive regret to proactive compassion. He shows up at rehab, seeks expert advice, reframes his case work through PTSD, and speaks a public apology disguised as argument.
- Betsy: From sullen teen to a daughter acting out of fear and fierce loyalty. Her fight at school and cutting question at home expose her pain.
- Lulu: The youngest voice of fear and longing, calling for stability as the household shakes.
- Mila: Quiet ballast, reminding Jolene to forgive herself and holding the line of family care.
- Keith Keller: Jolene’s mirror and warning. His hard-earned advice cuts through where others cannot.
Themes & Symbols
The chapters render PTSD not as an abstract diagnosis but as a daily assault—nightmares, flashbacks, hypervigilance, rage, and shame—tearing through routines and relationships. The home front becomes another theater of war, where spouses learn new languages of care and children absorb secondary trauma. Motherhood and identity intertwine as Jolene grieves the pilot’s wings and the effortless competence that once defined her, then gropes toward a new version of “Mom” that includes injury and need. Marriage, too, is reimagined: Michael’s listening, boundaries, and public affirmation model love as action, not argument.
Symbols deepen the arc. The downstairs bedroom marks Jolene’s isolation; the security light triggers the battlefield in a suburban driveway; the flooded kitchen floor externalizes loss of control. The courtroom flips from judgment to confession, the one place where Michael can be heard. Most potent is the wedding ring—returned not as a cure-all but as a vow to rebuild slowly, honoring the past and committing to a different future.
Key Quotes
“I should have told her I loved her, before she went off to war.”
Michael’s regret crystallizes the couple’s core wound: love withheld at the moment it mattered most. The line reframes the conflict not as deployment versus marriage, but as silence versus truth.
“Why did you even come back?”
Betsy’s outburst is cruelty born of fear. It voices the family’s terror that the woman who returned is not the mother who left—and forces Jolene to face the harm her symptoms inflict at home.
“I’m having … trouble.”
Jolene finally names the problem aloud. It’s the threshold between denial and help-seeking, the moment that allows Michael to act as partner rather than rescuer.
“I’m proud of her service.”
In court, Michael turns advocacy into apology. Public recognition of Jolene’s vocation becomes the key that unlocks her defensiveness and begins reconciliation.
“Come home to the people who love you.”
Keith’s plea carries the authority of shared experience. He offers Jolene a path he wishes he had taken earlier, shifting her from isolation to intention.
“Tomorrow I’ll start over… I’ll come home at last.”
The closing promise marks the turn from collapse to recovery. It’s not triumph, but resolve—the story’s pivot from surviving to rebuilding.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
This is the novel’s emotional apex and hinge. The chapters refuse easy catharsis, tracing how trauma destabilizes a household and how love must adapt into practical, sustained care. By pairing Jolene’s unraveling with Keith’s cautionary parallel, the story widens to indict the systems that fail veterans while locating hope in community, competence, and honest speech. The section ends by clearing just enough space—for a marriage to be redefined, for a mother to try again, and for a soldier to begin the long journey home.