Prologue
A girl of fifteen years stepped out of her boyfriends truck. "Bye," they exchanged. "Text me when you get home," the girl requested. Her boyfriend nodded and smiled brightly. "Sure, babe." The girl smiled back, not as brightly. She hated when he called her that. She had a name, and it wasn't babe.
Andrea Belle waved as her boyfriend, Gabe Wilson, drove off.
As Gabe rounded the corner in his beat up old truck she turned around and made her way up to the front door of her house. The house was by no means large. It didn't need to be. Only two people - she and her father, Master Gunnery Sergeant Tom Belle - lived there.
Andrea, better known as Andy to her friends and family, unlocked her front door and pushed it open. She jiggled the key around to get it out of the keyhole.
"Dad, I'm home!" Andy knew her father would be home. He was on leave, after all, for the first time in over two years. He wasn't about to just up and leave, head back out to Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever it is they station him all the time.
She normally stayed with her best friend, Ray-Ray, whenever he was away as her mother had died when she was a baby and she had no other living relatives.
Tom still hadn't answered and Andy was growing concerned. Her father always answered whenever she yelled for him. "Dad?" Still no answer.
Andy walked further into the house, looking around. Maybe he was asleep in the back room where he couldn't hear her yelling for him. She would look there first.
It was both the right place and the wrong place to be.
Andrea Belle screamed.