Gray Areas

Dex Martin spent eight years building a life on top of something he couldn't undo.

At thirty-seven, he's a former Army Staff Sergeant who traded a uniform for a corporate communications job and a mortgage he can barely cover. He's good at his work. He loves his wife and his kids. He also sends sixty dollars a month to a foundation account nobody knows about—an anonymous payment he's been making since the night he signed a report that buried the truth about how a man named Tariq Hassen died.

Tariq was their unit's civilian translator. He died because of a command error and a communication failure that started at the colonel's level. Dex didn't write the report that covered it up. He signed it. He was twenty-nine years old and loyal in the way the Army builds men to be loyal—absolutely, and without examining what that loyalty cost.

When a new job at a powerful communications firm puts Dex face-to-face with an old Army buddy who knows about Tariq's widow and the payments that have stopped, the carefully managed silence Dex has been living in begins to break open. What it costs to tell the truth—to his wife, to himself, to the woman he's been paying in secret for eight years—is the whole of this book.

GRAY AREAS is a psychological drama about guilt carried alone, a marriage tested by what one person chooses not to say, and what it actually looks like to start living honestly. Not dramatically. Not all at once. One hard decision at a time.

For readers who believe that character is what a person does in the dark.