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For much of the deployment, I’d been distracting myself with slow walks around the park or downtown, but it was late June now, and too hot for that. So, I decided to stop by Hailey’s instead, where I found Chloe skipping around, chanting, “We’re going on a ghost tour!” Chloe was deep in a ghost obsession, and Hailey had promised her all the ghost tours she could handle on a weeklong trip to Savannah during post-deployment leave. Leaning against Hailey’s bar, I watched her aggressively scrub her dishes and wished I hadn’t come. I had the distinct feeling she was angry with me. I even asked her, point blank, if she was. “Boiling,” she said. It was her trademark sarcasm, but her voice had genuine bite. There were just a few weeks left of the deployment. The wives were frustrated and wrung out, and the air had become charged with these emotions.
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