Downrange, she was the interrogator who could read anyone. He was the officer who ran her detachment. The regulations made them impossible ? so they never crossed the line.

A year after they both leave the Corps, they collide in a small Ohio town, at the memorial for the friend they couldn't save. The rank is gone. The war is over. There's nothing left in the way of them at all ? and that turns out to be the most frightening thing of all, because the regulation was only ever the wall they were hiding behind.

Cass Mercer spent a career becoming whoever a stranger needed her to be in order to break ? and she's worn so many faces she's lost the real one. Adam Stahl carried an entire detachment and let no one carry him, and he came home a wall. They are the only two people who can read each other, and the only two cleared into the same unbearable secret: how their friend really died, and whose call it was.

Over one summer, building a reading room in a dead boy's name, two people who are experts at everyone else's truth have to risk the one thing neither has ever survived ? being known, all the way down ? before the longest way home runs out of road.

The Long Way Home is an emotionally charged, dual-timeline military romance about classified silence, survivor's guilt, and the slow brave work of letting yourself be seen. Book 3 in the Need to Know series ? a complete standalone with a hard-won happy ending.