Captain Noah Foster returns to the city where no one is waiting for him, with an empty left sleeve and a habit of waking before dawn. He knows how to read people by the movement of their shoulders and assemble engines with one hand, but he's afraid to look in the mirror and see a man who is no longer what he once was. His grey eyes darken to black in anger, and his fingers remember the warmth of the only woman who fed him black coffee in the hospital, never turning away from the stump. Beneath a mask of dry humor and soldier's stubbornness, he hides the ability to carve wooden figurines and hum Chopin before stepping into hell. The war took his arm, but gave him one certainty: of all the faces he has seen, he remembers only one — the one that smelled of lavender and kept him from rotting alive. Now he stands under an old lamppost, wondering if the one he walked across Europe to find will recognize him.