A happy home life wasn't something Casey would admit to having had, though neither would one get him to say his upbringing were particularly troubled. His complaints chiefly being an abundance of criticism and a scarcity of recognition. You did what was expected and that was that.

His father had been a loving if distant figure consumed by work and, at the time, hidden affairs. Mr. Metz was a foreman at the local shipyard. That his father was well regarded in their community only cast that much longer a shadow of expectation. Some days it seemed that Casey would never measure up.

Casey had always been a frustrated boy. He was frustrated with his father for putting his work first, with himself for not living up to his or his families expectations, with his sister for being the apple of his mother's eye. Ultimately frustration gave way to aimless anger.

His school life was colored by conflict as he fought to exert some measure of control over his life. Casey always claimed to be righting some perceived injustice but the school and his parents rarely saw it that way. Discipline problems yielded poor marks and by the time he was finished with his education the military was the last remaining option.

The army was a good fit for Casey. The instilled him with a sense of purpose, provided structure and focus, and most importantly a sense of belonging. Where before he had rarely felt as if he were a success, now he was flush with pride. And then he was sent to Ireland.

He had thought he would be there to maintain peace, he was wrong. His ideas of right and wrong were thoroughly abused. Subjected to all manner of hate and violence, constrained by restrictive rules, Casey fell back on the embers of anger he hadn't been able to abandon entirely. For the better part of six years he was caught up in the chaos.

One day it all came apart, he was laid up in the hospital for months with shrapnel injuries that the doctors told him would be the end of his career. At times the pain and the obvious limp he was left with hardly feels like the miraculous recovery he'd been promised. But he was alive and going home. Little did he know it wasn't the home he'd left.

What he found when he returned to Shaddingham was as confusing to him as the riots he'd only just escaped. His kid sister had grown, and she looked so much like his mother it was surreal when she told him how their mum had passed. The pain was amplified by the fact no one had told him before then. Casey heard from family friends at church how drastically his father had changed after he'd left, after the affairs had become public. Some even suspected the old man of abuses.