“She said that she had filed a restricted report, and they knew instantly what that meant. It meant they couldn’t ask any questions. They couldn’t know who did it. And they couldn’t know who she was.”

The rest of the house is half-empty. The walls are mostly blank except for the black-and-white pictures of national parks that her boyfriend is hammering up and a few snapshots of Diana’s smiling friends, who have no idea what happened.

This is where she hides herself most of the time, too, this sunny home on a quiet suburban street where she avoids running, avoids get-togethers and avoids getting to know her neighbors except when she searches the local sex-offender registry.

She is studying when her boyfriend’s dad comes in. He knows she was in the Navy with his son but nothing else.

“How are you doing?” Diana asks.

“Fabulous!” he says and goes to look for food in the kitchen.

“I made some chicken, but it’s not ready yet,” Diana calls to him.

“That’s okay — how are you?” the dad yells.

“Great!” she says.

The first lie was something like that. It happened right after she hid the form in the magazines, when her boss knocked on the door and said he was writing her up for being late to work. A few minutes after that, she was sitting in a room with her chain of command, several middle-aged men, all Navy chiefs, who wanted to know why she was late for work.

Her boss wasn’t there. So she told them what she wasn’t supposed to tell them according to her understanding of the form she had just signed. She said that she had filed a restricted report, and they knew instantly what that meant. It meant they couldn’t ask any questions. They couldn’t know who did it. And they couldn’t know who she was.

The chiefs looked at Diana, who thought they looked like fathers alone with a teenage daughter they would never understand. One looked away, she recalled. One asked if she was okay. One asked if she felt safe.

She told them that she felt fine, and that was the first lie.

One asked if she wanted to see a mental health counselor and walked with her to that office. When she came out, she said, her boss was standing nearby. And as the days went on, he kept watching her, she said, and she became more nervous, more angry and felt more out of control, until finally she went to her chief’s office, handed over her weapon and asked to go home.

The authorization letter from the Air Force colonel ordered that she was to be evacuated to the United States using “the quickest means available,” which turned out to be a civilian flight with a layover in Doha, Qatar.

So the next day she was in Doha, at a U.S. military base, where she had no idea about where she was supposed to go or how she was supposed to explain why she was there.

At the front gates, some women who barely spoke English pointed her to another building, where someone told her to go to another building that was a mile away.

It was getting dark, and Diana started walking, hauling her backpack and rolling bag across the base. There were middle-aged men all over the place. She was lost.

Then a woman pulled up in a car beside her and asked why she was wandering around alone. She seemed genuinely concerned. Diana thought she was about her mother’s age and for the first time felt the urge to say everything that had happened.

But she couldn’t do that. Instead, Diana told the woman that she was going home “for medical,” and that was the second lie.

The woman drove her to the building to get her room assignment, which turned out to be a hangar-like space with dozens of empty bunk beds. It was the place set aside for women, but since there weren’t any, Diana stayed there alone.

She Skyped that night with a friend, chatting about how everyone was, but not telling him how she was, or where she was, or that she was coming home.

'Just crumbling'