"You say that like you know."
"I know what it costs to doubt them."
Tyler hesitated and extended a hand, as if he could begin again without the weight of Hollister's story hanging over him. He seemed to have forgotten that she had already called him by name.
"I'm Tyler."
"Marisol."
"Have we met before?"
"I don't think so."
The lie tasted bitter. She had not been certain the general would come; she was not about to give Tyler a revelation she could not protect with evidence. Through a window beside them, Priya Raman finished a live report for the station, speaking into her microphone with the hall behind her.
"This is Priya Raman outside Liberty Oak Veterans Hall in Savannah. Now, back inside the reunion."
Rick appeared just as Tyler shifted his weight to take another step. The aide's face showed the impatience of a man whose employer wanted his audience returned to its proper position. He looked from the veteran to Marisol and jerked his head toward the door.
"Tyler. Brock wants you back. Kitchen's closed."
"Back off, Rick."
For the first time that afternoon, Tyler's voice carried the authority of the soldier he had once been. Rick glanced at his phone, then at the hall, where Hollister's laughter drifted through the doorway. His response was low and pointed.
"Pick a side, Tyler."
Tyler said nothing. He did not yet know the whole truth, but for the first time in twelve years he suspected that remaining quiet might be a choice with a cost. Marisol left him there and walked toward the memorial garden behind the hall, where stone benches stood among low azaleas and the names of the dead were cut into a bronze wall.
The garden was cooler than the hall. A fountain made a thin ribbon of sound behind a row of white stones, and the fragrance of wet earth carried Marisol back to a very different valley. In the memory, the helicopter's cabin lights were red, the airframe shook, and she had both hands braced around Daniel Mercer as blood soaked through the field dressing. She heard herself again, the words she had repeated while the hospital lights remained impossibly far away.
"Hold on, Daniel. Almost there."
She opened her eyes to discover that another woman had stepped onto the path. Claire Mercer wore a pale green dress and held a folded memorial program against her chest. In person she looked smaller than the photographs Brock displayed on his campaign page, but her gaze was direct and intelligent. Seeing Marisol beside the memorial wall, she hesitated.
"I'm sorry. I didn't know anyone was out here."
"Stay. It's a big garden."
Claire settled onto the far end of the bench. For a time they watched the fountain without speaking, two women bound by a man neither could bring back. Then Claire admitted something Marisol suspected she had never dared say in the dining room.
"Everyone keeps telling me how brave he was. It's like they're reading me a story about someone else. What was he really like?"
Marisol's memory offered her Daniel's dry humor, his impatience with authority when it obstructed a wounded man, and the way he had worried about his wife even as he lost blood. None of those things fit comfortably inside the formal language of a memorial plaque. She chose the answer that seemed most like him.