The fourth was a choice.
"You can come home," Briggs said. "Officially. Your name, your rank, all of it. We tell a carefully constructed story and do everything we can to protect our friend in Oman, and maybe it's enough." He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the table. "Or you stay dead. A medical retirement under another name, your full pension, a new life in a place of your choosing, and a phone number to call if anything ever goes wrong. Nobody else ever knows. Not your unit. Not Lieutenant Reyes, who I'm told calls the Kessler's chaplain every week to ask if they've found anything. Nobody but your mother, and only if you insist."
"You're asking me to stay dead."
"I'm asking you to consider it." Briggs looked at him across the table, and for the first time something human came into his face. "I'm not going to pretend there's no pressure here, Commander. There is. There's a great deal of it, from people a lot more important than me. But I'll tell you something else, man to man, off the record. I read your debrief. All of it. I read the part about the breach." He paused. "Most men in your position, the hard part would be not coming home. I'm not sure that's the hard part for you."
Carter looked at his hands on the table. They had healed, mostly. The nails had grown back.
"They're mourning four men for that ship," he said finally. "Three of them earned it."
"And the fourth?"
"The fourth is the reason one of them is up there."
Briggs said nothing for a long moment.
"That's not what Reyes says," he said at last. "That's not what anybody says."
"Reyes was underwater," Carter said. "Reyes doesn't know."
He chose to stay dead. He told himself, then and for years afterward, that he did it for the man in the white dishdasha and the man's sons, and for his mother in Tucson, and for the front doors in Virginia Beach. And that was true. It was all true.