"I know what they told you."
"Then who —" And then she stopped. And he watched her look at him, really look, past the beard and the weight he'd lost and the new lines around his eyes. He watched her remember. There'd been a barbecue, the summer before the deployment, in the backyard of a house on Shore Drive, Mike's team and their wives and girlfriends and kids, and the commander had come for an hour and stood by the grill in a Hawaiian shirt and burned the hot dogs and been teased about it mercilessly. He watched her remember that. He watched her put her hand flat against the roof of the car, as if the ground had moved under her.
"No," she said. "No. No."
"I'm sorry."
"They buried you. They — I was there. I sat behind your mother, I —"
"I know."
"You're dead."
"Yes," he said. "Officially. I'm going to stay that way. I'm not supposed to be here. I'm not supposed to tell you any of this. If anybody finds out I came here, a lot of people are going to be very angry, and some of them might get hurt." He made himself look at her. "But I was with him, and you're his wife, and I thought — I thought you had the right to know what happened. What really happened. Because what they told you isn't all of it."
She stood there on the sidewalk for so long that a car came around the corner and had to swerve around her. On the porch, the baby in the stroller woke and began to fuss.
Then she said, "Wait here," and went back across the street and picked up her son and went inside, and the door closed, and Carter sat in the rented Ford and waited, sure, completely sure, that the next thing up the street would be a police cruiser.
Twenty minutes later the door opened again, and she stood in it with the baby on her hip and said, "Well? Are you coming in or not?"
He told her everything at her kitchen table, with the baby asleep in the next room and a cup of tea going cold in front of him. The hold. The air pocket and the laugh. The count. The breach. The hand flat on his chest, pushing. The squeeze.