"You said they wanted to send you to Arizona. To be near your mother. You're not going. You'll hate it. You'll dry up and blow away." She turned around. "My grandmother has a house on Deer Isle, in Maine. On the water. Nobody's lived in it for two years. There's a boatyard in Stonington that's been looking for somebody who knows diesels since last spring." She looked at him. "Do you know diesels, Commander?"
"I — yes. Some."
"Good," she said. "Because I've been thinking about moving. Lucas should grow up near the water. Mike would want that." And then, after a beat, more softly: "And somebody's got to teach him how to do things."
* * *
They married in the summer of 2010, on the lawn behind the grandmother's house on Deer Isle, with the tide out and the mudflats shining and a justice of the peace from Blue Hill who had to be reminded twice to say "Samuel." Lucas was three and a half and carried the rings on a lobster buoy his new father had carved and painted for the occasion, and halfway down the aisle he dropped the buoy in the grass, picked it up, looked straight at the man waiting at the end and said, loudly, "Dad, I dropped it," and that was the first time.
Carter had to turn and look at the water for a while before the justice of the peace could go on.
He taught the boy to fish. Off the town dock first, with a hand line and a bucket of clam bellies, then off the ledges in the skiff, for mackerel in July when the water boiled with them, for stripers in the fall at the mouth of the reach. He taught him to tie a bowline one-handed and a clove hitch in the dark. He taught him to change the impeller on an outboard and to bleed the air out of a diesel's fuel line and to read the sky over Isle au Haut in the afternoon and know whether he'd be getting wet by supper. He taught him to splice three-strand and to scarf a plank and to tell the truth even when it cost him something, which was the one thing Carter knew, every single time he said it, that he had no business teaching anybody.
Elena kept the secret. She kept it better than he did, some years. She was the one who'd told Lucas, when he was nine and had found the tattoo fascinating, that his stepfather had been a SEAL a long time ago, before Lucas was born, and had served with his father once. She told Carter afterward, in the kitchen, with the door closed: "That's true. Every word of it is true. I'm not lying to my son for you, Danny. I'm just not telling him everything yet."
"Yet."
"Yet," she said. "One day you'll tell him. And it'll be you, not me. That's the deal."
He'd agreed to the deal. And then the years had gone by, the way they do in small places by the sea, measured in winters and boat launches and the heights of a boy pencilled on the inside of a pantry door. And in the fall of 2019, the phone number Briggs had given him rang for the first and only time.
It was Briggs himself, retired, calling from somewhere with wind in the background. Their friend in Oman had died, he said. Peacefully, in his own bed, at the age of eighty-one, with his grandchildren around him. His sons had long since gone to live in London. The people who had held Carter in the stone room were scattered or dead; the war in Yemen had seen to most of them. There was nobody left to protect.