"I'm not telling you what to do, Commander," Briggs said. "I'm just telling you the door's open. It's been open for a while, frankly. I should've called sooner."
Carter had thanked him and hung up and stood in the boatyard office for a long time, looking out the window at Lucas, twelve years old, sitting on an overturned dory in the sun eating a sandwich and reading a paperback about the Battle of Midway.
He had not walked through the door. Elena asked him, on and off for seven years, and he never had an answer that either of them believed. He was settled. It would upset the boy. It would dredge up everything for the other families. All of that was true, too.
"It's because you think you should have died," she said once, in the dark, when she'd stopped being patient about it. "You think you got Mike's life by mistake and you're afraid if you come back from the dead, somebody's going to look at you and see it. That's all it is. That's all it's ever been."
He didn't answer. She was right, and they both knew it, and the sea went on breathing against the rocks under the window.
* * *
The admiral rose to speak at 1020, and by 1022 Carter knew he had made a mistake in coming.
Reyes had kept his Texas accent. Nineteen years and a flag officer's worth of Washington and he still came down hard on his vowels, and the sound of it went straight into Carter like a hook. Lean, still. A little grey at the temples. He stood at the lectern without notes.
He talked about the school first, and the four years ahead at Annapolis, and made them laugh twice. And then he stopped, and put both hands on the edges of the lectern, and looked out over the formation, and the whole lawn went quiet in the way crowds do when they feel a speaker turn toward something true.
"I want to tell you about the best officer I ever served with," he said. "I served with him for three days. I knew him for about a minute and a half."
Elena's hand found Carter's and gripped it.
"I was a lieutenant on a destroyer in the Arabian Sea. I was twenty-eight. I was very sure of myself." A ripple of laughter from the parents. "I led a boarding team onto a freighter one night, in support of a SEAL element, and the crew of that freighter scuttled her with us aboard. I ended up at the bottom of a flooding cargo hold with a young sailor named Tyler Bost, and I couldn't get him free, and I couldn't leave him, and I was going to die down there. I'd made my peace with it. I'm not proud of that, but it's the truth. I was holding his head out of the water, and I'd decided that was the last thing I was going to do on this earth."