"Yeah."
"Liar."
"Yeah," he said again, and she took his arm, the right arm, her fingers resting lightly on the inside of his wrist just below the compass rose, and they walked together toward the lawn.
It was exactly what she had said it would be. Rows of white folding chairs set out on the grass, maybe four hundred of them, with an aisle down the middle wide enough for a small parade. A low stage at the front, carpeted in blue, with a lectern and a row of chairs for dignitaries, and behind it a tall blue backdrop with the seal of the Department of the Navy in gold and white. Flags on poles at either end, the national ensign and the Navy flag and the flag of the Naval Academy Preparatory School, stirring and settling in a breeze off the water. A Navy band was setting up to one side under a white tent, the brass catching the sun.
The front row was reserved for family. Lucas had arranged it, Elena said, had put in a request with his company officer back in March, and Carter had not known whether to be proud or terrified. Front row meant no hiding. Front row meant whoever stood at that lectern would be looking straight down at him.
An usher in dress whites, a girl who couldn't have been more than nineteen herself, found their names on a clipboard and walked them to two seats near the center aisle, just left of it, where a laminated card on each chair read RESERVED: CHARDI FAMILY.
Elena sat. Carter stood a moment longer, reading the card. Chardi. Michael's name, and Lucas's, and once, for a few short years, Elena's. Not his. It had never been his. He had made his peace with that a long time ago, and yet seeing it printed there, so plainly, on a seat he was about to sit in, made something tighten in his throat.
He sat down. The chair was hot from the sun.
Elena opened the program on her knee and smoothed it flat. On the cover was the school's crest and the date, and inside, below the order of ceremony, the list of graduates, two hundred and some names in small serif type. She ran her finger down it until she found him, the way she'd found him in every Christmas pageant and every Little League roster since he was four years old.
Lucas Michael Chardi.
She tapped it twice with her nail, a small private ritual, and then turned the page back to the order of events, and Carter, reading over her shoulder, saw the line under Remarks and felt the world tilt very slightly sideways, the way a deck does in the half second before you know the sea has changed.
Guest Speaker: Rear Admiral Thomas A. Reyes, United States Navy.
Elena felt it. She always did. Her hand went still on the page.