Carter looked out at the water for a long time.
Then he looked at Elena, who was looking at him with an expression he'd waited nineteen years to see on her face and that he would not, later, be able to describe to anyone. And at Lucas, who was holding his diploma in one hand and his mother's hand in the other, and whose ears, God help him, still stuck out.
"Yeah," he said. "Okay, Tommy. Out loud."
* * *
They held it in the first week of October, at the black granite wall in Virginia Beach, on a cold bright morning with the wind coming in hard off the Chesapeake and snapping the flags.
It was not a large ceremony. Reyes had seen to that. A few dozen people on folding chairs. Ray Dunleavy, retired, silver-haired, who walked straight up to Carter without a word and hugged him so hard Carter's back cracked. Andre Oduya's sister. Tyler Bost's mother and father, up from North Carolina, who afterward asked Carter very quietly if their son had been afraid, and listened to his answer, and thanked him. Two of the three sailors he'd hauled out of the hold on a line, middle-aged men now, one with a crooked left arm that had never healed straight. And in the second row, in the blue service dress of a fourth-class midshipman, granted a single precious weekend of liberty on the personal request of a rear admiral, Lucas, with his mother beside him.
The Navy read two amended citations into the record that morning.
The first was for Special Warfare Operator First Class Michael J. Chardi, whose Silver Star, nineteen years after his death, had been upgraded to the Navy Cross. The citation described, accurately for the first time, how Petty Officer Chardi had of his own volition returned below into the flooding hold of the motor vessel Anahita to find his commanding officer, had led him to a breach in the hull in total darkness, and, trapped in that breach, had forced him through it at the cost of his own life. Reyes read it himself. He got through it without stopping. Then he walked down off the little platform and handed the medal, in its blue case, to Lucas, and Lucas held it on his knees and did not open it.
The second citation was shorter, and stranger, and was read by a vice admiral from Washington who had clearly been briefed on a great deal and was saying very little of it. It confirmed that Commander Daniel R. Carter, United States Navy, previously reported lost at sea on the night of March 9, 2007, had in fact been recovered alive later that year under circumstances that remained classified, and had at his government's request, and at great personal cost, remained officially dead ever since. It restored to him his name, his rank, and his record. And it recognized formally, as the Navy had once recognized posthumously, his conduct in the hold of the Anahita, where, it said, he had gone below for men who were not his own.
Carter had asked for one change to that citation, and gotten it. In the draft Reyes had shown him, the last line had said that his actions reflected great credit upon himself. He'd crossed out himself and written, in block capitals, in the margin, ON THE MEN WHO WENT BACK FOR HIM.
When the vice admiral finished reading, Reyes came down and stood in front of Carter, and Carter stood up. He was wearing a uniform. Elena had found it in a cedar box in the attic on Deer Isle and had it let out by a tailor in Ellsworth, and had not said one word to him about the forty pounds. The Navy Cross that had been given to his mother at Little Creek in 2007, and that she had kept on her mantel in Tucson until she died, knowing, never once telling a soul, Reyes now pinned on his chest himself. His hands were not quite steady doing it.
"Welcome back, sir," the admiral said.