"Danny," she said, barely moving her lips.
He didn't answer. He was looking at the stage, at the empty chairs in their row, at the lectern with its microphone bent like a question mark, and he was not seeing any of it. He was seeing a flashlight beam swinging through black water, and a young lieutenant's face turned up toward a hatch, eyes wide, mouth open, a thin streak of blood running out of his hairline, and he was hearing himself say, Go, Tommy, go, go, I've got you, go.
"Is that him?" Elena whispered. "Is that the one?"
He nodded once.
She folded the program closed. He watched her decide, the way he had watched her decide so many things over nineteen years, the line of her jaw going firm, the small breath in through the nose.
"We can leave," she said. "I'll tell Lucas you got sick. Food poisoning. He'll be angry, but he'll believe it."
"He wouldn't believe it."
"He'll believe it if I tell him."
He looked at her. She meant it. She would do it, would walk him back to the car and sit with him in the gravel lot with the air conditioning running and lie to their son that evening over lobster rolls, and she would never once in the rest of her life tell him that she'd been sorry to do it. That was the thing about Elena he had never managed to deserve.
"No," he said. "No. He asked for the front row."
"Danny, if that man recognizes you —"
"He won't." He said it with more confidence than he felt. "He was twenty-eight. It was dark. He saw me for — he saw me for maybe a minute and a half, Lena, and most of that he was underwater. It's been nineteen years. I've got forty pounds and a whole head of grey on the man he knew. He's going to look out at four hundred people and see four hundred people."
She studied his face a long moment.