He parked the motorcycle where Ortiz directed, in a patch of shade, and took his time getting off it, because his right knee had opinions about the morning and because he needed a moment before he faced them. Noah was there first, out of the third vehicle almost before it stopped, one hand under his grandfather's elbow with a steadiness that pretended to be casual.
James leaned, and was annoyed, and was grateful, in proportions he hoped his face did not itemize. Then the families were around him, and there was no more time for dignity, because the first of them β Dale Finch's sister, eleven years old when the telegram came and sixty-eight now, with his eyes β took both of James's hands and said, "You came back again," as if simply arriving, year after year, were the whole of the heroic; and James said, "I told your brother I'd look in on the place. He'd have had remarks if I hadn't," and she laughed and cried at the same time, and the morning opened into handshakes and embraces and names spoken aloud in the sunlight, which was, after all, the only ceremony any of them had ever really wanted.
He was halfway through a sandwich that had been pressed on him with the combined force of the United States Army and several determined widows when a familiar car came too fast through the gate road and pulled up in the visitors' lot, and David Harris got out already scanning the crowd β fifty-six, engineer, gray at the temples, his father's son in every line of his worried face. Sarah Bennett came out of the passenger side faster, a teacher's bag still over her shoulder, plainly summoned from the middle of ordinary life; and Lily Bennett, seventeen, unfolded herself from the back seat with her phone in her hand and her eyes huge.
"Dad!" Sarah called, and then they were all three around him, and Lily got there first and hugged him hard enough to rock him, and Sarah took his face in both her hands and looked at him the way she had as a small girl checking him for damage after long absences β except that now she was fifty-two and the checking was not a game.
"Are you all right? Are you actually all right? Because that phone call β Dad, the call was twelve seconds long and it was a trooper's voice in the background and then the line cut, and nobody would tell us anything, and Noah wasn't answering, and David drove the whole way doing the math onβ" She stopped and took a breath. "Tell me what happened. The real version. Not the Dad version."
"The Dad version is the real version with the boring parts left in," James said mildly. "I got stopped on the highway, sweetheart. A misunderstanding about my documents and my speed, both of which were in order. It took a while to sort out. Then the convoy arrived β a little late, because a vehicle broke down β and things sorted out faster."
"A misunderstanding," David repeated, in the tone of a man who has driven forty miles imagining ambulances. He looked over his father's head at Ortiz, who had come up quietly behind the family, and at Noah, who was standing at something like parade rest without realizing it. "Colonel. Somebody tell me the non-Dad version, please."
Ortiz told it β cleanly, fairly, and, James noticed with approval, without making a villain of Emily Carter, though he did not hide the shape of it: the stop, the citations being prepared, the arrival of the escort, the resolution. Noah added the parts he had witnessed. Lily listened with her hand hooked through her grandfather's arm, and halfway through said, in a voice of perfect, furious clarity, "She was going to impound your motorcycle? On today?" and then caught James's eye and subsided, because he was looking at her with the expression that had gentled harder conversations than this one.
"She knows now," James said. "And she apologized, standing up, in front of witnesses, which is more than most people manage in a lifetime of being wrong. We're not going to be angry at her at the dedication of a memorial, Lily. That's not what the wall is for."
"Okay," Lily said gravely, and Sarah made a sound that was half laugh and half the end of fear, and put her arms around her father from the side, careful and fierce, and said into his shoulder, "You scared us, Dad."
"I know, baby," James said. "I'm sorry for the scare. The rest of it β the rest of it was just a morning. I've had mornings in worse places with worse company." He patted her back. "And I rode in with an escort fit for a general, at fifty-two miles an hour, and your nephew standing by to fuss over my knee. It'll make a story for the table. That's all any of it needs to be."