Where was he? Why wasn’t he here? Of all people, he was the one she would have expected to come and show his support for her. Unless her kidnapping had convinced him once and for all that he didn’t want her on the teams.

Whatever his reasons were, he didn’t show up. Didn’t add his trident to the rows accumulating on the desk in front of her.

With every slap of another SEAL’s hand on her desk, the sound was a sharp reminder of the one SEAL who wasn’t here.

She would not cry. She wasn’t ashamed to let these men who could have been her brothers in a different time, a different world, know how much their tribute meant to her, but she would not show them weakness. Never that.

And she damned well wouldn’t cry for Griffin. She’d really thought they had something. She’d thought he’d made peace with her becoming a SEAL, that she’d finally found a man she thought she could trust. A man she could love. A man who would take care of her. Look out for her. See all of her.

But in the end, he’d left her, too.

In a way, this hearing was her funeral. The end of her long struggle to scale the unscalable mountain peaks—of becoming a SEAL, and of breaking through Griffin’s emotional walls. She’d given both everything she had, but it hadn’t been enough.

She’d failed as a SEAL.

Even harder to swallow, she’d failed as a woman.

In a way, she was grateful to Griffin for staying away. He’d already humiliated her enough by rejecting her. She didn’t need him to witness this final degradation as well.

At precisely one o’clock, Admiral Duquesne, his executive officer, and a stenographer filed into the room. The admiral stopped in his tracks at the sight of the table in front of Sherri peppered with gold SEAL pins. He stared down at it a long time while she stared at him.

If she wasn’t mistaken, she thought she saw the tiniest hint of a smile cross his face before he looked up at her sternly. “It appears your instructors have spoken, Lieutenant Tate. Loudly.”

She nodded in acknowledgment, too emotional to trust her voice.

Briskly, he took his place at the front table, facing the room, and laid down the training folder he carried. He opened it and, while everyone watched in charged silence, browsed through it.

“It says here your instructors find you to be a consistent performer, determined, positive, and unflaggingly supportive of your teammates. Would you say that’s an accurate summary of this trainee in your experience, Commander Kettering?”

“Yes, sir.”