Focusing keeps me centered and calm, and I feel the hot pavement through the soles of my ankle-high boots, and the sunlight soaking into the soft fabric of my cotton tactical shirt. Sweat is cool as it trickles down my chest, my belly, my inner thighs. I’m conscious of the pull of gravity as I push my way uphill, and my body seems to weigh twice what it does. Moving around on land is heavy and slow, and when I was underwater I weighed nothing at all. I floated.

I floated and floated, drawn deeper into blackness, and it isn’t true what they say about moving toward the light. I didn’t see a light, not a bright one, not the smallest one. It’s the darkness that seeks to claim us, to seduce us like a drugged sleep. I wanted to give in. It was the moment I’ve always waited for, the moment I’ve lived for and that more than anything else is what I can’t get past.

I met death on the bottom of the sea as silt billowed in a cloud and a dark thread fled up from me, dissipating in my bubbles. I realized I was bleeding and had the irrational desire to take the regulator out of my mouth. Benton says I did, that as soon as he’d place the regulator back in I’d pull it out again and again. He had to hold it in place. He had to fight off my grabbing hands and force me to breathe, force me to live.

He’s since explained that removing the regulator is a typical response when one panics underwater. But I don’t remember panicking. I remember wanting to shed my buoyancy control device (BCD), my regulator and scuba tank, to free myself because I had a reason. I want to know what it was. It’s on my mind constantly. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about why dying seemed like the best idea I’ve ever had.

LUCY APPEARS around a bend.

She walks briskly toward us, and the thunderous noise seems suddenly louder. Of course it’s my imagination. But what she’s wearing isn’t. The shapeless old gray gym shorts and T-shirt have the FBI ACADEMY boldly emblazoned on them, and it’s as deliberate as waving a battle flag. It’s like showing up in uniform after you’ve been court-martialed or wearing an Olympic medal after you’ve been stripped of it. She’s flipping off the FBI, and maybe something else underlies her behavior.