They went into the lobby, now even more crowded, the voices sounding almost contentious. Mary guessed she and this Holly were the only women on hand. But then she saw some Afghan women—or perhaps they were Pakistani—carrying a large poster board through double doors. They couldn’t fit. There was a scurrying, and the crowd bunched, then all movement stopped, and there was no way to fan out again. It was like a crowded elevator as the doors close, people trying to rearrange their bodies to cause the least offense by the way they held themselves.

She heard Holly say something she didn’t catch to a man standing next to her. He had longish hair and a beard. At first he looked like Jesus or a washed-up rocker, but then she saw that his hair wasn’t nearly long enough for the biblical likeness and he was too powerfully built to qualify as ex-druggie. She was trying to remember if she’d met him before when the embassy woman said, “Captain, this is so amazing. But this is Will Holmes. He’s—well, I’ll let him explain it.”

“Captain,” he said to her, offering his hand to shake. His grasp was so strong she thought he was playing with her, but this was hardly the setting for the kind of grip that certain military types tried out on her before introducing their low opinion of women in the armed forces.

They were so close, a few inches from cheek to cheek, it seemed after the fact to be making introductions. “Hello,” she got out. Had Health Attaché Holly said what or whom he was with? She guessed DynCorp, maybe management. He had no vest, no visible weapon. He was wearing a topcoat or blazer, but she was packed so against him she couldn’t tell if he was in suit pants, khakis, or, for that matter, blue jeans. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I didn’t hear—you’re DynCorp, right?”

“Mr. Holmes is with DOD.”

He looked beaten down, and yet also, though it was so hard to put together, alert, acutely, strangely awake to her, to what was going on around them, but mostly to her eyes, to the crankpin disjoint coming from she didn’t know exactly where, to Holly Fitzsimmons’s examination of how long and just how he looked at Mary. And when he couldn’t get away with looking at her any one second longer, he stopped, and in a knucklehead way, something just on the line between afterthought and dopey, said, “Sorry for your loss.”