“Although I sacrificed personal freedom and many other things, I got just as much as I gave,” he wrote his wife in his open-in-the-event-of-my-death letter. “For all the times I was cold, wet, tired, sore, scared, hungry and angry, I had a blast.” Mary revised her open-in-the-event. Bravado, she realized after Neil’s, served up bogus.

Bluster was nothing like what she felt. First came vengeance. She worked harder to lay waste. She itched to press the pickle button, the one her thumb hit to release projectiles. Next came choking up. It didn’t always happen in private, and it went on much longer. Third came numbing out, which outlasted avenging or weeping. As for Frank, he seemed, from what she could see, stuck in payback.

But even that came to an end when, after a year in Afghanistan, both of them posted back to Andrews. They flew random patrols, awaiting their next assignment, which everyone said would be Iraq. She was grateful to survey D.C. She wanted to stay. She told herself she was guardian, not an angel, but at least sentry. She definitely and only flew. She began, on certain days, to get back to the blooming soar of it. As for Frank, he was bored.

Her crash revved him back. That night, he got to Walter Reed before the rest of the squadron. He was, after all, the only kind of family she had. He motored up Sixteenth Street Northwest, the White House in his rearview, wheels fast into the old hospital drive, his cell phone on speaker, begging for the duty nurse.

Frank, Mary guessed, was thinking of Neil. Neil, to Frank, wasn’t carrot curls and pink chin. Neil was gonzo made of kryptonite, he-man of phys-ed stats and training-day glories. To Frank, Neil’s slide off the Chinook was proof that no one was safe, not even kings. And on this particular day at Walter Reed, he had more evidence—here was Mary, trussed in bandages. A medical miracle—alleged—though Frank never believed military pronouncements. Her crash made no sense, that much made sense. He tried with her, more than once, to hear the story. She told him each step, more than once, as if it were a logical story. But each time that he looked at her and she looked at him, the final expression in each tense eye was this: Frank and Mary were in the dark. Something, somewhere, in some inch of some infinity, was hidden.

Adam saw her by accident. When he looked up from a small map he was studying at his desk, he saw Mabel Cannon on her knees picking up her overturned purse. She was just outside his glass wall.

He looked back fast. She didn’t see him. He hoped. Adam tried with his peripheral vision, but couldn’t catch a glimpse of her. What was she doing here?

Adam’s secretary, Tabitha, knocked softly and put her head inside the doorframe.