“So—can I have the photos of the tree strike?” she asking, changing the subject. She regretted telling Dozer about the penitentiaries of her childhood, thousands of different shadings of shame for each moment, an impossible clarity of disgraces, as if each blade in a yard were separate and visible from cloud cover.

“Can’t,” Dozer muttered, as she expected.

“What did it look like, then?” She didn’t much care how the tree she landed in looked—she wanted Dozer to remember duty, the regulations, not her father.

“Like a Guard Baby loose with luck tore off some mighty oak’s crown.”

She laughed. He called her Guard Baby because she had only ever flown for the Air National Guard, which trained her. Dozer came to the military after flying United and a midlife medical degree.

“Loose with luck,” she said.

“The joints, you know,” he said, speaking of her miracle hip, “when you’re lucky, they’re loose.”

“An oak tree,” she said. “Huh.”

“Acorns everywhere.”

“Wild.”

“For squirrels, yeah. But, Mary …” Dozer started.

“I know,” she said, “we’re getting close to thirty days after the crash.”

She dreaded this part of the timeline. It meant she had to see the psychiatrist. It meant the preliminary finding would follow a month after the session. It meant they might take flying away from her. Was it even feasible that so much went so wrong? How could night vision have malfunctioned, the sky gone dumb black, the onboard computer massively failed—because that’s what a Viper was, flying by wire—how could so many impossible wrongs have busted that one ride on that one night? Frank was right. It made no sense.

What would the session with the shrink dredge out of her? She knew her father was in there somewhere. The rancid smudge of her progenitor—it had shown through the bleached sheet. Because of him, she’d always been double-checked and triple-questioned. She was used to X-rays. This time, though, she needed more than heavy lead to keep them guessing.

Later in the week, the session came and went. It was as perfunctory as buttonholes. Worked up as she was, she could barely pay attention to the shrink’s questions, which came in far less insinuating tones than she’d expected. She was beginning to think she’d come through it with no nicks or cuts. But then she heard from Frank, who insisted they talk.