Blake eventually requested a meeting.
The commander asked Michael whether he wanted to refuse. Michael nearly did. He had no interest in becoming the final exam for a man’s rehabilitation. But the request had been written without excuses, and that mattered enough for one conversation.
They met in a quiet room near the training compound.
Blake entered without a group behind him. No audience. No spotless performance of authority. He looked tired.
“Chief Carter.”
“Captain.”
Blake sat only after Michael nodded toward the chair.
For a while, he said nothing.
Then he placed a small object on the table.
It was a polished metal pin, new and untouched.
“They issued me a replacement after I transferred,” Blake said. “I used to think new meant better.”
Michael looked at it, then at the worn insignia on his own jacket.
“Sometimes it does.”
Blake gave a humorless smile. “Not always.”
He told Michael he had completed months of counseling and leadership review. He had apologized to the sailors whose names appeared in the statements. Some accepted. Some did not. He had not been returned to an instructor position.
“I kept thinking you took something from me,” Blake said. “Then I read the statements. I had already been giving it away.”
Michael understood what he meant.
Respect.
“Why did you move the table?” Michael asked.
Blake stared at his hands. “Because you kept moving after I told you to stop.”
“That simple?”
“That ugly.”
Michael nodded.
Blake looked at the wheelchair. “I saw the chair before I saw you. Then I saw the jacket and decided you were trying to make people admire who you used to be.”
Michael touched the worn metal on his chest.
“I was wearing it because I had promised somebody I would.”
Blake looked up.
Michael had never told the room that part.
Forty years earlier, after the training crash, one of the men Michael carried from the aircraft had survived long enough to recover but never returned to operational duty. His name was Samuel Ortega. He and Michael had spent years joking that their scratched insignia looked like they had been dragged behind a truck.
Samuel died the winter before the cafeteria ceremony.
