“What is on it?”
“The last six minutes of our flight channel.”
“I know what happened in the last six minutes.”
“No. You know what you remember.”
Her pulse started climbing.
Jack did not push the card toward her.
“The official board cleared your decisions. You never read the full findings. You left before the final briefing.”
“They cleared me because the mission objectives were met.”
“They cleared you because Ethan chose to turn back after you ordered him to egress.”
Dana stared at him.
“No.”
“You ordered both of us out. He saw the rescue helicopter below and made a second pass on his own.”
“He told me he had my six.”
“He did. Then he broke south to draw the missile battery away from the helicopter. That was his choice.”
Dana’s voice dropped. “I put him there.”
“We were all there.”
“I was flight lead.”
“And he was a pilot, not a chess piece.”
The terminal blurred at the edges.
Dana sat on the nearest bench.
For two years, guilt had given the world a simple shape. She had made the decision. Ethan had died. Therefore she had killed him.
It was unbearable, but it was clean.
Jack’s version was messier.
It required her to admit that Ethan had possessed courage, judgment, and agency separate from her command. It required her to stop making herself powerful enough to control the past.
“Why didn’t anyone make me listen?”
Jack sat beside her.
“People tried.”
She remembered sealed envelopes left unopened. Calls ignored. A colonel waiting outside her apartment. Jack’s name appearing on her phone until she changed the number.
Dana looked down.
“Right.”
