Chapter 6
Ryker requested assignment to the follow-on task force.
He was approved.
I want to be honest that working alongside him for the following eight months was not uncomplicated. He was a good operator. He had also been careless in a specific way that people are careless when they have not yet had the experience that teaches them what carelessness costs, and he had not yet had that experience at Coronado, and the experience came later, in a way that I will not describe except to say that it changed him in the way Syria had changed me — permanently, in the direction of understanding that the world does not organize itself around your assumptions about it, and that the assumptions you have not examined are the most dangerous ones you carry.
Crawford's daughter was seven years old when he died. She is nine now. I visited her twice in the eleven months of the investigation, not because it was required or because it resolved anything, but because some things need to be done regardless of whether they resolve anything, and I had been the last person to hear her father's voice before the building came down, and that made me someone she had a right to know.
The last time I saw her, she asked me why I didn't talk.
I gave her the notebook. Let her read the sentence I had written for Ryker.
She looked at it for a long time, the way children look at things they are turning over slowly, checking all the sides.
Then she wrote something in the notebook below my sentence and handed it back.
May you like
My dad was like that too. He said the important things didn't need to be loud.
I kept the page.
