They were quiet for a moment. Then Victor said something that Ethan didn’t expect. “Would you—” He stopped. Started again. “This is going to sound strange, but would you be willing to talk to him? Not about what happened. Not to—I’m not asking you to make it easy on him. I just—he’s not listening to me. He doesn’t respect me the way a son should. That’s partly my fault. I know that.” A long pause. “But he might hear something from you that he can’t hear from me.”
Ethan looked at him for a long time. This was the last thing he had anticipated. And he was very good at anticipating things. “Not now,” Ethan said. “And not because I told you to. If Ryan comes to me, if he decides on his own that he wants to talk, I’ll listen. But I’m not going to perform a lesson for your benefit. That’s not how this works.” Victor absorbed that. “Okay,” he said.
“And Victor.” Ethan looked at him steadily. “If anything, anything at all happens that resembles what happened these past three weeks. It’s over. No conversations, no second chances. The legal process fully immediately. You understand?” “Yes,” Victor said. “Good.” Victor nodded once. He turned to leave. Then he stopped on the top porch step and turned back and said something without quite looking at Ethan.
“The report mentioned something. A mission in 2012. The investigator said the details were fully classified, but that there were commendations from two senators and a citation from the joint chiefs.” He paused. “He said normally those things don’t happen unless—” He stopped again, didn’t finish. Ethan waited. “I just wanted to say,” Victor said, and his voice was slightly different now, stripped of its usual professional control. “For whatever it was, thank you.” Ethan looked at him. “Go home, Victor,” he said. Victor went home.
Ethan stood on the porch a long time after the Mercedes disappeared, his coffee long cold in his hand. The street was quiet. A few houses over someone’s sprinkler had turned on automatically. A bird landed on the fence post and looked at him with the profound indifference that birds had perfected over millions of years. He thought about 2012. He thought about a village in a country whose name he still couldn’t say in most contexts, about a team of six and a mission that had turned into something else entirely, and about the particular weight of certain decisions made in darkness under pressure with no good options available.