For the first time all morning, there were no cameras between us.
“Did you know?”
“No.”
“Did the military tell you anything before today?”
“No.”
She searched my face, apparently trying to decide whether I was enjoying this.
I wasn’t.
Garrett being alive was not victory.
It was complication.
It reopened a door I had spent seven years learning to live without.
“I thought he was dead,” Scarlett said.
“So did I.”
Her chin trembled.
“Beatrice told me the flag would come to me.
She said everyone would finally understand I was his real family.”
I glanced toward my children.
“Those words should bother you more now than they did when she said them.”
Scarlett flinched.
I didn’t say it to punish her.
She had helped Garrett leave me.
She had accepted a life built on the wreckage of mine.
But standing in that cemetery, I could see something I had never allowed myself to consider clearly before.
Beatrice had been using Scarlett too.
She needed a woman who fit the picture she preferred.
Scarlett had agreed to become that picture.
The difference was that I had stopped posing for Beatrice years ago.
Scarlett hadn’t.
“Are you going to see him?” she asked.
“If he asks.”
“And if he wants you back?”
That almost made me smile.
“Garrett wanting something has never automatically made it my responsibility.”
I took my children’s hands and walked away.
Three days later, General Bradley contacted me through official channels.
Garrett had been transferred to a secure military hospital.
His injuries were serious but not considered life-threatening.
The operation surrounding his recovery remained classified.
There was one thing Bradley could tell me.
Garrett wanted to speak to his children.
I did not say yes immediately.
For the first time in our history, Garrett had to wait for my decision.
I spoke with a family counselor.
I spoke privately with each child.
I explained that their father was alive, that adults sometimes made choices that hurt people, and that they were allowed to feel happy, angry, confused or nothing at all.
My youngest son asked, “Does he want to be our dad now?”
It was the hardest question anyone had asked me at Arlington.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“But wanting it and doing it are different things.”
The children eventually agreed to a short video call.
I sat just outside the camera’s view.
Garrett appeared on the hospital screen thinner than I remembered, one side of his face bruised, his voice rough.
For several seconds, nobody spoke.
Then our daughter said, “We went to your funeral.”
Garrett closed his eyes.
“I heard.”
“Grandma made us sit in the back.”
