Maybe that's the answer to the question that's been eating you alive for 17 years. Ethan finally turned to look at her. What question? Whether you could have made a difference, Victoria said softly. You just proved in front of 200 people that you could that you would.
That's not nothing, Ethan. That might be everything. He didn't answer, but something in his chest, some fist that had been clenched tight since a hospital hallway. 17 years ago loosened by a fraction for the first time. His phone buzzed in his pocket.
A text from Carol. Sophie wants to know if you're a real hero now. I told her to ask you herself. She's waiting up. Ethan read the message twice and for the first time in 4 days, something that felt almost like the beginning of peace settled behind his ribs.
I have to go, he told Victoria. My daughter's waiting. Of course. He'd made it halfway down the hallway when Colonel Whitfield emerged from the conference room, his face tight with a new and different kind of urgency. Ethan, he called out.
We found the name on the shipping authorization. Ethan stopped walking. Who was it? He said. Whitfield hesitated, glancing back toward the conference room, then at Victoria.
And something in that hesitation made the hair on the back of Ethan's neck stand up before a single word had been spoken. "You're not going to like this," Whitfield said quietly. "Say it!" Ethan said his voice low and steady in a way that scared Victoria more than if he'd shouted. Colonel Whitfield glanced down at the paper in his hand one more time, as if checking it might somehow have changed.
The quality control authorization for that 2008 batch, he said slowly, was signed off by a division supervisor named Richard Voss. The name meant nothing to Ethan for a full 3 seconds. Then something cold moved through him, memory clawing its way up from 17 years deep. Voss, he repeated. Richard Voss.
You know him. He was my flight instructor, Ethan said, and his voice had gone strange, flat, distant. At Edwards, before he moved over to the manufacturing side, he was the one who signed my wings. He was Ethan stopped his jaw working. He was at the funeral.
He stood right next to me at my wife's funeral and told me it wasn't my fault. He told me the accident board would find the truth. The hallway went very quiet. He knew, Ethan said, and the words came out of him like something being physically torn loose. He knew the coupling failed inspection.