Chapter 18: The Winter Ball

The Navy Relief Winter Ball was held in a hotel ballroom on the water in Norfolk.

It had chandeliers and an ice sculpture of an anchor.

My parents had Rosetta for the night.

I wore the green dress.

Sullivan wore dress blues he hadn't touched in two years, with a row of ribbons I couldn't read.

When we walked in, the room turned its head.

"Breathe," I said.

"I am."

"You're gripping my hand like it's a rope."

He loosened his fingers one at a time.

Across the room stood a long table of men in dark suits.

I knew them.

Eleven of them had stood on my parents' porch seven years ago and watched me be sent home.

None of them came over.

"Sullivan," a woman's voice said behind us. "Carina. You came."

Whitney Slingsby wore ivory silk and her mother's pearls, and she kissed the air next to my cheek.

"I'm so glad," she said warmly. "I know it hasn't been easy."

"You sent me a video," I said.

"Because I care about you."

"Fourteen minutes of it."

Something flickered across her face and was gone.

"I don't know what you mean," she said. "Enjoy the evening."

At nine the lights dimmed.

The admiral, a white-haired man with a hard face, made a short speech about service.

Then Whitney took the stage in her silk, and a screen came down behind her.

"Tonight we honor those who come home changed," she said. "And we remember that the people who love them carry that weight."

The screen lit up.

It was Sullivan on the floor.

It was a cut of the video, thirty seconds, with the sound off and her voice laid over it, soft and sad.

"Some of our heroes are not safe to be near," Whitney said.

"Some of them hurt the people they love, and some of those people are afraid to say it."

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