Then he looked up at his wife.
Claire was still kneeling beside him with her hand on his shoulder, and she had stopped breathing. Her face had gone the color of the new lumber on the step. He had known that face for eleven years: across a crowded bar in Virginia Beach, over a hospital bed in the delivery room, across a thousand dinners, through a laptop screen at two in the morning her time. He knew every weather it had. This one he had never seen, and he understood it immediately, the way you understand a word in a language you didn't know you spoke.
She didn't say anything. She didn't have to. In a way he would later be grateful for, she didn't even try.
Across the cul-de-sac, Brenda Pruitt had come out on her porch and was waving with both arms, her phone held up to film. Someone in another yard started clapping. The neighborhood had seen the yellow ribbon on the Harlans' mailbox for eleven months, and a soldier coming home was something to clap for. Daniel raised a hand. He did it without thinking, the same way he would have returned a salute.