Owen looked at him for a long time with his serious gray eyes, his mother's eyes. Daniel watched him take it in, turning it over the way he turned over everything, testing its weight. Then something in his narrow shoulders came down, a little, an inch, something he had been holding up so long he probably didn't know it was there. He let out a breath. He didn't cry. He nodded once, gravely, as if accepting new orders.
Then he asked if he could still keep the dog tag. Not for the mission, he said. Just to have.
Daniel told him it was his. He told him it had always been his. He tucked it back inside the green hoodie and smoothed the fabric over it, the way he had on this walk a year ago, and it felt like the same gesture made into a different one.