Daniel knew a particular silence. It came half a second after a blast, when the pressure wave had passed through you and taken all the sound with it, and the world went on in pictures without a soundtrack: dust rising, a man's mouth opening, a boot lying in the road where a boot shouldn't be. You learned to work inside that silence. You learned that the body could keep doing its jobs, checking, counting, reaching, while the mind was still somewhere in the air, floating down.
He was in it now, kneeling on his own front walk in the gold light, with his son's breath on his face.
He did not look at Claire right away. He looked at Owen, who was waiting for praise, his face open and lit and certain. A seven-year-old's honesty didn't know what it was holding. It just held it out with both hands.
So Daniel did what the body knew how to do. He smiled. He felt the smile from the inside like a piece of equipment he was operating. He put a hand on the back of Owen's neck, under the hood, and squeezed, and told him he had done a good job. His voice came from far off and sounded completely normal. He told him he was proud of him. Both were true, which made it worse.