The morning of the dedication, I dressed carefully. Not for Victoria. Not for the cameras or the reporters or the row of folding chairs facing the podium.
I dressed carefully because my brother Tommy had taught me to show up for things that mattered, and this building mattered more than anything I had done in my adult life, and I wanted to look like I understood what I was walking into. I wore a gray dress and low heels and the small pearl earrings my mother had given me after Tommy’s funeral, the ones she said she could not wear anymore because they made her think of him too much. I put them on every time I needed to remember why I was doing something hard.
My husband Daniel watched me from the doorway of our bedroom while I fastened them. “You look good,” he said. “Thank you.”
“Emily.” He paused.
“Just so you know, my mother is going to be there.”
I met his eyes in the mirror. “I know.”
He seemed like he wanted to say something else. Instead, he straightened his collar and walked out.
That was Daniel in those years. Always on the verge of a sentence he could not finish. Let me tell you about Tommy first, because nothing that happened at Fort Stewart that afternoon makes sense without him.
Thomas Everett was my older brother by four years. He was the kind of person who made rooms feel slightly larger simply by being in them, not because he was loud or dramatic but because he was genuinely interested in people in a way that most people are not. He remembered details.
He asked follow-up questions. He laughed at the right moments and went quiet at the right moments, and he had a patience with difficulty that I spent years trying to understand and only gradually came to see was something he had cultivated on purpose, as a response to a world he found harder than he let on. He enlisted at twenty-two, which surprised no one who knew him.
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