He drew a breath. "Petty Officer Owens played a piece of it in the engineering office yesterday. He said there might be a new inspection order and that we should be careful what we said about the maintenance log."
Brandon's legal officer raised a hand. "Ellis, don't address my client. Direct your answers to the admiral."
Ellis nodded. "Yes, sir."
Reed asked, "Why didn't you report it yesterday?"
"Because I thought the order was real. Then this morning I saw Admiral Owens on the pier. Petty Officer Owens acted like he hadn't expected her." Ellis glanced at me. "That didn't make sense."
I thought of Brandon's grin as he blocked the gangway. It had looked so easy. He had played a recording of my voice the day before, then greeted me as though my uniform were a costume.
Reed closed the computer screen halfway. "Chief, secure the log and the drive. I want engineering to verify the valve without Brandon present. No ship movement until we know whether that fire main can do its job."
Marcus acknowledged the order. Ellis released a breath he seemed to have been holding since he entered.
That should have been the end of the meeting. It was not.
The wardroom phone rang. Reed answered, listened, and looked through the window toward the pier.
"Who authorized his access?" he asked. Another pause. "Keep him at the visitor station. I'll come down."
He replaced the receiver.
"Your father is at the gate," he told me.
Brandon lifted his head. "Dad came?"
"He says he's here as a witness to the complaint."
Robert Owens lived close enough to reach the base quickly, but not close enough to have come by chance. I looked at the tablet and remembered Brandon's sentence on the pier: *Does Dad know you are pretending to be important today?*
"Did Brandon contact him?" I asked.
"Security can establish the timeline," Reed said. "For now, your father stays off the ship."
Brandon stood. "He can explain what happened."
"What happened this morning?" I asked. "He wasn't here."
Brandon looked to his legal officer and sat back down.
Reed left Marcus with us and went to the gate. The room seemed quieter after he was gone. Ellis was excused to accompany the engineering team. Before he left, he turned his clipboard over in his hands.
"I didn't know if calling would get me in trouble," he said.
"I know," I told him.
He nodded once and went through the door.
Marcus stayed by the table, entering the time and location for every item he had taken into custody. Watching him work steadied me. He had been beside me through inspections where a missing signature meant nothing more than a rushed day and others where a small error led us to a serious fault. He never treated a sailor's fear as proof, or a senior person's certainty as an answer.
"Your father being here changes nothing about the log," he said without looking up.
"I know."
But it changed the room for me. I could picture Dad at the visitor station in his brown jacket, telling whoever would listen that he had come to clear things up. He had said those words before. Usually they meant he wanted me to accept Brandon's version so we could all eat dinner in peace.
My phone vibrated with a message from an unfamiliar base number. It was from visitor security, asking me to confirm that Robert Owens was my father. I replied yes. A second message followed: he had brought a printed statement and asked that it be delivered to Admiral Reed.
Marcus saw my expression. "Don't read anything sent to you privately. Let it come through the proper channel."
I put the phone facedown.
When Reed returned, he carried a single sheet in a clear sleeve. Dad had signed it at the bottom. Reed gave a copy to Brandon's legal officer first, then let me read another.
Robert Owens stated that Brandon had called him from the pier after I had "personally threatened to ruin his career." He described the supposed threat in careful, quoted words. They were almost identical to a sentence in Brandon's complaint.
Then I saw the time beside Dad's signature.
7:42 a.m.
