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accepted this with a simple kindness that belied how much, in ways they dimly understood, the two years of his captivity had changed her as well.
    The woman Chad had met was eighteen, a freshman at Colorado College with no ambition other than to become a wife and mother; the man Allie had met was a senior at the Air Force Academy, the cocky product of an all-male society, whose goal was to fly the newest fighter planes as far and fast as they could go. They had fallen in love—or what Chad believed was love—and married with more optimism than insight. And for the next seven years Chad had continued to be who he was: high-spirited; prone to whiskey and when at liberty, the seemingly endless number of women who desired him; serious only about excelling as a pilot. Then, Chad’s regret had not been what the nomadic career of an air force officer had done to their marriage, but that he had missed Vietnam. Allie’s weary resignation, her quiet dislike of theirexistence—the constant moves; Chad’s nights spent drinking at the officers clubs; his casual philandering from California to Thailand—were, to him, unimportant when compared to the convenience of dropping in and out of her life.
    Until he could not reach her, and only the thought of Allie kept him alive.
    One night in Beirut, filled with scotch, Chad had been snatched off the street by three men speaking Arabic. His journey ended he knew not where, in darkness, a cell. For the first time—endless, minuteless hours and days—Allie was the center of his thoughts, her memory more precious than her presence had been, the hope of seeing her again all that kept him, amidst torture, from wishing to die. Though not— and this still astonished him—enough to make him tell his captors what they wished to know.
    And then he was free.
    When Chad Palmer came home, more in love than he had thought possible, he found a wife who did not conform to his memories.
    Their daughter, Kyle, slept surrounded by his photographs. But Allie had thought him dead. Now she did not seem to need him: for two years Allie had managed her own life.
    “You’re not the same,” she told him. “Neither am I. I’ll never be that girl again.”
    Her distance hurt him. Finally, he said, “I don’t think you missed me like I missed you.”
    She appraised him with a level gaze he had never seen before. “Maybe there was less to miss,” she answered.
    In some ways, Chad came to realize, he was more lost than he had been in prison. He had returned with a sense of seriousness unforeseeable in him, and rare in any man, to a wife transformed by his disappearance, and a daughter he did not know. The central purpose of his life—to fly—was gone: though his body healed well in time, he could no longer do certain things required to qualify as a fighter pilot. Nor did he know the man he had become by accident: a public figure hailed as a “hero” by the media, the air force, and more politicians than he had ever known existed.
    Slowly, from the ashes of his career, Chad constructed a new purpose for his life. Solitude had impelled him to reach conclusions about himself, and the society in which he lived.That was a gift, and so was every day thereafter. And if he did not see himself as a “hero,” he was wise enough to know that heroism had its uses and that, in politics, modesty would enhance this all the more. Both parties wanted to use him; he chose the Republicans out of a genuine congruence of beliefs. What he did not tell them, and what they learned only gradually, and to their sorrow, was that Chad was no conformist. He had learned in prison who he was.
    Together, he and Allie found a way to reconstruct their marriage. They moved to northern Ohio, where Chad had grown up, and he ventured into politics. He was an image-maker’s dream—plainspoken yet appealing, handsome as a film star. After, as Chad sardonically put it, “ten hard months spent proving my fitness for national leadership,”