Mom walked straight to my chair, setting the flowers on the chestnut table with a proud, confident click.
She leaned down, wrapping her strong, warm arms around my neck, pressing her soft cheek against mine:
“Elena?”
Mom whispered into the morning breeze:
“The water is sweet.”
“The door is unlocked.”
“The house is ours.”
“And nobody is ever making you fly five thousand miles away again.”
I reached up, wrapping my strong, loving arms around my mother, feeling the living, breathing miracle of a family that had survived the storm and gathered upon solid rock:
“Nobody is ever separating us again, Mom,” Colonel Elena Mercer replied:
“The house is clean.”
Mounted in solid teak on the cedar wall of the pavilion behind our rocking chairs…
Beneath a clean pane of museum-grade non-reflective glass…
Was the Four-Inch Solid-Titanium Transponder Key.
Beside it, resting inside a velvet-lined rosewood shadowbox, was the broken gold nib of Chief Justice Arthur Vance’s Montblanc fountain pen.
