Chapter 15
I told her I had no idea what reasonable meant.
She told me that was exactly why she would control the budget.
Six months after the night she appeared at my gate, we held Jonah and Blythe's seventh birthday in the garden.
No politicians.
No investors.
No cameras.
Just friends, nurses, doctors, security personnel, Elena, Miriam, Genevieve, and two children who had once been given ten days to live.
Jonah ran across the lawn carrying his broken robot.
I had offered to replace it.
He refused.
"Mom fixed this one once."
Genevieve had repaired the missing arm with silver tape.
Blythe sat beneath an oak tree drawing.
I walked over.
"What are you making?"
She held up the page.
Four people.
Me.
Genevieve.
Jonah.
Blythe.
Then I noticed a fifth figure standing beside them.
Elena.
And behind everyone, she had drawn a small blue stone floating in the sky.
"What's that?"
She looked at me as if the answer were obvious.
"Mommy's necklace."
Genevieve approached behind us.
The actual necklace was no longer around Elena's neck.
After the trial began, Elena had tried to return it.
Genevieve refused.
"You kept my promise alive," she had told her.
"It belongs to you now."
Blythe leaned against my side.
"Daddy?"
"Yes?"
"Did you save us?"
I looked across the garden.
At Yates laughing with Miriam.
At Elena arguing with Jonah about how much cake a human body could survive.
At Genevieve standing in sunlight when I had spent two years believing I would never see her again.
"No."
Blythe frowned.
"Then who did?"
I thought about money.
Power.
The walls around my estate.
The guards.
The weapons.
All the things I had spent my life believing created safety.
Then I thought about a penniless twenty nine year old woman standing in freezing rain outside my gate because she had made a promise to someone the world believed was dead.
"Your mom saved us first," I said.
"Then Elena saved us.
Then the doctors saved us.
Then a lot of people refused to give up."
Blythe considered this carefully.
"So everybody?"
I smiled.
"Something like that."
That evening, after the guests left, Genevieve and I sat on the back steps.
Rebuilding a marriage after mourning your spouse is a strange thing.
She had returned from the dead, but our old life had not.
Too much had happened.
She carried guilt for letting us believe she was gone.