Chapter 10 - The Horizon of the Stars
The seventy-third year of my father’s birth would have been in December, and to celebrate, Ethan and I drove the old Jeep back to the lake house for the winter solstice. The lake was completely still, a perfect, dark mirror that reflected the entire cold expanse of the Texas night sky.
The A-frame cottage was warm, the woodstove humming in the corner, the smell of ginger cookies and pine needles thick in the living room. Arthur Vance had sent a box of pecans from New Mexico, along with a note that read simply: “The mountains are tall, but the air is clear. Keep the well covered.”
At 9:00 PM, Ethan and I walked out onto the dock, wearing our heavy winter coats and holding two mugs of hot cider.
The sky above us was an impossible field of diamonds, the Milky Way tracing a long, silver ribbon across the dark pines. There were no sirens, no guards, no walls. Just the wind over the water and the small, steady light of the stars.
Ethan leaned against the wooden railing, his mug held between his gloved hands. "Maddie, do you remember the night before the trial started? When Mom took us out here and told us to look at the Orion belt?"
"I remember, Ethan," I said, resting my head against his shoulder. "She said that no matter how dark the night got, those three stars would always stay in a line. They never lose each other."
Ethan looked up into the deep blue vault of the sky, his face illuminated by the starlight, his dark eyes entirely clear of the shadows that had chased him since he was five years old. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, brass object—the clover-topped key he had kept hidden in his velvet treasure box for six long years.
He didn't look at it with anger. He looked at it like an old tool that had finished its work.
With a single, smooth motion of his arm, he tossed the key out into the center of the lake.
It made no sound as it hit the dark water, just a tiny, silver flash in the starlight before it sank down into the deep, quiet mud of the cove, joining the old ledgers and the broken promises at the bottom of the world.
"She was right, Maddie," Ethan whispered, his hand finding mine in the dark, his grip warm and strong. "The world is still good."
May you like
I tightened my fingers around his, looking out over the water where the reflections of the stars moved lazily in the ripples, bright and unbroken, a line of light that stretched all the way from the dark room of the past to the clean, open road of our future.
"Yes, it is, little brother," I said, as the winter wind lifted the scent of the pine trees into the sky. "It really is."
