Across the nation in San Francisco, Hale Dynamics had been dismantled under federal chancery decree. Its thirty-one billion dollars in cloud infrastructure was re-chartered into permanent public trust telecommunications utilities, while Marcus Hale’s Pacific Heights mansion was auctioned on the courthouse steps to provide twenty-four million dollars in permanent restitution to regional miscarriage recovery and single-mother legal aid funds.
On the broad, covered cedar back deck of my restored home overlooking the deep-water shipping channel where the naval patrol cutters and civilian passenger ferries glided clean, smooth, and free toward Green Bay...
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Sitting at a long twelve-foot reclaimed chestnut trestle table with an open set of regional land surveys and a steaming ceramic mug of dark-roast chicory coffee...
Was Natalie Mercer.
I was thirty-eight now.
I had formally dissolved the marriage to Marcus Hale, resumed my ancestral name of Mercer, and assumed the permanent Chancellorship of the Sovereign Admiralty Trust six months ago, while directing strategic territorial title interdiction for the Joint Chiefs of Staff without drawing a corporate consulting dollar. The paralyzing trauma of losing our fourth baby, the memory of those nine unanswered telephone rings, and the heavy burden of eighty years of sovereign defense vigilance had completely metabolized into an un-shakeable, eighty-year architectural peace; my strength had completely returned, rooted in the bedrock of an un-broken command.
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