Dad slapped me across the face, right there at the dinner table. He continued striking me until his own colonel stood up from her chair and declared, “She’s a general.

We sat on the stone terrace of a small café in Georgetown two weeks later, the afternoon sun warming the brick walls covered in blooming wisteria.

Nathan was holding a cup of black coffee, watching the scullers on the Potomac glide past through the arches of the Key Bridge.

“I got the lease,” he said.

I looked up from my tea. “The space in Old Town?”

“Yeah.” A slow, genuine smile spread across his face—the kind of smile I hadn't seen on Nathan since we were children building forts out of driftwood on the Bayport shore. “The kitchen is huge, Lila. It needs work—the grease traps have to be replaced, and the walk-in cooler is from the nineties—but the bones are solid. The bank approved the small business loan yesterday.”

“Without Arthur’s co-sign,” I said.

Nathan let out a short, quiet laugh. “Without Arthur’s co-sign. It turns out when you aren't laundering fake invoices for naval parts, your credit score is actually pretty good.”

He reached across the small iron table and touched my hand. The skin of his fingers was rough from weeks of cleaning out the old restaurant space, but his touch was gentle, completely devoid of the twitchy, defensive tension that had defined him for forty years.

“I was so angry at you for so long, Li,” Nathan said, his voice dropping into that quiet, sacred space where siblings finally speak the truth. “When you left for basic training... I thought you were abandoning me. I thought you were leaving me alone with him.”

“I was running, Nathan,” I admitted, looking down at our joined hands. “I wasn't brave when I was eighteen. I was terrified. I thought if I stayed in that house another year, I would either end up in jail for hitting him back, or I would end up like Evelyn—agreeing with everything he said just so he wouldn't turn his eyes on me.”

“You didn't abandon me,” Nathan said firmly. “You showed me there was a world outside the fence. It just took me twenty years to climb over it.”

Quinn walked onto the terrace, wearing civilian clothes—a crisp white linen shirt and jeans—carrying three small boxes of fresh pastries from the bakery down the block. She set them on the table, pulled up a wicker chair, and sat down with that effortless, centered grace that made every space she occupied feel secure.

“The transfer orders for Evelyn were finalized this morning,” Quinn said, picking up a lemon tart.

“Transfer orders?” Nathan asked, his brow furrowing.

“She’s surrendered the deed to the Bayport house,” I explained. “The government allowed her to keep her mother’s inheritance and a small condominium outside of Trenton. She isn't facing criminal charges. The U.S. Attorney agreed that her role was passive, mostly signing what Arthur put in front of her.”

“Is she... is she okay?” Nathan asked, his natural gentleness surfacing despite everything.

“She’s angry,” I said. “She’ll probably be angry for the rest of her life. She still blames me for taking away her country club membership. But she’s safe. And for the first time in twenty-five years, nobody is screaming at her when she burns the toast.”

Nathan took a slow breath of the spring air.

“That’s enough,” he said quietly. “That’s more than she gave us, but it’s enough.”

The three of us sat there in the warm afternoon light, listening to the church bells from Georgetown University tolling three o’clock across the rooftops. There were no briefings waiting for me that afternoon. No supply manifests to audit. No defense appropriations committees to face with folders full of logistical calculations.