She Tried to Burn My Father's Uniform, So I Wore It to Her Gala. Why Did a Colonel Show Up on My Birthday With a Letter That Made Her Shake
Chapter 1: The Smell of Wool
I smelled it from the mudroom before I had even set my backpack down.
It wasn't the clean, piney smoke the fireplace at Thistlebrook House usually gave off on cold March afternoons. This was sharper. Bitter. Like hair caught in a curling iron.
I knew that smell. When I was little, Dad used to singe the loose threads off his uniform with a lighter before an inspection, squinting, tongue pinched between his teeth, and the whole kitchen would fill with that same sour, scorched-wool stink. I used to wrinkle my nose and he'd laugh and say, "That's the smell of looking sharp, Hallie-bug."
My heart understood before my brain did.
I dropped the backpack and ran.
The great room was dim, the heavy curtains drawn the way Vivienne liked them in the afternoons. She stood at the hearth in her cream cashmere wrap, one hand resting on the mantel, the other holding the iron poker. And on the grate, half swallowed by flame, was a dark blue sleeve with a gold-braided cuff.
Dad's dress blues.
"Stop!"
I don't remember crossing the room. I remember the heat slapping my wrists, the brass buttons hot enough to sting, the way the jacket fought me like it was heavier than it should have been. I dragged it out onto the hearthstones and smothered the smoking cuff with both palms until the little orange worms of fire went black.
Behind me, Vivienne sighed. Not a gasp. Not an apology. A sigh, the kind people give a dog who tracked mud on the carpet.
"Hallie. You're getting soot all over the rug."
I looked up at her. My hands were shaking so hard the buttons clicked together.
"What are you doing?"
"Clearing out." She set the poker back in its stand with a delicate little clink. "The Pryce people's designer comes Friday. I'm not staging this house with a d3ad man's closet in every room."
"It's his uniform."
"It's polyester and brass, sweetheart." She tucked a strand of ash-blond hair behind her ear. "He isn't in it."
The words landed somewhere under my ribs and stayed there.
I pulled the jacket into my lap. The left cuff was ruined, the braid curled and blackened, but the rest had survived. His name tape was still there over the right pocket. BRENNAN. The ribbons were still pinned in their neat rows above the left one, exactly where he'd always tapped his chest when he told me things he wanted me to remember.
"Everything that matters, I keep right here," he used to say. "Close to my heart."
He had been gone six years. A training accident at Fort Kettering, two weeks before he was supposed to come home for good. I was twelve. Vivienne had been my stepmother for three years by then, and I had spent every year since learning exactly how little room she had for me.
"Saturday is your birthday," she went on, examining her nails. "After that, you're an adult, and whatever you do with his junk is your business. Until then, this is my house. And Saturday night, I need you invisible. The Pryce family is coming for the signing gala, and I won't have you moping on the staircase."
"Saturday is prom."
"Then I suppose you'd better find a dress." She smiled. "I'm certainly not paying for one. The college fund ran dry a long time ago, as you know."
I did know. I just never knew where it had gone.
I stood up slowly with the jacket folded over my arms, the trousers dangling from the grate where I yanked them free. I didn't trust my voice, so I didn't use it. I walked past her, up the wide staircase, down the hall to my room, and shut the door with my hip.
Then I laid the uniform out on my bed and sat on the floor beside it.
When I was ten, Dad had put on these exact blues for a ball on base and come into the kitchen to show me. I'd been in pajamas, eating cereal. He'd held out his hand and said, "Practice run." I stood on top of his polished shoes in my socks, and he waltzed me around the island while Mom's old radio played something with too many violins.
"Senior prom," he told me, spinning me past the fridge. "I'm walking you in. I'll be in the blues, you'll be in whatever you want, and every boy in that gym is going to be terrified of me."
I had laughed so hard I nearly fell off his feet.
Now I touched the burned cuff and felt something rise up in me that wasn't quite grief. It was steadier than that.
"Okay," I whispered to the empty room. "You're still walking me in."
I would make the dress myself. From this.
I was reaching for my seam ripper when I heard the floor creak in the hallway. I looked up. Through the gap under the door, a shadow stood perfectly still.
Vivienne hadn't gone back downstairs.
She was standing outside my room, listening. And for a woman who had just called that uniform junk, she seemed awfully interested in where it had gone.
Chapter 2: Close to My Heart
My grandmother Ada's sewing machine lived in the corner of my closet under a quilt, because Vivienne said it was an eyesore. It was a heavy black Singer with gold scrollwork worn down to the metal where Grandma's thumbs had rested for forty years. She'd taught me on it the summer before she d!ed, and I hadn't touched it since.
I hauled it onto my desk that night and plugged it in. The little lamp above the needle flickered on like it had been waiting.
For the next three nights, I worked after midnight, when the house went quiet.
I learned how much of my father was in that uniform. His shoulders had stretched the jacket a little wider on the right side, from years of carrying a rucksack heavier on one arm. There was a tiny ink mark inside the collar where he'd written his initials, D.R.B., in case it got mixed up at the cleaners. In the trouser pocket I found a wrapped peppermint, the kind he always handed me in church, and I had to put my forehead down on the desk for a minute before I could keep going.
I sketched the dress on the back of a chemistry worksheet. A fitted bodice made from the jacket, the brass buttons running down my spine. A skirt pieced from the trousers and the satin lining, flared enough to dance in. The gold braid from the good cuff along the hem. And the burned cuff, I decided, would become a band around my left wrist. I wasn't going to hide what she'd done to it.
My best friend, Tamsin, texted me Tuesday night.
Tamsin: still coming saturday?? limo picks up at 7. you can ride w us
Me: I'll be there. making my own dress
Tamsin: from WHAT
Me: from him
She sent back a single blue heart, and nothing else, which is why she's my best friend.
Rosa, our housekeeper, the only person Vivienne hadn't managed to drive off, found me asleep at the machine on Wednesday morning. She didn't say anything. She just set a cup of coffee by my elbow and a spool of navy thread I hadn't asked for, and closed the door softly behind her.
Wednesday night, I started on the lining.
The left chest of the jacket was stiffer than the rest. I had noticed it before and assumed it was interfacing, the extra fabric tailors use to make a chest lie flat. But when I slid my seam ripper under the silky lining, the stitches I found weren't machine stitches. They were big, uneven, a little crooked. Hand stitches.
Dad's stitches. He sewed his own buttons back on every time, badly, and refused to let anyone help.
My breath went shallow.
Behind the lining, right over where his heart would have been, was a flat pocket made from a scrap of the same blue wool. Inside it was a clear plastic sleeve, folded twice.
I unfolded it with my fingertips.
The first page was typed and very formal. PREMARITAL AGREEMENT between Daniel Robert Brennan and Vivienne Anne Marsh. My eyes skipped down the dense paragraphs until a line stopped me cold.
Vivienne Anne Marsh hereby waives any and all present or future claim to the real property known as Thistlebrook House, which shall remain the separate property of Daniel Robert Brennan and pass to his daughter, Hallie Grace Brennan.
At the bottom were two signatures. My father's, with that sharp backward slant to the D. And Vivienne's, round and looping, with a little circle over the i.
Folded behind it was a square of yellow legal paper in Dad's handwriting.
Hallie-bug,
If you found this, I wasn't around to hand it to you myself, and I'm sorry for that. Keep it close. Don't give it to anyone but Marcus. He'll come.
Love you to the moon and back, and then some.
Dad
I read it four times. Then I read the agreement again, slower.
I remembered the lawyers in the dining room after the funeral. I remembered Vivienne in black, dabbing her eyes, saying Daniel never believed in prenups, never made a will, never planned for anything. I remembered someone mentioning that old Mr. Fairley, Dad's attorney, had passed away, and that his office files were lost when the river flooded.
Every copy gone. Except the one Dad had sewn over his heart.
That was why the uniform was in the fireplace. She hadn't been clearing out a closet. She'd been clearing out the last piece of proof.
The doorknob turned.
I hadn't heard her on the stairs. Vivienne stood in the doorway in her silk robe, a glass of white wine in her hand, her gaze dropping from my face to the paper in my lap.
I watched it happen. The color drained from her cheeks from the top down, like water out of a sink.
"Give that to me."
My fingers closed tight around the plastic sleeve.
"No."
Chapter 3: The Key Turns
She set the wine glass on my dresser very carefully, the way a person sets something down when they plan to need both hands.
"Hallie. You don't understand what you're holding."
"I understand it fine." My voice wobbled, and I hated it. "You signed this. You told everyone there was nothing."
"I told the court what I knew." She took a step closer. "That is a scrap of paper you found in an old coat. It could be anything. A draft. A joke. Your father had a sense of humor, if you recall."
"It has your signature on it."
She lunged.
I twisted away, and her manicured fingers caught my wrist instead of the paper. She squeezed hard enough that I gasped, and in that half-second I shoved the plastic sleeve down the front of my sweater, flat against my skin. Close to my heart. I didn't even think about it. My body just knew where Dad had kept it.
Vivienne let go. She was breathing fast now, her perfect hair slipping loose.
"Dutch!" she called over her shoulder.
Heavy footsteps came up the stairs. Dutch was the head of the private security company Vivienne hired the year after Dad d!ed, a wide, quiet man with a shaved head and a wire in his ear. He mostly stood at the gate. I'd never once heard him laugh.
"Ma'am?"
"My stepdaughter isn't feeling well. She'll be resting in her room until Sunday." Vivienne held out her palm to me. "Phone."
"You can't do this."
"Phone, Hallie. Or Dutch takes it."
I looked at Dutch. He looked at the carpet.
I put my phone in her hand. She took my laptop from the desk too, and then, after a pause, she reached over and yanked the plug of Grandma Ada's sewing machine out of the wall, as if it might call for help on its own.
At the door, she turned back.
"Let me explain how the rest of your week goes," she said softly. "Saturday night, Graham Pryce signs for this house in front of a hundred and fifty people who matter in this county. Sunday morning, you wake up eighteen, with no house, no college fund, and nobody to call. Your father isn't coming. And his little Army friends stopped coming years ago." She smiled. "I made sure of that."
The door closed. I heard the old skeleton key grind in the lock, the one that had sat decorative and unused in that door for a hundred years.
I sat on the floor until my legs went numb.
The days after that ran together. Rosa brought trays three times a day while Dutch stood in the hall watching. On Thursday, as she set down a bowl of soup, she bent close enough to straighten my napkin and breathed four words in Spanish-accented English.
"The Colonel came. Tuesday."
My head snapped up. Dutch shifted in the doorway, and Rosa was already gone.
The Colonel. Marcus Odell. Dad's best friend since basic training, the man who stood up at his wedding to my mom and carried his casket six years ago. He used to send me birthday cards with a twenty-dollar bill and a bad joke inside. After the first year, the cards stopped. I thought he forgot me.
Now I wondered how many of them Vivienne had thrown away.
Don't give it to anyone but Marcus. He'll come.
He had come. And Dutch had turned him away at the gate.
By Saturday, I'd plugged the machine back in with an extension cord hidden under the rug and finished the last seams by lamplight. The dress hung on my closet door, dark blue and gold, the brass buttons catching the light. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever made, and nobody was going to see it.
At seven o'clock, I heard a limousine horn at the bottom of the drive. Tamsin. It honked three times, waited, honked again, and finally pulled away.
I pressed my forehead to the cold window and cried the ugly kind of crying, the kind that makes your whole chest hurt.
Below me, cars kept arriving. Valets with umbrellas. A string quartet tuning up in the ballroom. Laughter rising through the floorboards. Somewhere down there, my father's house was being sold out from under me with champagne.
Rain started ticking on the glass, then hammering, turning to sleet.
And through the blur, I saw the porch roof below my window. The white rose trellis bolted to the corner post. The flowerbed beneath it.
I remembered Dad, the year I turned eight, walking me through a fire drill he invented himself. He'd opened this exact window and pointed.
"Second floor, Hallie-bug. Window, porch roof, trellis, ground. You never wait for someone to unlock a door."
Vivienne had locked the door.
She had never once thought about the window.
Chapter 4: Window, Roof, Trellis, Ground
I got dressed with my hands shaking.
The bodice fit like it had been waiting for me. I fastened the brass buttons I could reach and left the top two undone. I slid the burned cuff over my left wrist. Then I took the plastic sleeve from under my pillow, folded it once more, and tucked it inside the hidden pocket I had carried over from Dad's jacket into my dress. Left side. Right over my heart.
I didn't have prom shoes. I had my old black flats and a pair of white sneakers. I picked the sneakers. Dad would have approved. You don't do a fire drill in heels.
The window stuck at first. Swollen with damp. I braced my palms against the frame and pushed until it gave with a crack that I was sure the whole house had heard. I froze, listening. The quartet played on. Somebody downstairs laughed too loudly.
The cold hit me like a hand.
Sleet stung my bare shoulders. The porch roof was slick and gray, shining under the light from the drive. I gathered the skirt in one fist, swung my legs over the sill, and lowered myself onto the shingles on my stomach, inch by inch, the way Dad had shown me, keeping three points touching at all times.
"Three points, Hallie-bug. Two hands, one foot. Or two feet, one hand. Never fewer than three."
I said it under my breath like a prayer.
At the edge of the roof, the trellis waited, white paint flaking, old rose canes threaded through the slats like barbed wire. I swung one sneaker down, found a crossbar, and tested it. It creaked but held.
Halfway down, a thorn caught my forearm and dragged a thin red scratch across it. I bit my lip and kept going. Two rungs from the bottom, my foot slipped on the wet wood and I dropped straight down into the mulch bed, landing on my backside with a soft, wet thump.
For a second I just sat there in the rain, stunned, sleet running into my eyes.
Then I looked at the dress. The hem was muddy. The skirt was soaked. But the buttons were all there. The pocket over my heart was still flat and safe.
I laughed. I actually laughed, alone in a flowerbed in a dress made from my father's uniform. It sounded half crazy.
"Okay," I whispered. "Okay, Dad."
I stood up and walked.
The ballroom ran along the east side of the house, a long room of tall French doors that glowed gold against the storm. I stopped at the edge of the light and looked in.
It was like looking at a postcard of my own life, with me cut out of it.
Crystal chandeliers. Women in velvet and silk. Men in tuxedos holding champagne flutes. White roses spilling from silver bowls. At the far end, on a small raised platform where Dad used to set up the Christmas tree, there was a table draped in linen with a leather folio, a fountain pen, and a woman with a notary stamp sitting beside it.
Graham Pryce stood next to the table. I recognized him from the billboards along the highway, the developer who'd bought up half the farmland in Kessel County to put in townhomes. He was laughing at something with his hand on Vivienne's elbow.
Vivienne glowed in a silver gown, diamonds at her throat. Diamonds I had never seen before. I wondered, with a cold little click in my chest, what my college fund had looked like before it turned into those.
She raised her glass. Her voice floated through the glass doors.
"To new beginnings!"
A hundred and fifty glasses rose with hers.
My knees wanted to buckle. Every part of me that had spent six years learning to be small and quiet in this house was screaming at me to go back up the trellis and hide.
I thought about the yellow note. Keep it close.
I thought about his crooked stitches.
I put my hand on the brass handle of the French door and pulled it open.
The rain came in with me. A gust of icy wind set the candles flickering along the nearest table, and heads turned toward the draft. Then more heads. I walked in, soaked to the skin, my sneakers squeaking on the parquet, water dripping from the gold braid at my hem.
The quartet's bow scraped and stopped.
The room went still, conversation dying table by table like lights going out down a hallway.
"Is that a uniform?" a woman whispered near me.
"That's Dan Brennan's girl," someone answered.
At the far end of the room, Vivienne's glass had stopped halfway to her lips. She stared at me as if I had climbed up out of the ground. As if I were him.
Then her face twisted.
"Get her out of here!" she shouted at the security men by the wall.
And they started toward me.
Chapter 5: Don't Let Her Speak
Dutch was closest. Another guard in a black suit came around the dessert table from the other side. The guests parted for them, stepping back with their glasses held high, like people backing away from a spill.
I didn't run. I didn't know I was going to say anything until my voice came out, high and cracking, echoing off the chandeliers.
"Mr. Pryce. Before you sign anything, you need to know my father signed something first."
Graham Pryce's eyebrows went up. He glanced at Vivienne.
She recovered fast. She always did. She set her champagne down, pressed a hand to her chest, and turned to the room with a look of tired, tender sorrow.
"I'm so sorry, everyone. This is my stepdaughter, Hallie. She's been struggling terribly this week. Her father's anniversary always brings it all back." She shook her head slowly. "Look at her, poor thing. Playing dress-up in a d3ad man's laundry."
A few people tittered nervously. A man by the bar snorted into his drink.
But not everyone. An older woman in a green dress, Mrs. Pruitt from the church choir, didn't laugh. Neither did the gray-haired man beside her, who was staring at the ribbons on my bodice. I saw his lips move. Bronze Star.
I reached into the hidden pocket and pulled out the plastic sleeve. My fingers were so cold I could barely unfold it.
"This is a premarital agreement," I said. The room was so quiet I could hear the rain on the windows. "Signed by my father and by her. It says she gave up any claim to Thistlebrook House. It says this house goes to me."
The notary at the table set down her stamp.
Graham Pryce's attorney, a thin man with rimless glasses, leaned toward his client and murmured something.
Vivienne's composure cracked straight down the middle.
"Hold her down!" she shrieked. "Don't let that little witch say one more word!"
The sound of it rang through the ballroom, raw and ugly. Somebody's champagne flute slipped and shattered on the floor.
Dutch reached me first. His big hand closed around my upper arm, not hard, but firm, and the other guard grabbed for the paper. I clutched it against my chest with both hands and folded myself over it.
"Let go of her!" someone shouted. I think it was Mrs. Pruitt.
"Ma'am, please, just give me the paper," Dutch muttered, low, almost pleading.
"It's my dad's," I said into the wet wool. "It's my dad's."
That's when the light changed.
Red, then blue, then red again, sweeping across the tall front windows of the foyer, slashing across the white roses and the guests' startled faces. Sirens gave two short bursts and went silent.
Everyone turned.
The front doors of Thistlebrook House didn't swing open. They banged open, both of them at once, so hard that one of the old leaded glass panes cracked clean across. Cold air and rain swept down the foyer and into the ballroom.
Four soldiers in black armbands marked MP came through first, sidearms holstered on their belts, boots loud on the marble. They fanned out across the doorway without a word.
Dutch let go of my arm like it had burned him.
Behind them walked a tall man in dark blue dress uniform. The same uniform I was wearing. Silver hair cut close. Eagles on his shoulders. A face lined deeper than I remembered, but I knew it immediately, and something in my chest broke open.
Colonel Marcus Odell.
He didn't look at the guests, or the chandeliers, or the notary. His eyes found me first, dripping and shaking in the middle of the room, and something passed across his face that I didn't have a name for yet. Then he turned and walked straight to the platform where Vivienne stood.
The crowd moved out of his way without being asked.
"Mrs. Vivienne Brennan?"
She stood rigid, chin lifted, her hand still half raised from pointing at me.
"This is a private event," she said thinly.
"Yes, ma'am. I've tried the other way twice this week. Your man at the gate didn't care for my company." He reached into his jacket and removed a thick envelope sealed with red wax. "I was instructed by this young woman's father to deliver this into your hands..."
He drew back his sleeve and checked his watch.
"...on his daughter's eighteenth birthday."
It was 9:42 p.m. on Saturday.
My birthday.
I hadn't even remembered.
Vivienne snatched the envelope and tore it open with one nail, the wax seal cracking. She unfolded the first page. Her eyes moved across one line.
Then her hands began to shake. The paper rattled audibly in the silent room.
Nobody moved. Not the guests, not the quartet, not the soldiers at the door.
And for the first time in six years, Vivienne looked afraid.
Chapter 6: What He Knew
"This is a forgery," Vivienne said. Her voice came out thin and strange, like it belonged to someone else. "Daniel never made a will. Everyone knows that."
"Daniel made a will at the Fort Kettering Legal Assistance Office, eleven months before his accident," Colonel Odell said evenly. "Every soldier does before a long deployment. It was signed in front of two commissioned officers. I was one of them." He nodded toward the envelope. "That's your certified copy. The original was filed with the Kessel County probate court yesterday afternoon, along with a motion to halt any sale of this property. Your buyer's attorney should be receiving notice."
The thin man with rimless glasses was already scrolling on his phone. He stopped. He showed the screen to Graham Pryce without a word.
Pryce closed the leather folio with a soft, decisive slap.
"Vivienne," he said, "I don't buy houses with lawsuits stapled to them."
"Graham, wait, this is a misunderstanding..."
"Your sworn statement said no will and no prenuptial agreement existed." The attorney didn't look up. "If both exist, that statement was false. I'd advise my client not to be standing near it."
Pryce stepped down from the platform. His wife followed. Then a couple near the bar set down their glasses. Then another. The movement rippled outward, slow at first, the way water drains from a tub.
"Why now?" Vivienne demanded, turning on the Colonel. "Six years! Why wait six years?"
"Because he asked me to." Colonel Odell's voice was quiet, but it carried. "Dan knew about the money you'd been moving out of the joint account. He told me so on the phone the week before he d!ed. He didn't want to blow up his daughter's home over a suspicion. So he set it up so the will would be opened on her eighteenth birthday. If you'd done right by her, he wrote, you'd never have to read the letter on top." He looked at the papers trembling in her hands. "You're reading it."
I didn't know there was a letter on top. I watched her eyes flick down at it, and whatever it said, it made her press her lips together so hard they went white.
"I was overseas when he passed," the Colonel went on, softer now, and this time he was looking at me. "By the time I got home, she'd changed the gate code and the phone number. I wrote you every birthday, Hallie. Every one of them came back unopened."
Every year I thought he forgot me.
I looked at Vivienne. She wouldn't look at me.
"I gave that man five years," she hissed. "Five years of base housing and casseroles and waiting by the phone. I earned this house."
"You signed it away," I said. My voice didn't shake anymore. "Before you ever married him. With a little circle over the i."
Somebody near the door actually laughed, a short surprised bark.
Dutch stepped back from Vivienne's side and unclipped the wire from his ear. "Ma'am," he said quietly, "I wasn't hired for this."
He walked out with the guests.
Vivienne stood alone on the platform, silver gown, stolen diamonds, a table of untouched champagne flutes behind her and a notary packing up her stamp.
I walked over to her. Up close she looked smaller. Older. Her mascara had started to blur.
"You told me he isn't in it," I said, touching the brass button at my collar. "The uniform. You said he isn't in it anymore."
She stared at me.
"You were wrong. He's been in this room all night."
Colonel Odell cleared his throat behind me. When I turned around, he was holding something out. A small white box. Inside was a corsage. White roses and a thin navy ribbon.
"He left me one more instruction," he said, and his voice finally broke a little at the edges. "It said, If I can't make her prom, you go in my place. Wear the blues. Scare the boys." He swallowed. "Prom runs till midnight, kiddo. We've got two hours and nine minutes."
I laughed and cried at the same time, which I didn't know was possible.
We pulled up to the Varnell Hotel at 10:30, in a Military Police cruiser with the lights off, because the MPs insisted. When I walked into that ballroom on the Colonel's arm, muddy hem, white sneakers, burned cuff and all, Tamsin screamed so loudly the DJ stopped the music.
Then the DJ put on something slow, with too many violins.
And Marcus Odell held out his hand and said, "Practice run."
Epilogue
It took the probate court four months to make it official. It took Vivienne thirty days to move out.
She left with her clothes, her car, and very little else. The diamonds went back to the jeweler to cover part of what the estate's attorney proved she'd drained from my college fund, and the rest she is still paying off, one monthly check at a time, from a rented condo across the county line. The Pryce development went up on a different piece of land. I hear the women from her charity board stopped returning her calls around the time the story made its way through Kessel County, which in a town this size took about two days.
I didn't go after her for anything more. I didn't need to. She'd spent six years building her whole life on top of one lie, and when it went, everything else went with it.
Rosa still lives at Thistlebrook. She runs the place now, officially, with a real salary and a real title. She says I'm a terrible cook, which is true.
Colonel Odell retired in the fall. He comes for dinner on Sundays and brings a bag of those wrapped peppermints, and every single time he hands me one, I have to look out the window for a second.
He gave me the birthday cards, too. Six of them, still sealed, stamped RETURN TO SENDER in Vivienne's careful looping hand. Each one had a twenty-dollar bill and a terrible joke inside. I read them all in one night on the floor of my room and laughed until I cried.
I started college in January, two towns over, close enough to come home on weekends. The estate covered tuition. Dad would have pretended not to be proud, badly.
The dress hangs in my closet, in a garment bag Rosa bought me, with the muddy hem I've never washed. The hidden pocket is still sewn into the bodice. Some nights I unzip the bag just to touch the crooked stitches I copied from his.
This Thanksgiving, for the first time in years, we lit the fireplace in the great room. Real logs, real kindling. The Colonel built it the Army way, which he says is the only way, and Rosa rolled her eyes.
When the flames caught, I stood there for a long time and breathed in.
Pine smoke. Clean and sweet. Nothing burning that shouldn't be.
I reached up without thinking and pressed two fingers to the left side of my chest. Right where he always tapped.
May you like
Close to my heart.
Exactly where he said everything that matters belongs.
