They came within a day.

All of them.

From four different lives in four different corners of the country, they dropped everything and came, and when they walked into the room I had rented, nineteen years fell away and yet nothing was the same, because we were older now, and softer in the places life had softened us, and united by something entirely different from the missions that had once bound us.

Because here is the thing I had not fully understood until I saw their faces.