There would be hard days, and days of missing our parents so much it stole the breath out of me, and the slow, patient, delicate work of building some new kind of life out of what the storm had left standing.

But sitting there in the dark beside Ethan, with Evelyn sleeping safe inside and the leaves whispering overhead, I found that the fear — the old, cold, seven-month fear — was simply gone.

I was not an island.

I was a brother, and a grandson, and a survivor, and I was home.

And for the first time since that midnight phone call in November, I looked straight into the darkness of everything that was still to come, and I smiled, because I finally knew the one thing that mattered: whatever came next, we would face it together.

It had held.

We had held.

And we would go on holding, the three of us, for as long as it took.