EPILOGUE

Grace played with words in her mind while picking fruit in an orchard encircled by an ancient stone wall.

It’s August and my pockets / are full of plums

It’s the end of the cherries / but the figs have just begun

She smiled.

A small white puppy followed her as she headed uphill, studying the sheep in the meadow and beyond to where, under gathering storm clouds, the birds made an awful racket in the wooded hills.

Grace thought about the Armstrong family, adrift on the planet.

Steven and Vivian rented a house in Virginia near Phillip and Monica and the grandchildren. Frank and Tom’s families leased a compound in Wyoming where they were busy planning a veneer plant. Tom taught woodworking once a week, sang to the music, smiled again. He and Sara were expecting their second child, a girl. They laughed together a lot.

Sara and Rebecca took over the International Yellow Ribbon Alliance which was well funded with Frédéric Trinité’s $3 million donation and another $2.4 million from an anonymous donor. No one—beyond the Sheriff who would take the secret to his grave—had any idea who could have given such a large amount, but they were all very grateful.

Grace helped the Alliance with communications, ensuring them a strong voice in the debate. They published recommendations on management of Western forests which were widely read, sometimes followed.

Chase and Joan Stanford helped Grace publish her findings on multiple platforms, triggering outrage and investigations, discussions about sunsetting treaty obligations.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service was overwhelmed with opposition to its controversial Plan to kill barred owls while the EPA and US F&WS were flooded with emails pushing for bans on all poisons leeching into our waters, killing birds and wildlife.

Seamus Boyle’s information would eventually deliver Frédéric Trinité to the justice of the courts, but, until then, a horde of reporters made good on Grace’s promise, reducing his life to a very public hell. Boyle too was suffering, confined in a jail in Belize as the US took its sweet time extraditing him back to the States.

Grace had finished writing Liberty’s Price: Eternal Vigilance, dedicated to Virginia “Ginnie” Anderson. It told the story of communities like Silvercreek that had, and hadn’t, succeeded in establishing and keeping local control. One day, she hoped, humans would succeed at utilizing the Earth’s bounty while protecting it and respecting the people involved in the environmental equation.

As Grace reached the top of the hill, music flowed from the house—Jacob Diboum singing “Je Suis Heureux”, “I am happy”.

Grace smiled and lifted a red and black wool blanket from the rocking chair on the porch, pulled it over her shoulders. In the kitchen, a timer went off and she walked—with a slight limp and the puppy waddling behind her—through the blue door of the stone house with blue shutters.

Jackson watched her, from a big walnut desk next to where a fire glowed in an ancient stone fireplace. On the stone wall behind him hung the painting of the mill in the Lot Valley, their mill, Moulin à Libellule.

Grace placed the colander of fruit next to a bouquet of Queen Anne’s lace in a pitcher set on a white linen runner on the work table. A basket of eggs showed off their speckled tans, soft greens, eggshell blues. Copper pots hung from an oak shelf above the oven where Grace checked the bread. “Not long now,” she said.

Jackson walked to her, folded back the blanket. “Not long now,” he said, running his hands over the baby growing in her belly, kissing the wedding ring on her finger.

He thanked God every day for the good fortune that brought Grace to him and for His mercy that kept her by his side.

He wanted Grace with him for the rest of their days and children filling the house, playing in the forests and rivers, working their land one day, working in their mill.

They were starting a new life together in a new world, the Old World.

Never would they take their liberty or love for granted. They would guard both forever.

LA FIN/THE END