The Long Way Home
Her name was Mara Dalton, and she had spent twelve years being the most calm person in any emergency she had ever been in, and she was very tired of it.
This is not self-pity. It is the accurate observation of a woman who had flown one hundred and forty seven combat sorties over eleven years, who had accumulated three Distinguished Flying Crosses and a reputation in the 480th Fighter Squadron that she had worked twice as hard to build as the men around her and that had, in the end, been the most isolating achievement of her life. The reputation was real. The isolation was also real. Both of these things were true simultaneously and she had spent a great deal of time in the three years since her discharge making peace with the simultaneity.
She was thirty eight years old and she was on a plane to London because her sister had asked her to come, and she had said yes because saying yes to Sarah was something she had not been doing often enough. The reason she had not been saying yes to Sarah often enough was complicated and had to do with the difficulty of explaining herself to people who had not been where she had been, and Sarah was patient and loving and had never been to war, and the gap between those two things was wide enough that Mara had been standing on her side of it for three years not quite knowing how to cross.
So she was going to London.
She was going to sit in Sarah’s kitchen and drink tea and let her niece Emily show her things on a tablet that Mara did not understand and she was going to be a person who drank tea and looked at videos of animals doing things on tablets, and she was going to do this without monitoring exits or assessing sightlines or waking to every unfamiliar sound.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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