Ann walked him to the door and stepped out on the porch to watch him get in his new jeep and drive away.
She didn’t go back in the house immediately, but settled down on the swing to enjoy the sweetness of the autumn woods around the house. Summer was over. There was snow expected tonight, a lot of snow, though it was only late September. She hoped she’d be home snug in front of a fire long before the white stuff started. Her husband warm by her side. She smiled wistfully. Everything was back to normal. Almost.
She went back into the house and got ready to go to work. All the publicity from the monster, the exclusive video, had saved the Klamath Falls Journal. The circulation had gone through the roof as they’d hoped. In the beginning, people heard about the monster on the evening news and wanted to know more. For a while the only place to read more about the doomed dinosaur was in the Klamath Falls Journal.
Then after Ann was sure the paper was back on its feet, she’d sold the story and the video to larger newspapers across the country. She’d received amazing employment offers from three of those newspapers and turned them down. Zeke needed her. And she liked her life the way it was. Comfortable as an old shoe. In the park with her husband and her family. That’s where she wanted to spend the rest of her days. No more excitement.
She thought about George Redcrow often. She hadn’t known Greer as well, so George was the one she missed. He was the one, after all, who’d saved her life and had been her friend. He’d been in her stories, a remembered hero, like Lassen and Greer.
She’d had guilt over George to work through. At first she’d blamed herself.
If she wouldn’t have gone out there that day to get a story and pictures, he’d still be alive. If she would have moved quicker. Yelled, grabbed at him, or something. Done something other than what she’d done.
Eventually Henry and Justin had convinced her he might have died anyway, whether she’d been there or not. Many men had died that day. George had been on duty; he’d been a ranger. It wasn’t her fault. But, in the end, it’d been what Henry had confided in her late one night when he’d caught her weeping behind the bathroom door that had finally healed her blue heart. He’d said if George would have had a choice of a way to die, he would have picked that way, doing his job, being a hero, while saving a friend. George had admired Ann. Liked her. Known how much Henry had loved her. He hadn’t died a useless death. He’d saved another’s life and in doing that other’s lives as well. That would have made him happy.
And George had confessed to Henry he’d dreaded getting old and ending up a human vegetable in a lonely nursing home. With no relatives, wife, or children that was what he’d feared it would come to some day. Maybe she’d saved him from that indignity.
After she’d gotten enough of the wood’s beauty, Ann went to work, smiling, her thoughts on her husband. She knew she’d almost lost him and these days their marriage had a special poignancy. They were newlyweds all over again.