"Yeah?"
"Next time you decide to bring us on a tropical survival march, think about packing a picnic."
Eric laughs and heads back down the trail at a jog.
By the time we get back to the hotel, we are hot and tired and agree to take a break in our rooms before getting back together in the evening. I say goodbye to them at the door to my room and head inside. Closing the bedroom door behind me, I go to the bed and pull my suitcase out from under it. I reach into the pocket on the outside and pull out a small box. Opening it, I run my fingers over the dog tags nestled inside.
Chapter Sixteen
Ten months ago…
The first time Emma walked through the cemetery toward the grave that bore her mother's name, it was unsettling and upsetting. She didn't understand why the grave existed. From the time she was a little girl, not even twelve years old when her mother was murdered, she looked at the urn her father picked out and understood her mother's ashes were in there. During the dark and fitful times when she questioned everything, and the thought of a white sheet covering the stretcher made her wonder if she had really died at all, thinking about that urn forced her through. She could walk up to it and touch it, put her hands around it and see her mother's name etched into it. It wasn't the same as having seen her face, but it gave her something tangible.
It was like the urns that held her grandparents' ashes. They didn't give her any sense of who they were or the type of comfort they seemed to give her mother when she was alive. But Emma could look at them and understand that's where their bodies were. Not in Russia where they died. Not in a cemetery somewhere marked by a stone that blended in among the rolling landscape of identical markers. They were there in those containers, and her mother was there in hers.
So why was she walking through a cemetery? Why did Bellamy find a death announcement that included information about a wake and a burial? It made no sense when her best friend went to Florida and found the information in the first place, and it made even less sense when she first crossed the grass and looked down at the stone with her mother's name on it.
She wasn't sure how she was supposed to feel in that moment. If it was supposed to be emotional in some way, or if it was supposed to bring her peace that she knew the body wasn't there. The problem was, she didn't know what to think. Anything could have been buried down in that grave.
But she didn't feel that way anymore. The sense of peace she felt might have been missing that first time but it came over her as she walked across the cemetery toward the plot. The May afternoon was bordering on hot, but the sunlight felt good beating down on her back. She got to the grave and knelt down in front of it. Brushing away some wayward bits of cut grass that clung to the stone, she set her mother's urn up against the stone.
“Happy Mother's Day, Mama,” she whispered. “I thought it would be nice to come and visit you here today. But, of course, we both know you're not in there. So, I brought you.”
Ian laughed beside her.
“I forgot how much like her you were,” he said. “Maybe you weren't this much like her when you were younger. But you definitely have her sense of humor.”
Emma looked at her father and smiled. That was the best compliment anyone could give her. She would cling to anything that connected her to her mother. Her long legs and blond hair were a hint, but being anything like her as a woman meant so much more.
Looking back at the grave, she reached over to the stone set close beside the one with her mother's name on it. There were a few more blades of grass covering the marker. She brushed them away, too.
“Hi, Elliot,” she said. “This is the first time I'm seeing your gravestone. It looks nice. Better than that little white thing with a number on it, right?”
It still hurt her to think about how long he’d lain there in the potter's field, unidentified and without even the dignity of a real tombstone. She liked knowing he was here in the Florida graveyard now. Still watching over her mother, even after all these years.
Her father had given her all the information he had about the man she’d once known as Ron Murdock. According to him, Ron's real name was Elliot. He had no family. He started working with the rescue group Spice Enya years before Mariya even did but became particularly close to Ian and Mariya. They were the closest thing he had to a family when he was alive, and Emma wanted to be certain they remained his family even now.
He deserved recognition and respect. He spent years protecting her mother and facilitating the rescues of people in extreme danger. He put his life on the line countless times to ensure her safe passage from place to place and assignment to assignment. And in the end, he offered up his own life in one last effort to protect Emma.
She wished it hadn't turned out that way for him, but she also knew he didn't die in vain. It was because of him she started pulling the thread that eventually led her to understanding what happened to her mother. Emma could only hope that would be what he wanted.
She and her father sat at the graves with a picnic spread in front of them, talking and sharing memories, feeling truly connected as a family for the first time in so long. Mariya might not be there physically,
