Well, who knows what would have been. I had a long history of playing the what-if game, and I tried not to do much of that now. Because when I didn’t think too hard about it, when I simply let the entire journey we’d undertaken swirl in my mind as a misty memory, every twist and turn seemed fated. Each challenge and every victory had propelled us forward in some astonishing way.

Not that I had a lot of time on my hands to sit and daydream anyway. Rebuilding the world was a full-time job, or at least, rebuilding our corner of it. I stood now, stretching my back from where I’d put a newly grafted tree into the ground and patted the dirt around it.

Our orange orchard now stretched as far as the eye could see, the same as it once had. From where I was, I could just catch a glimpse of the vegetable garden and the house Emily’s father and I had built for Emily and me.

I began walking, examining the trees that had been planted last spring. They were doing well, but it would be a few years until they produced fruit. The trees that had been spared from the fires, however, were heavy with bright orange jewels. They sparkled in the sunlight and scented the air around me.

I moved a little farther into the grove, able to see our land stretched below me from this higher ground. The barnyard…the chicken coop…the garden that was continually being expanded as we were able to trade for seeds we didn’t yet have at the farmers market a few miles from here. And up the hill a little farther were my bees and the honeycomb that Emily’s mom used to make candles.

These days, I often found it necessary to simply stop and take stock of everything around me. Perhaps, in some ways, it was only now that I was fully grasping the immensity of all that had occurred. We’d been working so long and hard up to this point to create a life where we could count on continued survival, that sometimes I had to remind myself what the world used to look like.

My gaze moved beyond, to the outside world, and my heart gave a hollow knock like it always did when I thought about how many people had perished. Cities, that had become bastions of crime in the aftermath of the solar flare, were now empty graveyards. Criminals and predators had ruled over the wreckage for a time, but eventually, their reign of terror had ended when supplies ran dry. Then they turned on each other, their numbers diminishing further by the day.

The criminals who had managed to survive had come into the countryside to find a new set of victims, but we’d been prepared, they’d been depleted, and that battle had been over before it’d really begun.