“Skoal!” she agreed, clinking back, her smile brightening the room.

I stared at her.

“What?” she wondered.

“Nothing,” I said, shaking my head in wonder. In this case, of course, nothing meant everything.

She blushed.

I was smitten. If you’ve been really lucky, you know what I was feeling. You might even be able to close your eyes and re-create it. If you haven’t experienced it, all I can say is, I hope it happens for you. There had been a good run of women in my life since I rolled off the reassembly line, but not one of them had shown any staying power. Maybe that was my fault. It didn’t really matter, because that’s what it had taken me to get to this place. I didn’t know where we were going, neither of us did, so we lived happily in the present. Occasionally she would refer to her ex, “perfectly proper Peter,” without expressing any anger or regret. I was naturally curious why their marriage had failed, amazed that any man could let her go, but whatever had happened, she didn’t want to talk about it or repeat it. Unlike a lot of people, she was perfectly happy simply being perfectly happy.

I was still basking in her smile as I was on my way to the gym the next morning. An early morning rainstorm had temporarily broken the heat wave. Along the way I stopped at all my regulars, and after a few mumbled words dropped my usual buck in a cup.

There was no place I felt more at home than in a gym; the clacking of weights, the occasional grunts, the friendly banter had been the background music of my life. The smell of sweat was my perfume. Obviously, I couldn’t do everything I’d once done, so I compensated by doing more of what I could do. The Light Brigade had been with me the whole trip.

Wrightman’s speech was the only thing anybody wanted to talk about. There was a general uneasiness about his over-the-top patriotism. Wayne Chang, a D.C. detective, compared it to Dubya’s use of 9/11 to launch the war against Saddam Hussein. Everybody had an opinion about exactly what it meant, about how far he might be willing to go. No one could figure out his real intentions. He wasn’t banging the war drums, there was no screaming about political enemies, there weren’t even any obvious legislative goals. For me, I piped up, it was like an itch on your back that was just out of your reach; it was real and it wasn’t going away.

What was clear was that the White House was struggling to regain its solid footing. The doubts about the administration’s competence had provided an opening for us to publish Inside the Beltway stories that otherwise would have attracted little interest. I had published two additional stories pretty much demolishing the links between the attacks and the Detroit raid. The Hill ran a piece revealing that the Department of Labor had quietly changed the method used to compile economic statistics, making the economy appear significantly more resilient than it actually was performing. A Politico piece exposed the confusion inside the Defense Department about how to respond to the attacks. A Washington Post feature criticized the National Security Council for not taking stronger steps to restore the nation’s intelligence capabilities, which had been decimated by Trump and obviously insufficiently repaired by the Dems.