“You will talk about it with me,” Anita said, pushing past the mention of Tristan. “I’m your mother.”

The blonde girl, Victoria Dallon, made a small whistle, signaling. She was close enough to hear, as she raised her voice, “Got a call, we’re being asked to come in!”

“So soon,” Anita said.

“If you hadn’t made me change—” Byron said.

“No blaming,” Ray told him. “There’s too much of it these days.”

“No blame,” Byron said. “Yeah.”

“Anita,” Ray said. “Before they go, I want a moment alone with him.”

“Do you want a divorce?” she asked. “Because I get little enough of him without you wanting exclusive time. We share our own children.”

“Anita. It’s important.”

Anita huffed.

“Byron will make it up to you by calling twice a day for the next short while.”

“I’ll what?”

“As a consequence of taking so long to tell us what was happening here.”

“I was trapped in prison in another dimension, no phones, and I still managed to let you know in a pretty reasonable span of time.”

“You missed your daily call.”

“I was in prison. I still got in touch, I—I’ve got to go.”

“You’re smart, you have a capable team, Byron,” Ray said. “And stay, let me have a word, por favor?”

“Only because I love you guys.”

“You’ll call twice, every day for the next two weeks,” Anita said.

“Next few days.”

Anita wanted to protest, but Ray ushered her away.

“I’ll be at the car, nursing a grudge,” she told Ray.

“I understand.”

She walked away. Some of the more distant people like the group at the coffee shop were just leaving.

Ray waited until Anita was gone. He looked at Byron. Byron, who had worried him so much when he was young, because he had never flourished. Part of that was living in his brother’s shadow. Part was because Byron wasn’t a flower or anything of the sort. A flower bloomed in visible ways, while Byron was encapsulated in a shell, the metamorphosis happening within, in small steps that only Byron noticed.

And somehow, without anyone realizing, he became this wonderful young man, noble and strong in his own way. Perhaps Ray’s first thought when he thought hero.

Sentiment in an emotional time, surrounded by other people reuniting with loved ones and catching up with colleagues, maybe.

But he’d had so many regrets when he thought this boy had died in battle.

“I could not be more proud of you,” Ray told his son.

Byron seemed to be at a loss for words.

“Except perhaps if you called your mother more.”

Byron smiled. A rare treasure.

“May I speak to Tristan?”

“Thought that was why you wanted mama gone,” Byron said. He blurred, features twisting, the lines of the blurs distorting the boundary between the boys before settling into Tristan’s outline.