The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up like copper wire.
I looked from Eleanor to Clara.
My wife had not moved from the mantelpiece.
She was not looking at the Admiral.
She was looking at me, her hazel eyes shining with tears that she had held behind her lashes for three years—tears of an unbearable, ancient pride that had finally reached the end of the long road:
“Sebastian,” Clara whispered, her voice trembling:
“Show the Admiral your compass.”
My hands began to shake with a cold, surgical tremor.
I looked down at the brass drafting compass in my left palm—the antique maritime tool forged from naval ordnance brass in nineteen-forty-two, which my grandfather had carried aboard a destroyer escort in the South Pacific.
I turned the compass over.
There, engraved on the underside of the central hinge pin, concealed beneath forty years of machine oil and hand-wear, were three microscopic, hand-stamped letters:
