Fourteen months later.
The early autumn sun broke over the high, landscaped sandstone ramparts and the wide, sparkling blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean outside our restored family homestead in Oceanside, California, burning off the sweet morning mist that clung to the sweeping clover lawns and the blooming native bougainvillea along our front terrace.
The air was sixty-eight degrees, smelling of sun-cured cedar shingles, salt spray from the Pacific, fresh-baked blueberry scones, and the clean, honest ozone of an un-broken American sky.
The historic forty-acre Mercer estate—and the memory of that third-grade classroom where Clara’s work had been tossed in the trash—had been completely transformed.
On the cleared site where Evelyn Harrow’s private corporate annex had once stood in San Diego, the Department of the Army and the Department of Defense had installed a permanent geodetic monitoring monument; surrounding it now, occupying forty acres of protected shoreline parkland, stood **The Chief Master Surveyor Arthur Mercer & Lauren Eleanor Sovereign Children’s & Working Military Families’ Sanctuary**, its state-of-the-art forensic auditing archives, military family legal defense clinics, and world-class canine tactical training centers training four hundred young female officers, military dog handlers, and service dependents every year in commercial contract defense, sovereign estate law, and constitutional property protection.
