Johnston Green stood at the sink in the kitchen of his home, his wife still sitting quietly in the dining room. He knew that he had been short with her, but Gail had been as close to unbearable to live with these last days since April's death as she'd ever been in their thirty plus years of marriage. They had all lost someone special that day, but Gail had taken her daughter-in-law's death especially hard. She had also taken out her anger on her youngest son, on Mary Bailey.

On him. But they had all suffered that day.

Johnston shook his head. He needed to go back in and talk with his wife: the woman he'd loved and lived with for most of his adult life. He would apologize, for sure, even though no apology was truly warranted. But then he would tell her how he felt; he would tell her his perspective of everything that had transpired; he would explain to her why she was right, that she was at least partly responsible for Eric leaving Jericho for New Bern. It would hurt to say it, to tell his wife such a painful truth. And he knew it would hurt her to hear it – doing it would be one of the most painful things he had ever been forced to do. But doing this was better than leaving things status quo. The status quo, as it stood right now, would surely fester into something far worse, something far more insidious. He knew that they couldn't withstand letting things stay as they were. What was the Abraham Lincoln quote? 'A house divided against itself cannot stand'.

Those words were as true about marriage as they were about a shaky democracy: both institutions were worthy of the hard work it would entail and the pain they might have to suffer to keep them whole. Johnston figured that the parallels would hold true for whatever lay ahead for Jericho in the days and weeks, months and years to come.

He turned from the sink and headed to the dining room. He needed to work on his own 'house', because without Gail, and his boys, all of the rest, to Johnston Green's mind, could just as well fall away like a house cards.

The End.