Was my grandfather Arthur Mercer Senior’s surviving younger brother.
My grand-uncle.
**Vice Admiral David Mercer**.
Seventy-four years old.
Chief of Naval Operations Emeritus.
Surgeon General Emeritus of the United States Navy.
Admiral Mercer walked down the center aisle, his hand-welted bridge shoes striking the parquet with that unhurried, rhythmic, concussive *TACK*:
*TACK.*
*TACK.*
*TACK.*
Every step fell with the mechanical, heavy cadence of a naval battery firing across an enclosed harbor.
He stopped beside the communion table, looked at his grand-niece standing unbowed in her mother’s wedding gown, turned forty-five degrees toward me, and brought his white-gloved right hand up to an unyielding, razor-sharp military salute:
“**Chancellor on deck!**” Admiral Mercer boomed across the sanctuary:
“Olivia Eleanor Mercer.”
“Master Trustee, The 1944 Mercer Sovereign Lineal Charter.”
“And Sole Lineal Custodian of Conduit Ten.”
Vanessa Reed collapsed onto both knees on the shattered glass of her fallen wine flute, her hands clawing at her stained ice-blue dress as her entire twenty-eight-year manufactured existence dissolved into ash:
