I turned to Ollie, my eyes already streaming.
“How did you—”
“Turn around,” Ollie said, grinning now, tears on his own face. “At exactly the right moment. He said you’d be standing right here.”
I turned toward the gymnasium doors.
And they opened.
And Logan walked through them.
In his dress blues. Real. Home. Six thousand miles from where his phone call three days ago had said he’d be.
The entire gym froze.
Two hundred kids, the chaperones, the DJ — nobody moved, nobody breathed, like the whole room had been pressed pause.
Then somebody gasped, and somebody started to clap, and the sound built into a roar as Logan crossed that floor in his uniform, his eyes locked on me the entire way, and I could not move, could not do anything but shake and cry in my blue dress.
“The call was real,” he said, when he reached me, his voice rough. “They weren’t going to release us. Then my CO heard why I wanted to come home, and he made it happen. Ollie’s been coordinating it with me for two days. The suit, the flowers, the stall — all of it, so you’d be standing right here, right now.”
