His parents drove up together in late August, which they had not done since the original arrival five years ago. His mother had called ahead; his father had cleared his schedule. They came through the camp barrier together and he met them at the bottom of the south hill.
His mother hugged him first — the specific hug of someone who has been managing their worry about you across a very long distance and is releasing it directly into the physical reality of you being present and uninjured. He held on. He let it be long.
His father shook his hand and then pulled him into a hug too, which Marcus Alexander did not do spontaneously very often. When he did, it was always complete — his father's specific quality of full presence, the physician's attention turned from the diagnostic to the personal.
They walked around the camp. All of it — not the orientation tour but the real one, the one that showed the places that mattered. The eastern woods where he had practiced for five years. The hill and Thalia's Pine, which was thriving. The medical room where his father's training program had been running for four years and had produced, he reported, a measurable improvement in serious injury outcomes that he had been tracking in his own records.
He brought them to the Hecate cabin.
His mother stood at the door and put her hand on the stone the way he had put his hand on the stone when the cabin appeared. She was quiet for a long time. He thought about her at a crossroads sixteen years ago — the conditions she had negotiated, the trust she had placed in a bargain with a goddess, the specific love that had let him be himself rather than requiring him to be the manageable version.
'She kept her word,' his mother said, about Hecate.
'Yes,' Kael said.
'And you kept yours.'
'Yes.'
She pressed her hand to the stone for a moment. Then she turned and looked at him with the specific look — the one he had been receiving since he was four years old at the kitchen table, the look of someone who had always seen the full version of him rather than the version that fit most easily into the available categories.
'I'm so proud of you,' she said. It was simple and complete and he believed it without qualification.
He thought about Aurelie's diary, which his mother had found in a cedar box. He thought about four generations of Hecate-blood in his family, some of it used well and some of it kept small and all of it having led here. He thought: I am standing in the continuation of something that started before I was born, in either life, and the continuation is mine to build further.
'I'm proud of us,' he said. 'All of us. The whole line of us.'
His father was looking at the camp's medical room through the window he could see from the cabin door. 'The training program is running well,' Marcus said. 'Chiron tells me they've adopted it at two affiliated programs.'
'I know,' Kael said. 'You should come back and run a seminar. Properly, not just a single visit. The Apollo cabin's healing work would benefit from your pharmacological knowledge — there are gaps in their approach that your training can fill.'
Marcus looked at him with the expression of someone who has just been offered something they have been quietly wanting to be offered. 'I would like that,' he said.
They stayed for a week. It was the best week of the summer, in the way that certain weeks are best not because of what happens in them but because of who you share them with.