October 2084, Keri Riley is 23. Justin Kim and Stephanie Day are 24. Jeremiah Day is 27. Willow is 2, Lily is 18 months.
* immediately prior to this chapter in the timeline would be Keri’s flashback story, “change my world”: (never mind that I think I wrote that Madison had been up once before in April already—that piece had to be moved in the timeline a bit in revisions.)
Before he left with Keri's family to pick her up at the landing site in South Carolina, Stephanie told him, "I shouldn’t be there. It’ll be weird. It’ll be weird enough for you already."
She was right. It was weird. Medical staff were looking over the newly arrived earthlings, checking vitals, giving them juice to drink out of sippy pouches. The ones who had been up there a year took the longest to check out. They could have one family member present until they were cleared. Keri chose her mom, so Justin waited with Lily and Bryson.
Seeing his wife in the flesh left Justin feeling stumped. She looked exactly the same as when she’d left last year, yet he knew she’d become so much different. There were tiny scraps of some kind of feeling when he first saw her at landing—a thousand feelings battling for his mind and heart. He thought of what Stephanie said to him, “What took you so long?” What ever had him so enamored with Keri that he couldn’t see Stephanie standing right in front of him his whole life? Stephanie hadn’t been the kind of girl a typical teenage boy notices—she was reserved, tall and boxy, hidden under sweatshirts and baggy pants—and maybe he’d been entirely typical to fall for Keri who had sex written on her forehead. Well now he’d grown up and Stephanie had grown up, and he knew that what was hidden underneath all of those sweatshirts and baggy pants was wonderful. Now that she was married to someone else, and so was he. To think it could all be decided and over with before he even turned twenty. That wasn’t fair.
