At the first Detroit Homecoming in 2014, organizers gave each expat a deed to a parcel of land in the city, a symbol of the enduring connection between this place and its people.

I got one and promptly lost it, but the idea took root: Two years later, after 31 years away, I returned home to Detroit for good.

Kerry Duggan got a deed that day, too, and it changed her life.

Before I get back to that day and the deed, let me tell you a little about Duggan. She grew up in Farmington Hills, one of four children raised by parents who met in the bleachers at Tiger Stadium. Her mother stayed home with the kids. Her father worked in risk management for several health care systems. "When I was growing up," she told me, "I was forbidden from going to Detroit."

Kerry attended Catholic schools before transferring to Detroit Country Day School, where she became an all-state basketball player. (Though she is not related to Mayor Mike Duggan, she did play basketball against his daughter.)

Kerry Duggan later played hoops at St. John's University and in Europe before transferring to the University of Vermont to quench her interest in environmental policy. That led her to Washington, where she worked for the Energy Department.

One day in 2011, her boss got a memo from the White House. President Barack Obama wanted to deploy top federal talent to work with community leaders in Detroit and a few other major cities. "You're from Detroit," he told Duggan. "Go see about this."

For the next seven years, Duggan commuted between Washington and Detroit, one of a half-dozen or so Obama administration officials embedded in City Hall to learn what Detroit's leadership needed from Washington, then convening meetings at the White House to meet those needs.

Her main project: Helping Mike Duggan keep his campaign promise to light up the city streets. The Strong Cities, Strong Communities program is a rare example of a federal-city partnership that created real and durable progress. Rather than impose mandates from on high, the program injected problem-solving federal workers into cities to assist local leaders. Nothing like it exists today.

For the first meeting between Duggan and her fellow Washington travelers, she brought her three-month-old son to Detroit. In the next three years, Liam would take 52 flights between Washington and Detroit with his mother, and the Westin Book Cadillac would become their second home.

That brings me back to the 2014 Detroit Homecoming. When Duggan looked at her deed, she got a chill; there was a family connection to the Virginia Park land she now owned.

Her great-grandfather, Daniel O'Donnell, left Ireland in 1914 to escape poverty and landed in Detroit, where one of his sisters had already moved. He had $14 in his pocket and built himself a home in Detroit.

He invested. He bought property. He opened a bar called Shamrock Pub near Virginia Park.

Holding that deed at Homecoming, Duggan realized she couldn't spend another night at the Book Cadillac. She wanted to invest. She wanted to buy property.

"I called my husband in Washington and said, 'We're either buying a place here in Detroit or I'm quitting my job. And I'm not quitting my job.'"

They bought a loft in Eastern Market, where she and Liam stayed during her trips to Detroit. In July 2015, Duggan went to work for Vice President Joe Biden and, because she no longer needed a place to stay in Detroit, rented out the loft.

Biden's last official trip as vice president was to Detroit, a trip that Duggan took aboard Air Force Two last January.

Seven months later, Duggan left Washington and moved her family into their Eastern Market loft. "I couldn't get the place, this city, out of my bones," she told me over breakfast at Zeff's in Eastern Market. "Nobody can."

So she's brought her consultancy business, SustainabiliD, to the D, and she's still working with the city, among other institutions, to connect dots that need connecting for the connected future.

Daniel O'Donnell's great-granddaughter is back home.