Chapter 19
After the call, I stood at the kitchen window for a long time without moving.
The cedar beds needed turning over before winter.
The tomatoes were still coming in, more than I could use alone.
I thought about my husband building those beds on a September weekend, measuring twice, screwing the planks together with the particular care he gave to things that were meant to last.
I thought about him saying, *This'll still be here when we're old*.
I thought about how we had both assumed we would be here together when old finally arrived.
The lake house had always been his idea too.
His love of water, his love of early mornings on the dock with coffee and no agenda.
I had carried it forward for him, maintained it, paid for it, because letting it go had felt like letting him go.
It did not feel that way anymore.
It felt like something complete.
A thing that had its full life, and was now being passed gently to someone who would love it the way it deserved to be loved.
I went outside and started on the tomatoes.
* * *
# CHAPTER 10: The Last Conversation
Madison called on a Sunday morning, three weeks after the settlement.
I was on my back porch with coffee, the kind of late September morning that arrives unexpectedly warm, as though summer has one last quiet thing to say before it goes.
"Can I come over?" she asked.
"Of course," I said.
She arrived an hour later with a paper bag from the bakery we had been going to since she was small — the one on Fifth Street with the cinnamon rolls that were too large to eat in one sitting.
She put them on the kitchen table and sat across from me without taking off her jacket.
"Connor and I are in counseling," she said.
May you like
I poured her a cup of coffee.
"How is that going?"
