Best of all, when she arrived no media had been lurking at the On Time or seemed to have made it across the channel to the property. When John had said he had a few things to take care of and had left for Chappy with Earl, he must have taken care of the reporters. In his peaceful, coply way.

Digging through her refrigerator, she came up with various bits and tossed them into a salad—greens, tomatoes, some vegetable lo mein, and leftover chicken. Thankfully, it tasted better than it looked. She sat by the window while she ate, not turning on either the television or the radio for the false company of voices. She did not check her phone for texts or her laptop for mail; she simply sat and pondered. Mostly, she tried to steer her pondering to Donna’s impending visit.

Kevin would be upset that their mother was still coming. Maybe he should have been the one to call her—he knew Donna so much better than Annie ever could.

Annie could not imagine what it would have been like if she’d been Kevin, if she’d been raised by a mother but no father, a working mother, which still had not been common in the seventies when Kevin was growing up. For Annie, it might have been fun to be around all of Donna’s beautiful antiques, to have been surrounded by her friends who probably had creative minds and knew about history and art and all kinds of interesting things.

Bob and Ellen Sutton had provided a much different kind of home. But it had been a nice home. Where Annie had felt loved.

Tears began to well. She missed the mom and dad who’d raised her: the caretaking predictability of her mom, the unpretentious, nonjudgmental steadiness of her dad. Pushing away her salad now, Annie stood, went to her bookcase, and removed a large blue binder—the photo album she hadn’t looked at in a long time. She sat down in her rocking chair, slowly turned the pages, and remembered.

As a toddler, she’d always looked bewildered, her mass of black curls so different from the fair hair of her parents. By elementary school, her curls were gone, her hair then long and straight, parted down the middle because she’d wanted to be Cher. At her high school graduation, when Annie was named class valedictorian, Bob and Ellen Sutton looked so proud standing beside her on the dais. She traced her finger, first around her mother’s smile that had softened with the years, then around her dad’s receding hairline, that he’d often joked displayed his age the way the rings of an old tree trunk showed off theirs.