I wait for her to join me. When she doesn’t, I cross to the sunroom door. Elbows on the keys, face in her hands, and shoulders hunched, my Joy is joyless.

“Oh, baby,” I breathe, rushing to the bench. As soon as my arms are around her, she begins to sob. Swaying, as we did when she was a baby, I rub her back until the tears slow. She wipes them with the heels of both hands. After a ragged exhalation, she regards me with tragic resignation.

“I almost had a grandfather.”

My heart breaks. She so, so wanted this. I could kill Tom Aldiss for stealing it from her—which is a ridiculous thought, but I’m that upset for her. Death is a life lesson none of us escape. I know that. I just wish it had come later.

Then I remember Margo’s words. Accept what you can’t change by changing what you can’t accept. My father may have died nearly in front of my daughter’s nose, but I won’t have her thinking the timing was all bad. I can change the narrative. Can’t I?

Touching her cheek, I say with vehemence, “You did have a grandfather, Joy. You do. You’ll always have memories of this time with him. You made his last days happier.”

Her nose and cheeks are red from planting that morning on the bluff in the sun, and her eyes are swollen and damp, but they hold hope. “Did I?”

“Absolutely. You played the piano for him. He loved that. He loved that you served him breakfast at the shop and made him breakfast at home. He loved that you look like an Aldiss woman. He even loved thinking you were Margo.”

“Until Margo showed up.”

“But you brought her to him first. He was so happy seeing you, Joy. I will never, ever forget the look on his face when he saw you at the clinic last Friday, and when he reached for your hand and then didn’t take his eyes off you the whole way home. You’ll always have that memory. Papa wasn’t naturally a happy person, not in the sense of being cheery or jovial and lighthearted. But when you played this piano for him, when he was sitting here beside you, he was peaceful. You gave him that.”

“Really?”

“Yes,” I say with the confidence of a new memory now inked in. And if that memory is an exaggeration of the truth? It doesn’t matter. Joy isn’t the only one who needs it. The idea that my daughter helped my father in his last days comforts me as well.

Unfortunately, my thirteen-year-old needs more. “But why did he die so soon after I came? And why like that? He was supposed to die of Alzheimer’s.”