“Well…I like video games a lot. And watching basketball. And I also like movies, and books. Aunt Gillian and I started watching the Lord of the Rings movies when I was staying with her, actually. Grandpa used to read me those books, when I was a kid.”

“Did he?” I see Lorna’s fraction of a smile at that. I bet she finds it as touching as I do to hear Sam say the words, when I was a kid.

“I remember how much he liked those books,” she says. “You know, they were relatively new when your grandfather was young—like the Harry Potter of its day. He made me read them all once I got to high school; bought me my own box set.” She smiles. “He was quite a bit older than me, you know. By then he’d been married for probably a decade; he seemed quite middle-aged to me!”

Sam half-smiles at that. I see him trying and failing to imagine his grandpa as a young man.

“Did you like them?” he says. “The books?”

Lorna smiles at him.

“Oh, I loved them.”

Sam smiles back.

“And what about you, Gillian?” Lorna turns to me. “Your sister tells me you’re living in Birch Bend still, and that you’re a teacher there?”

I find myself flushing, suddenly caught off guard. She doesn’t mean it this way but her question makes me feel dowdy somehow. Lorna’s life has been so full of travel and adventure, and Abigail’s has too in its way. Even Sam wants to be an astronaut. I’m the one who’s never lived outside of her home state and whose late-twenties “exploratory” period only brought me a thirty minute drive south to Troy.

Feeling self-conscious, I fill in Lorna on my teaching career; I tell her about Oliver and the brewery start-up.

“Marvelous,” Lorna says.

“Their house is awesome,” Sam pipes up.

I look at him in surprise, and so does Abigail—which I get, because you probably wouldn’t expect a kid who lives in that Westchester mansion to describe Oliver’s and my home as “awesome.” And enthusiasm isn’t exactly what Sam’s been known for of late. But Lorna’s nodding attentively and, confident of her full focus, he continues.

“It has this garden that’s really wild, with tons of birds and squirrels and everything. And there’s a tree that goes all the way up past the roof, it must be super old, with two different birds’ nests in it.”

Lorna smiles past Sam at me.

“That sounds quite magical.”

“Yeah, and my room has this, like, slopey ceiling, and in the morning you see the tree shadows moving all over it, and it kind of feels like being in a treehouse.”

I almost choke on my coffee. Who is this eager child?

My room, he just said. I feel warm at the words.