Who am I to argue with the wind? With Jenna?

I’m purged once more as I tell Trisha Williams about Lochbrook, about Jenna rescuing N. E. Endsley, and about Nolan. I sniffle my way through my discussion with Mark in Nolan’s heart, but I can’t stop giggling when I tell her about the stick figure drawings we drew in the fort and about Wally’s caffeine habit.

I don’t mention Avery and Emily, or Nolan’s journals.

Unlike the wind, Trisha nods and murmurs in response to my story, and by the time I’m finished, we are both sitting on the ground and she is crying, too. Quiet, steady tears for a quiet, steady woman.

“I don’t want to go to Montana,” I tell her. “And I don’t know what I want to do yet, but it’s not that. It’s not being a professor.”

I shudder as the confession I’ve kept buried under stacks of books and blueprints comes ripping out of me. I’m fully expecting Trisha to be like Mark, angry and hurt. Instead, she digs out a pack of tissues from her purse and mops my face like I’m four. Snot smears against my cheek, but the movement is so loving and affectionate that I don’t mind.

She grabs my chin firmly between her fingers, her nails barely grazing my cheeks, and says, “Amelia Griffin, Jenna doesn’t want you to live her life, she wants you to live yours. I want you to live yours. It’s all you can do, baby. That’s all any of us can do.”

Together we sit on Trisha’s unfolded blazer, the clever wind caressing us as the insects take up their instinctual hum and the whales move north toward the horizon.

I sleep better than I ever have, after Trisha drops me off at my house.

“I’ll talk to Mark,” she says in the driveway. She promises me over and over that he’ll come around and won’t be mad.

“We’ll support you no matter what you do, Amelia. That’s what family is for.” She smiles Jenna’s smile at me in the darkness of her car. “I’m a custody lawyer. I know these things.”

It’s a bad joke, but I’m so relieved to have finally made the right decision that I crack up anyway.

chapter nineteen

The next day’s afternoon event at Downtown Books floats by in a haze. I snooze through two alarms after my graveside confessional with Trisha, managing to wake up only with time enough to make myself look vaguely professional, then I scoot off to the store to photograph a local author tea for two hours.

Along with my alarm clock, I wake to a text message from Mark, three lines typed late last night after I’d already fallen into a slumber overrun with whales and photographs.