She can’t remember, but perhaps her father’s mild objection years before was the reason she refused to buy ornaments for Hannah. They decorated the tree with crafts Hannah made at school: a popcorn-and-cranberry garland, green and red paper chains, tissue-paper snowflakes. They made gifts by hand and opened them Christmas morning. She’d embroidered flowers on a T-shirt for Hannah. Hannah had taped tissues into a ball and used a black permanent marker to write “I love you” on it.

The tree is in Sadie’s attic; she hasn’t set it up in years. She has long given up her own faith, lost it so gradually that only now, contemplating the beauty of a church, does she realize it evaporated years ago.

She moved to this neighborhood a few months ago, her first move in more than a decade. When she walks past Coventry Second Church of Christ during her morning walks, or drives by on her way to work at Dillard’s, she feels a tiny flash of warmth in her sternum.

Her new place is a tiny purple bungalow amid Tudors and colonials. When she moved in, the lilac tree near the screened-in back porch dripped with blooms that blended into the siding. She clipped a dozen branches and stuffed the flowers into vases, water glasses, mason jars. The bush looked no less lush than it had before she took out her gardening shears.

The house before this one was her then-boyfriend Jim’s—he was the reason she’d settled down for so long after years and years of constant motion—and he let her garden one small section of border alongside his vast Shaker Heights lawn. She grew snapdragons and carnations in the summer, easy things. She never got any better as a gardener over the years. When she first started buying flats of flowers from the garden center, she chose based on the colors and the smells. Not all flowers smelled like perfume, she learned. Some gave off the fragrance of cinnamon, others the odor of a skunk or the basic scent of soap.

She kept gardening at Jim’s because she liked separating the roots of a plant with a trowel before she set it in the soil, setting it free from the strictures of the pot. She liked rising from the ground with damp, muddy knees. She liked smacking her gloved hands together to let loose the dirt that had clung to her.

Jim recently sold the house and moved from Ohio to North Carolina, where his daughter and grandchild live. He asked her to move with him, but she didn’t want to move anymore. She didn’t want a long-distance relationship, either. So they broke things off. They’d never talked about marriage.

Drifting apart seems like a natural end to things, but she misses him.