It wasn’t holding. That was the problem.

All these years later. Nothing was healed, just hidden.

She felt like she’d left pieces splintered of herself all over the country. On rivers and lakes in the Midwest, in the Atlantic Ocean. In different towns and different cities, different jobs and groups of friends.

She’d been searching for things there, but it had only left her more fragmented. And none of it had brought her healing.

She’d been everywhere else looking for it. But she hadn’t been back home, not really. Visits with her parents, the will reading, the funeral, that wasn’t the same as really being here. When she came back she didn’t spend time on Main Street in town, didn’t visit old friends. She usually holed up in her parents’ house and went between there and The Miner’s House to spend time with Gram.

“If you can open this shop, you’ll stay?” Her mother’s expression was neutral, and Lark couldn’t really tell what her feelings were on the subject.

“Yes,” she said.

“Then try it,” Mary said. “Why not?”

“A ringing endorsement,” Lark said. “What about you two?”

“I figured I’d just line up the renovations for The Dowell House,” Hannah said, in her typical, straightforward fashion. “Avery and I have already gone back and forth on furniture, and I ordered some.”

“You didn’t ask me?” Lark asked.

Avery and Hannah both had the decency to look slightly guilty. “I didn’t think you’d care,” Avery said.

But they hadn’t asked.

Their skepticism about her ability to run a business combined with this felt...

Like something you’ve earned?

She ignored that. Even if it was true.

She felt nearly divided sometimes, into before and after. Before she’d left home, and after. When she’d been young she’d been...well, young. And probably a little bit spoiled because she was the youngest. She’d always wanted to have fun, to have good feelings because bad ones had been unbearable and she didn’t know how to keep them in, and when they came out it was always a whole meltdown.

And then after...

She’d just stopped letting herself show those feelings. She’d stopped...letting herself want so much. And if her family thought she was sort of a shiftless drifter then fine. It suited her. It kept her a little mysterious, which also suited her.

Except now you’re mad about it. And hey, you’ve moved home. So much for your distance.

“Do whatever you want with The Miner’s House,” Hannah said. “I can’t run a shop and I don’t need a little house.”

“Same,” Avery said.

It was, maybe, the most tepid unanimous yes of all time, but Lark would take it.

She put her hand on top of the swatch book, and held the silver Christmas ornaments to it, looking at the silver glinting against the worn leather. Her grandmother would approve of the idea, she knew she would.

Gram had loved art. And she had fostered the love of it in Lark. In all of them, really. The Miner’s House had been the only place the three of them had ever gotten along.