“Quick, get in bed,” Claire said, and threw back the sheet. Sydney darted in and Claire tucked the sheet around her. It was a humid night and all the upstairs windows were open, but Sydney was suddenly cold and she snuggled against her sister. Claire put her arm around her and held her close. “It’s okay,” Claire whispered, resting her cheek on the top of Sydney’s head. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

“Mommy?”

Sydney turned quickly to see Bay in the doorway. “Hurry, honey, get in bed with me and Claire,” Sydney said, throwing back the sheet as Claire had done.

They held on to each other as thoughts of David drifted out the window.

The next morning dawned bright and sweet, like ribbon candy. Claire opened her eyes and stared at the bedroom ceiling, the same ceiling her grandmother had woken up to and stared at every day of her life.

She turned her head and saw Sydney and Bay, fast asleep, turned into each other. Sydney had been through and done more than Claire could ever imagine. That much experience, that much change, would devastate Claire.

Or maybe, even as extraordinary as it was, it was life. Everyone had stories to tell.

She looked back up at the ceiling.

Even her grandmother.

Sydney said that Grandma Waverley had gone to Lunsford’s Reservoir. As shocking as that was, Claire assumed she had gone there with her husband-to-be. But then Claire began to wonder about those old photos of her grandmother before she married her husband, when she was a pretty young woman with a joyful smile and hair that seemed perpetually in motion, as if she’d been followed around by a lovesick breeze. The photos were of her with several different boys, all with the same looks of admiration on their faces. On the backs of the photos her grandmother had written In the garden with Tom and At homecoming with Josiah. Then there was the one with just the name Karl.

Her grandmother had a life, a life Claire hadn’t known about or even imagined. She had tried so hard to know everything about Grandma Waverley, to be everything she was. But Grandma Waverley must have sensed something in Sydney, a kindred soul, with Sydney’s brightness and popularity. She gave Claire the wisdom of her old age, but she gave Sydney the secrets of her youth.

Claire didn’t have a single photograph that someone years from now would see and think, That boy loved her.

She got out of bed and made breakfast for Sydney and Bay. It was a nice morning, lots of chatter and good feelings, no scent of anything bad in the air. Sydney left for work by the back door, calling over her shoulder as she left, “There’s a whole bunch of apples out here!”