Bay came in at that moment, and Sydney laughed. “Oh, honey, you don’t have to wear that brooch Evanelle gave you every day. She doesn’t expect you to.”

Bay looked down at the brooch she’d pinned to her shirt. “But I might need it.”

“Ready to go for our walk to see the school?”

“Will you be okay without me, Aunt Claire?” Bay asked.

“You were a great help today. Thank you. But I think I can finish up,” Claire said. She was going to be sad when Bay started school in the fall. But then there would be afternoons to look forward to, when Bay got home from school and Sydney got home from work and they’d all be together. She was happy having Sydney and Bay there with her. She wanted to focus only on that, not on how long it would last.

She wasn’t quite up to admitting that she still thought about how it was going to end. She thought about it every single day.

“We won’t be gone long,” Sydney said.

“Okay.” Claire suddenly felt prickly, and she looked at the hair on her arms standing on end. Damn. “Tyler’s about to come to the front door. Please tell him I don’t want to see him.”

Sydney laughed as soon as there was a knock. “How did you know that?”

“I just knew.”

“You know, Claire, if you ever want to talk…”

Still so many secrets. I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours. “Ditto.”

Tyler and Bay waited together on the front-porch swing. Tyler used his long legs to swing them high, and Bay laughed because it was so Tyler. He was easily distracted and ready to have fun. But Bay’s mom said if he was ever concentrating on something not to bother him, that it was like not asking a person a question at dinner until they finished chewing.

As they swung, Bay thought about her dream, the one of her in the garden. Things here weren’t going to be perfect until she could replicate it exactly. But she couldn’t figure out how to make sparkles on her face in the sun and, even though she’d taken notebooks out to the garden and held paper up to the wind, she could never quite get the sound of paper flapping right either.

“Tyler?” Bay said.

“Yes?”

“What kinds of things would make sparkles on your face? Like if you were lying outside in the sun? Sometimes I see planes go by and they’re shiny and sometimes the sun makes sparkles on them, but when I try lying in the yard when planes pass overhead, they don’t make sparkles on me.”

“You mean like light reflecting and making sparkles?”

“Yes.”