Now half of the kitchen is covered in flour. We’re making muffins.

Paige got distracted. I love leaving the door open. She goes outside to paint her rocks and comes back in to help me mix. Her mouth has turned blue from the blueberries. She loves them fresh, the way a child of Maine should.

Strange, how memories work. Human brains are fallible. I remember picking blueberries with Joe, both of us laughing, happy. Were we really happy? Was he always this way or did he change at some crucial moment? We almost never remember things as they actually happened. Our perceptions are always influenced by the past—things that, by definition, we can only remember. We can never go fully back to the way things were.

I want to create new memories with Paige.

The best ones probably look like something out of a movie, or a children’s book. They probably look something like what we’re doing right now. I stand at the stove, oven mitt on one hand, watching the timer tick down. The scent of blueberry muffins fills the air. Outside, the world is green and fresh. I always loved summers at Eben Cape. The long days felt so full of possibility.

“Mom,” comes a voice. “Mom. Mom. Mom.”

That’s the way she calls me, repeatedly, and I love it. I’ll never get tired of hearing her voice. I put the tray into the oven and step outside.

The glare burns my eyes.

What could be more perfect than this moment? Paige, calling to me to show me something that delights her? I prayed for another moment like this when I was on the run. Now I have it.

“Look at that bird,” Paige says, pointing to the top of a tree. I squint.

There’s a mama bird feeding her babies, a little late in the season. Maybe she’s like me, late, but trying her best at motherhood. “She’s beautiful.”

“It’s so blue,” says Paige. The bird is intensely blue. Brilliant against the blue of the sky. A wisp of a cloud passes behind it, making it stand out even more.

It’s hard to take my eyes off Paige to look at the bird. She’s growing up so fast. It’s a cliché even to think it, but it’s true. Her hair is pulled back in a blonde ponytail and she looks gangly in her summer shorts and T-shirt. She’s so young, and yet it’s a shock to find that she’s seven years old and her baby roundness is mostly in my memory now.

“I love that color.”

“Me, too,” she agrees, tilting her head to the side. I wonder if she’s going to draw it later. Another memory. Sketching a bluebird while her mom cooks dinner.