And what of Jack and Molly? They would not exist. Phil would not love her. No. It was impossible to imagine a different life built from one pivotal moment, from one fork in the road.

She reread the first telegram and allowed one last imagining of what Nick felt when she did not respond. She lifted the paper, raised Phil’s lighter and flicked it on, touched it to the corner of the paper. The note lit quickly as if it was more than ready to combust. She allowed the ashes to fall to the kitchen table, and as the flames reached the edges of her fingers, she dropped the remains into her mug, where the ashes floated to the top of the cold liquid.

She lifted the second telegram and it burst into flames as she lit the paper; then she dropped its remnants on top of the other. She lifted the last note—the one that declared his love for her even as he believed she had deserted him. She read that final message: Amy, I love you, Nick, as the flames licked each word, as they were consumed into an irrevocable fire. The paper curled, and then disintegrated, matching the ashes of her life.

She stood and walked to the sink, poured the liquid into the garbage disposal. She turned the faucet on and the ashes and tea floated down the drain. She rubbed her hands across her jeans and felt oddly cleansed, as if she’d just taken Communion.

She walked up the stairs to the hall; two closets stood sentinel at either end, the only ones left to be cleaned out. She opened the scratched wooden door to the one next to Molly’s room. Carved into the wood with Daddy’s pocket-knife was MOLLY, slanted and crooked, from the summer she was five years old and first learned to spell her name, then wrote it on everything. Amy ran her finger over the letters. She had plopped Molly in an hour of time-out, lectured the wide-eyed girl about having respect for the house, about defacing the handmade door.

She desperately wished she could hold her five-year-old again. A deep longing for then, when none of this had happened, when she hadn’t wandered lost into the land of wanting to know about Nick, overwhelmed her. She lifted a pile of Molly’s old Cinderella sheets, buried her face in them, and fought back tears. She opened her eyes and automatically sorted the towels and sheets—knowing instinctively which ones to keep or discard.