“Yeah?” His face lights up. “I was hoping you would say that. Because I feel the same way.” He raises his eyebrows. “You coming, Tricia?”

“Yes. Just a moment.”

I find my wool coat, draped on the edge of the couch. I rifle around in the pockets and my fingers make contact with the cassette tape I stashed there. I pull it out, looking at my initials on the side of the tape. I’m a different person now than the girl on the tape. But in other ways, I haven’t changed at all.

I close my fingers around the cassette. I walk over to the fireplace, my cheeks absorbing the heat radiating out of the small space. I toss the tape in with the others, onto the slowly disintegrating pile. For a moment, I stand there and watch it burn.

Then I join my husband.

Epilogue

TRICIA

Two Years Later

My daughter Delilah loves the garden behind our house.

She turned one a few months ago, and she’s in this adorable chubby toddler phase where she walks around with her arms out at her sides, about to topple at any moment. I watch her from the rocking chair in front of the house as she does just that—falls to her knees in the soft grass, then gets right back up without missing a beat.

She is a girl with a mission. Right now, her mission is to bring me a daisy she found growing in the grass. She makes it the rest of the way over to me and places one of her tiny hands on my knee.

“Mama,” she says. “‘Dis.”

“Yes.” I accept the slightly crumpled daisy. “It’s a flower, darling.”

“Flar,” she repeats.

“That’s right.”

She beams up at me. I might be slightly biased, but I think she’s the most beautiful child who has ever lived. She looks a lot like her father. Ethan and I both have blond hair, but mine comes out of a bottle and his is real. She has his blond curls—although his is cut too short to curl—and his clear blue eyes. She’s a spitting image of the way he looked in the baby pictures he finally showed me soon after we bought this house.

She takes such joy in the little things too. I bought her a baby doll for her first birthday, and her little face lit up with a brilliant smile. It made me remember the collection of dolls I used to have as a child. I had at least a dozen of them. And then another collection in a drawer in my room of the shorn heads of the dolls I didn’t like as much.

“Flar!” Delilah cries, then she toddles back into the garden, eager to rip out more of my flowers and deliver them to me.