“Thank you for your permission,” Hannah said dryly. “No. Yes. I don’t know.” Miriam handed her some tissues, and Hannah bunched them up in her hand, gesturing wordlessly, as if she could wave the words out of the air.

“You left, and I handled it. I missed you so much, but it was okay. I knew you were doing what you needed to. And then Levi left. It was more pain than I knew any human could survive. But I did. I kept getting up in the morning, and I kept running the business, and I was going to make it. Then Cass got sick, and neither of you were here.” Her voice broke, and she sobbed. Miriam sat in front of her, and held her hands, waiting for her to be ready to speak.

She didn’t point out that she would have come, if she’d known Cass was sick. Hell, she didn’t even know if that was true—she might have kept making excuses. She wished Hannah had given her a chance to find out, but they had time, hopefully, to hash that out, so she bit her tongue.

Miriam stood up from where she’d been kneeling, pacing the small room, eyes on the carpet. It needed replacing, she noticed.

Hannah reached into the pocket of her robe and pulled out a crumpled airline napkin. She handed it wordlessly to Miriam, who looked down at it in her hand.

“This came a couple of days ago,” Hannah said. “It was tucked into a get-well-soon card with kittens on the front. It was addressed to you, but I recognized the handwriting, so I opened it.”

It was from a budget Australian airline, with writing in blue ballpoint.

Oh, her heart. The handwriting was Levi’s:

Can I come home yet?

Miriam cocked her head at her cousin. “Well? This is your call. You told him not to come back, so he didn’t. What do you want to do?”

“I was going to burn it, but I thought you had a right to see it. Um. Mostly because it was your mail.” Hannah looked only vaguely apologetic.

“It’s a bit of a cheap shot, using the napkin trick.” He would have known that writing like Cass always used to would get straight at her heart. Miriam turned the note over in her hands, trying to feel annoyed over the wave of sentimentality that engulfed her. She had been studiously avoiding feeling Blue’s absence too keenly. Trying to fit into the business, mourn Cass, miss Tara, pretend she was okay taking things slow with Noelle were all the complications she needed. She didn’t need another flaming sword thrown into her juggling act.

But she wasn’t sure what Hannah—or what Levi, for that matter—needed. She thought about Mrs. Matthews’s ball of dough and mentally tried to move herself out of the center.