The cats don’t even look up as we climb the back steps. The porch is crowded with all the things that make a place feel homey. Plants and bags of fertilizer. A little garden trowel. Overstuffed pillows. A book left open on a bright blue table. A forgotten coffee cup. A packet of seeds. And it’s weird how all that stuff makes me ache for the kind of home I’ve never had. It’s nothing like the sterile little apartment I share with my dad. And suddenly all I want in life is a porch like this.

A home like this.

A mother like this.

A leaf blower leans in one corner with a can of gasoline. Forgotten. And I wonder if they’ve been there since fall.

I imagine this house surrounded by colorful leaves. It must look like something out of a book.

Willa pushes open the door to a cozy kitchen, then parks me in a chair and crosses to the stove where a teapot is already steaming. She pours two cups of something that smells like mint, and then crosses back to the table to sit beside me.

I’m staring at a little painting that hangs on the wall over the breakfast nook. Beautiful girls with flapper-style haircuts and dresses. They’re all in white, and they’re dancing along the edge of a shining lake.

“The Greek muses,” Willa tells me. “I found that painting at a thrift store when I was writing Midnight Music. We were so broke back then, and I was trying to fix up this ramshackle old house.” She pauses. Blows on her tea. “Eden is Orion’s muse, you know.” She takes a tentative sip. “Every artist has one.”

They’re all so beautiful, but my eyes are drawn to one golden girl in particular. She stands shimmering in ephemeral light, waist-deep in the water. Her white gown floats around her, silver ribbons trailing in the rippling blue. There’s something about her that makes me sad.

And then my eyes focus, and I see her more clearly. Water is streaming into the lake from a dozen invisible cracks in her arms, her chest, her face. She is a fountain, and water flows out of her from all those holes nobody can see.

I feel the water begin to pour from my broken places, too.

I’m crying.

Sobbing at Willa’s kitchen table.

“What were you doing out there, Avril?” Willa’s voice is gentle. Easy. But there’s a firmness in it that tells me it won’t do any good to ignore her. So I choke out the truth.

“Looking for my mother.”

“Come on,” Willa says. She picks up both of our mugs and leads me into the next room.