The house was as it was before, but something had changed. Was it the space around her or the way she now stood in the space that was different?

On the wall hung a mirror she had avoided for as long as she could remember. Her reflection showed the same face as when she left, yet it was altogether different, because she was changed from the person who had woken one morning and assumed it was a day like any other. A day when she received a letter that would turn her entire world inside out.

She was no longer the person who had been existing but not living. Nor could she pretend that she hadn’t been affected by Tyler, and how he had made her heart dare to give in, to finally say “maybe.”

What now? How to start again, how to figure out the future?

“Tea,” Emily told herself as she went into the kitchen, paused at the fridge to rest her fingers on her grandmother’s favorite Anne of Green Gables quote still taped to the door.

She had been dying, slowly, from the inside out. Her grandmother was the only one who could see it and chose to save Emily, to make her notice all the little cracks in the world and not always see them as a bad thing.

Emily filled the kettle from the sink and set it on the stove. Then she opened the back door wide, let in the familiar scent of apple and honeysuckle as she looked up to the sky, at the great, comforting stretch of blue, and sighed her relief to be home.

It was only when she turned around, ready to reach into the dresser for her favorite mug, with turtledoves around the rim, that she saw it.

A box. A simple, cardboard box, sitting on the kitchen table by the window, waiting for her to pay attention. Underneath was tucked a note, written by an unfamiliar hand.

Emily pushed the box aside, read the words sent to her along with the unexpected gift.

For Emily. She asked me to tell you that the rest is up to you. Yours, Richard Thomas. P.S. Max says hello and invites you to walk with us both along the beach one day, whenever you’re ready.

The man with the dog. Apparently tasked with leaving Emily one last surprise from her grandmother.

“I don’t want to look,” Emily said as Milton jumped onto the back of one of the chairs, tilted his head toward the box. “I don’t want to look,” she said again, but found her fingers reaching out to open her gift. Those curious, pesky fingers that always wanted to see, to touch.

Inside were a stuffed toy, a photograph, and a small red notebook.

“Oh.” Emily took a step back, then peered inside once more.

The toy was a duck with patchwork feet and bright green eyes. Emily remembered he used to have a spotted bow tie, but that it got lost long ago. She picked him up, brought him to her nose, and inhaled the scent of her childhood. She could picture her old room, the wooden doll’s house by the window, a thin layer of dust on its roof betraying how little she played with it. A canopy bed with fairy lights strung all around, a cupboard stuffed full of books, and a chair by the window, in which she would sit with her mother, reading stories each night before going to sleep.