“We’ve got a newcomer,” Drew said as he took his place and opened his Bible. “Y’all might remember her as Lily Miller. Now she’s Lily Anderson, and she’s moved back into the old Miller house south of town where she was raised.” He introduced the other four people by name. They must’ve moved to Comfort in the last few years, because she didn’t recognize any of them.

She made a concerted effort to put names with faces, though, as Drew began to talk about the responsibilities of being a good Christian. According to him, it went beyond showing up in church on Sunday morning and in knowing the Bible upside down and backward. It had to do with what was in the heart.

Lily’s mind drifted off as she wondered what was hiding down deep in her soul. She was still thinking about that when the time was up and they all filed out of the room to go to the sanctuary for church. Moving back, sleeping in the old house, cooking with her mother’s skillets—memories flooded her mind that morning as Drew preached on kindness. If she hadn’t had two teenage children sitting between her and Mack, she would have thought she’d taken a couple of giant leaps back in time. Nothing had changed. Not the house where she grew up. Not the church with its two rows of pews and a center aisle—the same one that she’d walked down on her daddy’s arm when she married Wyatt. Thinking of that, she remembered the journal. What would she write in one? Would someone read it in a hundred and fifty years and see themselves in the sorrows and joys, like she had when she read Ophelia’s first paragraph?

Holly had spent part of the afternoon on the phone with a couple of girls she’d met in Sunday school that morning. She’d rolled her eyes every time anyone walked through the kitchen, where she sat on the floor with the corded phone on her shoulder as she did her fingernails. From the little Lily had heard when she went to get a glass of tea, those two girls didn’t have cell phones, either.

Braden and Mack had gone outside after Sunday-dinner dishes were done to play catch. Braden didn’t even seem to mind that his sister gave him another one of her looks that branded him as a traitor. He’d stuck his tongue out at her and then run out the door before she could retaliate.

Lily wandered through the house—memories continuing to wash over her like floodwaters in every room, from her father’s office, to the living room, to the dining room and the big country kitchen. There were pictures of her and her sister everywhere. The first one she removed from the piano in the living room was her wedding picture.