He’d laughed heartily. Now at thirty-five, lying in her childhood bed, her wishes weren’t any different, and she yearned to make Dad laugh as he had then. She threw off the covers and stepped onto the knotted rug her mother had bought at a craft shop in Charleston. Colleen remembered the day. “Oh, darling, this is exactly what I’ve been looking for to match your room. Now your little toes won’t be cold when you hop out of bed.” She’d kissed Colleen’s cheeks, then wiped the lipstick mark off.

Colleen smiled at the remembrance and closed her eyes for a moment, sent her mother some love and began the day with fatigue itching beneath her eyelids.

She’d stayed up most of the night writing stories from her notes and interviews. The stories mattered. All of it mattered and that thought had made her stay awake to get it done. From a day of interviews, she’d learned about her dad’s aversion to ghost stories; his high school record for most home runs on the baseball team (a record still held to that day); how, as a toddler, he’d bang his head onto pillows when he was angry; how his first dog had been run over by a car in front of him (and the reason he’d never wanted another). They were just anecdotes from a normal life—but they were also all the parts of a man she loved, whom she loved more with each telling.

As she wrote, she’d included her own birth on March 2, 1981, in Richmond. Next was Hallie in 1983 and then Shane in ’88. Her parents’ wedding story was the one she’d struggled to put into words, as no one else had been there to tell her about it. She imagined how they felt and what was said. It was a simple photo that caught the moment in the courthouse when Dad handed Mother a bouquet of wild roses. Neither of her parents had ever said much about that day, only smiled at each other with a shared look of private love.

When she’d finished, she gathered the pages and prepared for the meeting at Shane’s. Dad was safe with Bob for the morning and Colleen girded her heart for what would come next, and then next.

•   •   •

Shane’s apartment smelled like the local coffee shop. Colleen inhaled deeply as she stepped inside, shutting the door behind her. Hallie and Shane looked up from the paper-strewn table.

“Well, good morning to the two of you.” Colleen reached into her bag, her finger snagging on an open safety pin somewhere in the recesses of all the random doodads she stored there “just in case.” Then her fingers grasped the papers she was seeking. “I think I have something that will cheer you up.”

“I don’t think anything can do that,” Hallie said with such sadness that Colleen wondered if she’d missed something.