I drove all the way up to meet Judge Nagle in Oakden the day I got that letter, only for him to tell me he’d decided not to lease me the farm after all.

“I’m going to sell it to you instead,” he announced.

“That’s very generous, Judge,” I said reluctantly. “But I couldn’t afford it.”

“You haven’t asked me how much I want for it yet.”

I had to assume the way we lost our farm to him had haunted Judge Nagle over the years too, because all he wanted to hand it right back to me was for me to repay the money Henry had originally borrowed in 1933. I had plenty to cover the cost of that farm, plus enough to keep myself going until it was productive again.

Even as I drove through the gate, I could see that my farm needed a lot of love and care, but that was okay—I had never been afraid of hard work. The vegetable beds would need to be rebuilt, but the chicken house was where it had always been, ready to receive new tenants. I was relieved to see electric wires running to the house, and a new lean-to bathroom added at the back too. There would be no more midnight outhouse runs in winter, and no more racing around to light the lanterns, because that house would have electric lighting at last, just as Mother had dreamed.

I parked the car and stepped out to turn my attention to the Texas live oak and the little wooden crosses that jutted out of the ground beneath it, marking the space my parents were laid to rest. Beside it, the park bench I had always feared so much had collapsed. Elsie’s chair needed some love and I wasn’t great at woodwork. That would have to wait until Henry came home.

I started to walk toward that tree, a million images flickering through my mind of the way the farm once was and the way it would be again, now that it was finally ours—mine, and Henry’s too, because he would always have a home with me. I pictured him there in that new barn, tinkering with the engine of a tractor. I pictured row after row of vegetables and chickens roaming the garden, and cows back in the field where that big old pond was, the rest of the farm planted with wheat, tended and sowed and lovingly grown by me and my brother.

This, my soul cried. This was the life you were meant to live.

By the time I reached that oak tree, I was exhausted and I was overjoyed and I was so damned relieved to be home, I could barely take another step. I dropped to my knees and pressed a shaking hand to the dirt above my parents’ resting place.