You were enough, Mom, she thought now. I hope you knew that. I hope I was enough for you.

A few years after that visit, she’d joined the Little Kickers Soccer League. At the first practice, she’d seen Dean Fogarty again. He was, to her horror, one of the coach’s helpers, and his son was on the team. Getting through that first practice was agony, and when she got home, she told her mother she was never going back.

“I don’t like seeing him with his real kid,” she explained.

“You’re a real kid,” her mother had said.

“It’s not the same,” Natalie said.

Blythe had gathered her into a hug and whispered, “It’s not the same. It’s better. It’s better with just the two of us.”

“Does his other family know about us?”

“Do you want them to?”

“No!”

She never went back to the soccer league. Through the years, Dean came with gifts and a smile that was soft with regret, and eyes hungry with wishes, like the shop cat just before feeding time. Natalie tried to think of him as something more than a benign stranger, a customer stopping in for the latest bestseller, but she was never able to picture him as her dad.

Now the scent of flowers hung as heavy as old remembrances in the air. Natalie massaged the back of her neck, aching with sadness and fatigue. She dimmed the shop lights and set the security system. There were two entrances to the building: the grand foyer leading to the shop, and a street-level private door where the mail came in, with a stairway leading to the apartment where she’d lived as a girl.

Natalie used to envy her friends who lived in actual houses with big yards and swing sets and garages filled with scooters and bikes. Now that San Francisco’s real estate market had exploded in value, this ramshackle old structure was probably one of the most desired addresses in the neighborhood. With its historic charm and detail, the Sunrose Building, as it was called, was undoubtedly candy corn for real estate developers. The name of the building apparently came from a detail at the roofline—a winking sun. The bookstore’s sign and logo incorporated the image. The shop’s signature bookmark, printed on the old letterpress and given out with every purchase, bore the image with the slogan An Eye for Good Books.

In the kitchen, Natalie tidied up, putting away as much as she could of the food people had dropped off, and packing up the rest to give to a food bank. She understood why people brought food to the grieving, but she and Grandy couldn’t possibly use it all.