“She was just so serious about it,” Margo says, laughing too. “In the beginning, she wrote all of her orders out in full sentences! ‘Ida Winton would like french fries with melted cheese and some gravy, not too much, but enough, on a plate, please.’ ” She wipes her eyes. “April just figured it all out on her own. I’ve never seen a kid with her kind of determination.”

“Sounds about right,” Ethan says.

“That first apron went all the way to the tops of her sneakers.”

“Do you have pictures?” Ethan asks with his mouth full of pizza.

“Sure do,” Margo tells him. “I’ll bring them with me next weekend.”

She hugs me. “Girlie, get ready to see a lot of this face. Now that I know where you are, you and Max are gonna get sick of me!”

“Never,” I say, fighting tears.

Later, when the nurse brings paperwork for Max’s birth certificate, I write Ethan’s name on the line for who his father is.

Someday I’ll look for Justin again and give him another chance to be a good person to Max. But Max already has a family—the kind that counts the most. Me and Ethan and Carly and Margo. We have people we get to keep, who won’t ever let us go. And that’s the most important part.

That’s what’s true.

Acknowledgments

After turning in the final draft of this book, I went digging through my files for the first glimpse of April and found my original short story about April and Ethan. It was dated September 22, 2006. By the time this book is published, my relationship with April will be about a year shy of April’s age in part one. Thinking her thoughts and loving her people has been my favorite pastime for so long that the characters in this book exist in my mind like old friends who are just a phone call away—like if only I could find the right phone number scribbled on a napkin buried in the pile of papers on my desk, we’d have a good long chat. So although there’s a part of me that knows this is a bit silly, my first thank you is to April Sawicki, who popped into my head while I was writing something else and gave me a parallel universe where I could paint new stories with every feeling I’ve ever had. And then, of course, I have to thank Ethan, and Carly, and Margo, because getting to keep them in my heart for this long has made my whole life better.