Hope had the paper spread out on the pebbles. She looked up with a frustrated expression. “I can’t read it.”

“Let me take a look.” Linnea reached out for the wrinkled paper. Smoothing it, she read the words.

Listen, there’s a hell of a good universe next door, let’s go.

“What’s it say?” Hope asked.

“It’s a quote,” she said softly, feeling the impact of the words. “From a poet I especially like, e. e. cummings.”

It was a phrase she and John had often said to each other when they were living next door to one another, that first summer they’d fallen in love. She slipped back in memory to the many hazy, sultry hours she’d spent lying in his bed in the loft next door, the walls surreal, painted in a Van Gogh swirl of stars and planets and sea animals by Flo’s mother, Miranda Prescott. They’d talked, made love, read poetry. They’d taken turns reading aloud the lines of e. e. cummings, W. H. Auden, Rumi, Mary Oliver, and Marjory Wentworth, the South Carolina poet laureate. Linnea sighed, lost in the memory.

Hope sidled close and leaned against her. “Read it.”

Linnea blinked, coming back. “Please…” she prompted.

“Please,” Hope replied, chastened.

“Listen, there’s a good universe next door, let’s go,” she paraphrased, leaving out the word hell. She felt a softening in her heart and looked up at the window. John was standing there across the garden, watching her.

Neither moved to wave.

“What does that mean?” asked Hope.

“I think,” she replied, “it means he wants to be my friend.”

“I want to be his friend,” Hope said with a pout.

Linnea laughed softly. “You can be his friend too. Let’s go inside and write him a note telling him just that.” Taking Hope’s hand, she walked back toward the cottage, letting Hope’s enthusiastic wave and calls of “Bye!” suffice for them both.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING was warmer, and Emmi’s garden perked up. The cheery red azaleas competed with bursts of yellow daffodils. The air was heady with the scent of honeysuckle along the fence.

“Where should we leave the note?” asked Hope.

Linnea held the child’s hand as they searched Emmi’s garden for the right spot to put Hope’s note for John.

“The flowerpot?” suggested Linnea, pointing to the potted blooms at the base of the stairs to John’s loft.

Hope ignored that suggestion. Releasing Linnea’s hand, she wandered through the small yard in front of the carriage house, eyes peeled.

Both the house and the carriage house were painted a soft coral with sea-blue trim. Back when Flo owned it, her mother, Miranda, had used the carriage house as her art studio. She’d died when Linnea was still young, but she remembered the bohemian artist. Everyone had loved her. Miranda lived to shock the neighborhood. Emmi and Cara still regaled them with stories of running to the studio during summer afternoons for hours of dress-up and painting lessons. Miranda had passed of Alzheimer’s disease, and now Flo—opposite from her mother in every other way—was going down the same path.