“Couldn’t sleep,” Dad says. He’s staring at the garden, looking so lost and alone in the space that used to be beautiful when Mum tended it. He’s huddled in his chair, looking smaller, older. He’s only sixty-three, but he doesn’t look it today. He looks decades older.

I sit next to him. “Are you thinking of working in the garden again?”

“I was thinking…” His voice drifts off and he sighs. “I don’t know if I can do it again, Tess. I looked out and saw the daffodils and…” His voice breaks and he covers his eyes with his hand. I take his other hand, clutching it tight with both of mine.

“The seasons are still going to pass,” he says. “Time’s going to rush by and I’m going to be alone. I don’t think I can keep doing it. I don’t think I can go through it again.”

My throat closes up, aching with unshed tears. He had me and Bella after Mum died and he had Julia with him after Bella died. But this time…there’s only me left. I can feel it all closing in, the dark of the woods creeping closer, trees taller and tighter together. I want to run back to the city, to the safe box I live in, the safe teaching job where every day is the same and no one goes into the woods.

But Dad’s alone. He’s been alone for months, even when Julia was still breathing upstairs. And I don’t have a safe teaching job anymore, do I?

“I’ll be here,” I say. “I’m not going anywhere.”

He looks up and gives me a tired smile. “You have your job—your life in town. I won’t let you give it up for me.”

“But I don’t,” I say, the words coming out in a rush. “I have Bella’s life, not my own. I never wanted to be a teacher—that was what she wanted. I hate living in a city, I hate the grayness, the claustrophobia, the way I sometimes think I can’t breathe, surrounded by so many people. I hate teaching.”

“Oh, Tess,” Dad says. “I always wondered, when you said you wanted to teach instead of applying for that landscape gardening course you always talked about. But you were so sure, so insistent.”