“I’ll be here,” I told him. Before I closed the door, I heard the rumble of the truck, saw Billy and Liz roll down the gravel drive toward the highway. Liz was driving. Billy saw me and waved from the passenger seat, and I waved back, feeling wistful in spite of my plan with Lee, wishing they would have at least invited me along to wherever they were going.

___

I thought of Billy and Liz again later that afternoon, when Lee and I had returned from a hike through the hills behind the farm and found the truck still gone.

“What do you want to do now?” Lee asked me. We were sitting together in a patch of grass near the rows of vegetables, catching our breath. “We could draw or tell fairy tales again, if you want.”

I felt a tightness in my throat. “No,” I said. “I don’t want to remember anything today. I just want to be here.”

He took my hand. “I understand,” he said.

I looked at our interlaced fingers, thought of the truck, driving away. “Lee, you don’t have a ring or a bracelet or a necklace.”

“I know. I want one.”

“I want one too.”

“How will we get them?”

“I don’t know.”

A bird arced in the sky. Tulip darted past us, after something, through the rows.

“This place . . . ,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. And he rolled onto his back. I did the same. And it was Lee and me in the daylight, our bodies against the grass, not knowing what any of it meant.

___

The house was strangely quiet when I entered through the mudroom for dinner. But I sensed life, heard the faint sounds of breathing. Strung in the doorway between the kitchen and living room was a banner that spelled HAPPY BIRTHDAY, each letter stitched onto its own little flag. For the second time that day, joy sprung to my heart. I stepped under the sign and peeked around the corner.

There was everybody, huddled by the piano. Lee and Terry and Julia. Billy and Liz. Emma and Jackson and Hunter. Little Darius and Blanca and Mackenzie and James.

“Surprise!” they all shouted. The little ones cracked up laughing—I couldn’t believe they’d held so still, been so quiet even for a few moments. Lee bounced up and down on his feet, a grin across his sweet face.

“Nineteen.” Julia shook her head as though it were a monumental achievement, as though they’d known me all my life. When she stepped forward to hug me, I allowed myself to imagine—only very briefly, only while in her embrace—that Terry and Julia had an album of photographs of me, that I had lived in the main house when I was little, soaked in the upstairs tub, learned to read and set the table, grown up as they watched me.

And then she let me go.