“Thank you,” I said to all of them. “I’m so lucky.”

“We’re lucky,” Terry said. “Lucky to get to celebrate you.”

Julia disappeared to the kitchen to set up the little ones at the table with bowls of soup and Mary Poppins. The rest of us waited in the living room and soon she returned carrying a tray of sparkling cider in champagne flutes. She handed one to each of us, and Terry said, “To Mila!” and we all clinked glasses. My face was hot with the attention, so I walked over to a corner where a collection of CDs was stacked on the built-in shelves. I didn’t recognize the names on the cases. Soon, I felt someone near me. Liz.

“I can’t believe you still have these things,” she told Terry as she plucked a CD from a stack. “Look good?” she asked me.

I shrugged. “I don’t know any of them. So, sure.”

She laughed and handed it to Terry, who turned on the CD player and pressed some buttons. The disc disappeared into a slot. “We’ve never cared much about keeping up with the times,” he said. “No reason to out here.” The sound of a keyboard and a drum machine came through the speakers, followed by a woman’s voice. Terry extended an arm to Julia and they began to dance. Lee joined and they made space for him between them.

I settled onto the sofa to watch. I expected Billy and Liz to dance, too, but instead they sat next to me. “Did you go to town?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Billy said, brushing hair from his eyes.

“You didn’t stay long.”

“Of course not,” Liz said. “We came back for you.” She bumped my shoulder with her own. My heart swelled with it—how familiar she was acting toward me. I didn’t move away, kept my shoulder against hers. I pretended that it was casual, that it didn’t mean so much to me.

“Hey,” Billy said, leaning closer to me too. “You get to come to market with us tomorrow. Terry told us this morning.”

“Oh. I’m so glad.” For two months, I had not traveled in a car. I hadn’t been any farther than the beach across the highway. Soon, I would be out in the world again.

“I wish we could work the market,” Hunter said. I’d been so focused on Billy and Liz that I hadn’t realized he’d been listening. But when I looked, I saw that Emma and Jackson were watching us, too. “It would be way better than harvesting,” he added.

Emma rolled her eyes. “Don’t complain.”

“I can complain if I want to.”

“Okay, fine. Go ahead then,” she said.

We talked about the crop for a while, about how the summer was turning to fall, and what would soon be growing instead of strawberries and tomatoes.