Maybe Allison could sell her work, too, she thought. Not just the family portraits, but her town photos—of Willard Park at its most perfect and at its less-than-perfect. One of her shots of the White Elephant fire had been printed in the Post’s Metro section, and another in the county Journal. Maybe Lucy would hang them at the café. Maybe Allison didn’t need to publish a book to feel like she had “made” it. It might not be the Venice Biennale, or her own company, but it was something. Just finding moments of beauty in life was something. Just living and appreciating was something. Maybe it was enough.

Allison passed the Coxes’ stone lions on her way into the house—well, one lion, the other, apparently, had sold—and called for Suzanne. No one answered, but Allison ventured in anyway, knowing there was nowhere else Suzanne could be. Allison could hear her talking in her professional voice from deep inside the house.

She found Suzanne propped up in her bed, her belly a growing mound, surrounded by myriad papers and her laptop. She was on the phone, but she waved to Allison.

“By Monday,” Suzanne said. “I’ll expect to hear from you then.”

Suzanne was working frantically these days, hoping to have a few un-squirt guns, as she was calling them, ready for the summer season—now only a few months away.

Allison gave her the lemon bar. Suzanne hung up the phone and smiled. “Bless you, Allison Miller. How’s Adam doing?”

“Jumping on a bed, last I saw. With Grammy at his side.”

Suzanne crossed herself. “My dear, sainted mother.”

Grammy had gotten Adam to promise to come to her for help with everything during the next few months, so Mommy could rest, and Adam promised he would. Sometimes it got lonely, Suzanne admitted, but she was getting some work done for a change.

“It’s just temporary. Remind me that it’s just temporary.” Suzanne called Allison several times a day to ask for reassurance.

“It’s just temporary,” Allison said. “Everything is.”

Temporary, ephemeral, fleeting. Nothing lasted. Maybe that was good. The fight over the future of Willard Park had loomed so large for a while, until, suddenly, it didn’t. After the fire, the town council unanimously agreed to adopt the building regulations of another similar town nearby, thereby ending the threat of mass mansionization. Problem solved.