The busted window has been fixed.
New curtains have been hung.
A new family now calls the little apartment home because its previous occupants are gone, victims of the killing flu.
Life has remade itself here.
You see? I’m right. We find a way to move forward, even if it means starting all over.
That’s how it is.
That’s what we do.
I make my way back to the streetcar stop. When I’d arrived on South Street just minutes earlier, I’d felt like I’d been carrying heavyrocks in my pockets that had been weighing me down for weeks. But now they are gone.
Everything is setting itself to rights again, as best it can. Jamie might not believe me if I tell him all this in a letter, though. Maybe he will need to see it for himself, like I just did.
I can tell him the truth. I can tell him the whole truth about what happened the day I found Alex. I can bring Jamie here when he’s home at last and show him that life begins new again every time we think all is lost, because that’s what life does.
I will trust him with my secret.
Until then, I will keep writing to him. I will tell him every good and lovely thing that happens, even if it’s just that I saw a chickadee or that Alex got a new tooth or that his mother made a fudge cake.
And then when he gets home in the spring—spring!—I will prove to him there is always a way to make right again what has been skewed wrong.
