“I wouldn't expect anything less.” Grandma Sarah laughed. “I'll call Sarah and let her know. We'll pick you up Sunday morning. Be ready by six.”
“Six in the morning?”
“Early start. Long drive. No complaints.”
Lauren smiled. “Yes, ma'am.”
They talked for a few more minutes, working out the details. What to pack, where they would stop, how long they expected the drive to take. By the time they hung up, Lauren felt lighter than she had in days. The decision was made. The path was set.
Jeff watched her with a smile. “Feel better?”
“I feel terrified. But also excited. Is that possible?”
“Absolutely. That's how all the best adventures start.”
Lauren wrapped her arms around his neck. “Thank you. For pushing me. For pushing me to do this.”
“You need to be with your family as often as you can.” He kissed her forehead. “You just forget sometimes.”
Upstairs, Daniel started to cry, the sound of a toddler waking from a nap and demanding attention. Lauren sighed and stepped back.
“Duty calls.”
“Go. I'll clean up lunch.” Jeff gathered the plates and carried them to the sink. “And Lauren? Start packing tonight. If I know your grandmother, she'll be here at five-fifty-nine on Sunday honking the horn.”
Lauren laughed and headed for the stairs. He was right, of course. Grandma Sarah waited for no one.
As she climbed toward Daniel's room, she thought about the week ahead. The RV, the road, the long hours of conversationwith her grandmother and sister. The farm in Massachusetts, where Beth was waiting to become a mother. The house in Andover, where she’d grown up, where she had learned what family meant and how easily it could fracture.
She was going back, and maybe this time she would finally be able to truly appreciate the past while letting some of it go.
CHAPTER 12
The farmhouse was nothing like the Andover house where Maggie had raised her children.
She woke before dawn on Saturday morning, disoriented by the unfamiliar sounds filtering through the windows. A rooster crowing somewhere nearby, insistent and oddly melodic. The lowing of cattle from a neighboring property. The creak of old wood settling in ways that were different from the creaks she had known for twenty-three years in her suburban colonial.
The Andover house had been quiet in the mornings, nestled in a neighborhood where the loudest sound was the occasional car passing on its way to work. Here, the world announced itself before the sun had fully risen, a symphony of animal calls and wind through bare branches and the particular silence of open land that wasn't really silence at all.
Maggie slipped out of bed without waking Paolo and made her way downstairs, navigating the unfamiliar layout in the gray pre-dawn light. The stairs were steeper than she expected, the hallway narrower, the floorboards cold beneath her bare feet. She found the kitchen by following the faint glow of a nightlight plugged into the wall near the stove.
Charlie, Gabriel’s chocolate lab, lifted his head from his bed by the fireplace and thumped his tail once in greeting before settling back to sleep. The kitchen smelled of last night's dinner, something with rosemary and garlic, mingled with the earthier scents that seemed to permeate everything here. Soil and hay and the faint musk of animals, even though the livestock belonged to neighbors rather than to Beth and Gabriel.
This was farm country. Real farm country, not the manicured suburbia Maggie had known. The realization settled over her as she stood at the kitchen window watching the sky lighten over the orchard.
She had never lived on a farm. Had never woken to roosters or fallen asleep to the rustle of wind through apple trees. Her childhood had been spent in her mother's modest house, and her adult life had unfolded in the Andover colonial with its predictable rooms and familiar corners. Even Captiva, with all its differences from Massachusetts, was not like this. The island had its own wildness, but it was a coastal wildness, salt and sand and the endless rhythm of waves.
This was something else entirely. This was earth and growth and the patient cycle of seasons that farmers had followed for centuries.
The coffee maker was different from hers, a complicated machine with buttons she didn't recognize. Maggie studied it for a moment, then found the grounds in a canister on the counter and figured out the basics. Soon the kitchen filled with the familiar aroma of brewing coffee, a small anchor of normalcy in this unfamiliar space.
She poured herself a cup and returned to the window. The orchard stretched across the hillside, row after row of bare branches reaching toward a sky that was shifting from gray to pink to pale gold. In a few weeks, those branches would burst with blossoms. In a few months, they would hang heavy with fruit. The cycle of growth and harvest, endlessly repeating, hadbeen happening on this land long before Beth arrived and would continue long after.
It struck Maggie how different her daughter's life had become. Beth had grown up in suburbia, had walked to school on paved sidewalks, had played in a backyard that was tidy and contained. Now she lived on a working farm, surrounded by acres of land that required constant attention. She had married a man who built furniture with his hands and tended apple trees that had been planted by his great-grandfather.
It was a good life. Maggie could see that. But it was also a life she didn't fully understand, a world she was only beginning to glimpse.
Footsteps on the stairs announced Paolo's arrival. He appeared in the kitchen doorway, his hair rumpled from sleep, wearing the old sweater he had packed for the New England weather. He looked as slightly disoriented as she felt, another Florida transplant trying to adjust to this colder, quieter, earthier place.
