But she didn't miss the loneliness. She didn't miss the woman she had been here, the wife who had tried so hard to be perfect, the mother who had given everything and still felt like it wasn't enough. She didn't miss the house that had become a prison long before she realized she was trapped.
“I miss parts of it,” she finally said. “But I don't miss who I was when I lived here. I like who I've become better.”
“That's a good answer,” Chelsea said.
“It's an honest answer.”
Grandma Sarah turned onto a familiar road, and suddenly the houses were closer together, the lawns smaller, the streets lined with the kinds of mature trees that only existed in neighborhoods where people had lived for generations.
“We're almost there,” Lauren said, and her voice had lost its playful edge.
“I know.”
“Are you ready?”
Maggie wasn't sure how to answer. How did you prepare yourself to say goodbye to twenty years? How did you pack up a life and move on as if it had been nothing more than a temporary stop on the way to somewhere else?
“I don't think you can be ready for something like this,” she said. “I think you just have to do it and trust that you'll be okay on the other side.”
The RV turned onto Maple Street, and there it was.
The house where she had been a wife. The house where she had been a new mother. The house where she had discovered her husband's betrayals and had her heart broken and had somehow, impossibly, survived.
It looked smaller than she remembered. The white colonialwith black shutters, the wraparound porch Daniel had built the summer after Michael was born, the hydrangeas she had planted along the front that were just starting to show their spring growth. The maple tree in the front yard had grown so large that its branches now shaded the entire lawn where her children had learned to walk, to run, to ride bikes, to throw baseballs.
Christopher's car was parked in front of the house, giving Grandma Sarah plenty of room to park the RV. Maggie could see her son and daughter-in-law standing on the porch. Christopher had his arm around Becca, and even from this distance, Maggie could see the emotion on his face.
No one moved to get out of the RV.
“Well,” Grandma Sarah said finally, breaking the silence. “Here we are.”
“Here we are,” Maggie echoed.
“It looks the same,” Sarah said softly. “I don't know why, but I expected it to look different.”
“Houses don't change,” Lauren said. “People do.”
The air smelled like cut grass and spring flowers and something else, something that existed only in her memory. The smell of home.
She stood on the sidewalk, looking at the house where she had lived another life, and felt her family gather around her. Grandma Sarah on one side, Chelsea on the other, Lauren and Sarah behind her. Christopher and Becca on the porch.
“Ready?” Christopher asked.
Maggie looked at the front door, at the porch where she had sat on summer evenings watching her children play, at the windows where she had stood watching for Daniel's car, back when she still believed in the life they were building together.
“Ready,” she said.
And together, they walked toward the house.
CHAPTER 21
The front door stuck, just like it always had.
Christopher shouldered it open with the practiced ease of someone who had done it a thousand times, and the smell hit Maggie before she even crossed the threshold. Lemon furniture polish. And underneath it all, something indefinable—the accumulated scent of decades of living, of cooking and cleaning and laughing and crying and everything in between.
“I try and keep it as clean as I can, but these days with Ellie, things get away from me,” Becca said.
“Oh honey, don’t worry about that. Everything looks fine,” Maggie said.
