All those daisies.
Still going.
Still hers.
Still ours.
I close my eyes.
Think of her.
Mom.
I know, baby.
Both of you will be okay.
Together.
Yeah.
I know.
I love you.
I miss you.
The window is open.
It stays open.
EPILOGUE
TWENTY-SIX|FIVE YEARS LATER
• • •
The thing about living with my dad is that he has opinions about breakfast.
Specific, extensive, deeply held opinions about breakfast that he is not shy about sharing at seven in the morning when you are trying to make coffee in peace and process the fact that you are a functioning adult human being who has existed on this earth for twenty-six years.
"You need protein," he says, from where he is already standing at the stove, spatula in hand, entirely too awake.
"I have protein."
"Coffee is not protein."
"Coffee is survival."
He points the spatula at me. "You sound like your mother."
I take my coffee and sit down at the table.
• • •
We moved in three years ago.
Not because we had to. Because we wanted to. Because after everything — the hospital, the grey year, the eight hundred miles, the letters and the silences and the long way back — there was a version of the future where my dad was alone in this house with her garden and her chair and her book still on the nightstand, and none of us could stand the thought of it.
