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CHAPTER 40

LILY

My childhood home sat unchanged. Red brick warmed by the last gold of evening. White trim around the windows my mother repainted every spring. The narrow front garden boxed in by low stone, winter-bare except for the skeletons of rosebushes that would be impossible to kill no matter how hard my father tried to prune them.

Home.

My chest tightened until breathing hurt.

I had not been here since I was eight years old. Not in the life I remembered, the one where grief hollowed out everything that came after. In that life, this house had become something untouchable, preserved only in photographs and memory because returning would have meant confronting how much had been lost.

But nothing had been lost here.

Light glowed from the front windows. Warm, steady, ordinary. Shadows moved inside, living people passing from room to room.

Alive.

My hand trembled as I pushed open the gate. It gave with the same soft creak I remembered, a sound so familiar it stopped me. The short path stretched impossibly long, each step dragging through years that had not existed for me but had existed for them.

On the porch, I stopped again.

The brass knocker was polished to a soft shine. The tiny chip on the left edge, from when my sister slammed her toy gardening tools into it when my mum wouldn't let her dig in her flower bed.

I raised my hand and hesitated.

What if they open the door and don't recognize me?

The thought was absurd. Of course they would. But panic clawed up anyway, the fear that this world might reject me the way the last one had expelled me.

Before I could lose my nerve, I knocked.

Footsteps approached almost immediately. Light, quick.

The door swung open.

For a moment my mind refused to understand what I was seeing.

He looked older than the version burned into my memory, lines at the corners of his eyes, grey threading through dark hair, shoulders slightly stooped in a way that spoke of years I had not witnessed. But it was unmistakably him. The same steady gaze. The same quiet solidity.

“Hey pumpkin.”

His name for me. I hadn't heard it in so long. Warm and rough and completely real.

Something inside my chest collapsed. My arms flung around his neck and I held on as tight as I could.

“Well, it's good to see you too.”

His body was solid and warm. Grounding me in a way that nearly undid me.

He held me another moment. “You alright?”

I pulled away, wiping my tears with my shirt sleeve. “I'm fine,” I lied, because the truth had no shape language could hold. “I love you, Daddy.”

His expression was gentle.

“I love you more.” He patted me on the head the way he used to when I was little.

“Well,” he said, stepping back and opening the door wider, “don't just stand out there. Come in.”