Chapter 23
“I was never going to,” I said.
“I know that now.”
We said goodbye.
Then I went back inside.
Two weeks later, a package arrived.
Inside was the green mug.
Wrapped around it was the old photograph Ethan had found of Jason and me in the first laboratory.
On the back, Jason had written:
We were good at the beginning.
Underneath, after a space:
I'm sorry we forgot how to be good to each other at the end.
I stood in my kitchen holding the photograph.
Then I placed it in a drawer.
Not hidden.
Not displayed.
Simply kept.
There was a freedom in allowing the past to exist without asking it to become the future.
That Sunday, Mom came to dinner.
So did Eleanor.
Ethan brought his sister and her two children, who spent most of the evening safely constructing increasingly ridiculous towers from wooden blocks on the living-room rug.
Daniel arrived carrying a bottle of sparkling cider because he claimed lawyers should never arrive empty-handed.
The house filled with conversation.
Ordinary conversation.
Recipes.
Schools.
Work.
A neighbor's impossible dog.
Whether rosemary actually belonged in roasted potatoes.
At one point, I slipped away to the porch.
Mom found me there.
“You all right?”
“Yes.”
She leaned beside me against the railing.
The evening sky had turned violet.
After a while, she said, “Your father would have liked this.”
“I think so.”
“He worried about you.”
“I know.”
“So did I.”
“I know that too.”
She looked at me.
“Are you happy?”
I thought carefully before answering.
The old version of me would have tried to reassure her.
The newer version had learned that honest answers were kinder.
“Not every day.”
Mom smiled.
“Good.”
I laughed.
“That isn't what mothers are supposed to say.”
“No. But happy every day sounds exhausting.”
She slipped her arm through mine.
“Are you peaceful more often than you used to be?”
I looked through the window.
At Eleanor laughing with Daniel.
At Ethan kneeling beside the children's wooden tower.
At the photograph of my grandmother resting on the shelf beside the first miniature model from Rosemary Labs.
“Yes,” I said.
“I am.”
That was enough.
For years, I thought the scars on my body were the most permanent things I carried from the past.
I was wrong.
So were the lessons.
The people.
The work.
The parts of myself I thought I had given away.