My Dearest Robert,

This afternoon Sydney helped me chop vegetables. There were questions I wanted to ask her. I’ve realized, suddenly, how little I truly know of her past. There’s this young man named Micah, you see, and . . .

But that’s not why I’m writing this letter. I’m writing because it’s the questions Sydney asked me I can’t stop thinking about. She asked about Diana. About how I came to adopt her.

And Robert, it strikes me that in all these years of writing to you, I’ve never told you about Tatum Carter.

You were new in Muir Harbor when we met so I doubt you ever knew the Carters. They’re a prominent family. Tatum was two or maybe three years ahead of me in school. And I don’t know—honestly, I’ve no earthly idea—why he took an interest in a grieving nineteen-year-old that summer in between his college semesters. But he did. I’d see him in church or around town and he’d always have a friendly smile for me.

He was volunteering at the hospital that summer. He brought me a flyer one evening—about a volunteer opportunity in the maternity ward. Rocking babies. Literally, that was the whole volunteer role—just rocking babies in the hospital nursery. He said he thought it would be good for me.

I listened to him because at that point, I would’ve listened to anyone who offered any sort of cure at all for my grief. We’d ride together and I’d rock babies and when his shift was over, he’d pick me up at the nursery and drive me home.

And one night, in the middle of the summer, I held Diana. And, Robert, something in me knew even then that she was special. I found out later her mother, Olivia, was horrifically sick with cancer, had chosen to forgo treatments in order to deliver a healthy child. We became friends in the coming weeks. There wasn’t a father in the picture and she didn’t have much more in the way of family.

And when it came time for her to enter hospice only a month after delivering Diana, she asked me the question I never could’ve expected.

I brought Diana home to Muir Farm just days later. Tatum drove us. I think, perhaps, that Olivia thought Tatum and I . . .

But I was still grieving you. And then Olivia, too. And entering motherhood. And he . . . well, he returned to school.

Tatum wants to buy the farm. I know what he’s doing, Robert. He’s trying to help me again. And I’ve no idea what to do. It would break Neil’s heart if I sold. It might very well break my own.

And if I believed in ghosts, I’d fear Alec Muir’s eternal haunting.

But Neil works so hard and the girls have other careers and . . . I worry sometimes I’m trapped in the past. I’ve been having the nightmares again, Robert. About the night of Diana’s accident. They’re so blurry . . .

I don’t know what to do.

With all my love,

Maggie