I’VE NEVER FORGOTTEN that conversation about fate I had with Tru when we were in Atlanta — that maybe fate was catching up to the things you love. I’m one of the six thousand freshmen at LSU this fall. Tru is one of the others. And we are together.

I have a collection of heavy and expensive books about marine biology and ornithology. I’ve got the Mississippi River flowing close to me again; close enough that when I walk out of my dorm, I can feel the breeze off of it, walk to the levee, watch the barges go by and scan the sky for birds heading down the flyway. And I’ve got plans. Big plans. Next summer, I’ll be an intern for one of my professors, working on a project looking at how coastal erosion is affecting migratory birds.

I still see Kendra, who’s at Southern on her amazing basketball scholarship, although not as much as I’d like to. I can feel life pulling us apart, but she will still show up at my door and come in without knocking, throw herself down on my bed, and say, “I’m hungry. Anything to eat around here?” So far we have gone home two weekends together, once for Bellvoir homecoming and once just because. Our next trip to New Orleans is scheduled for November, when the Derek Turner Project will be playing at the Royal Sonesta in the Quarter. Guess who’s playing piano with him?

Mandy will be back from Atlanta next month for the Orange Queen competition. She thinks she’s really got a chance this year.

Every once in a while I’ll get a call or a text from Danielle. She’s going to a community college in Salt Lake City while she tries to decide what she wants to major in. She sends me pictures of her cute little sister, whom she adores and who clearly adores her, too. I am so glad she has a real sister to love her like that. I know that we are not going to get back what we once had. I know we may never be in the same place again. But I also know that for each of us, the other is part of what we’ll always call home.

Our family’s home now is a duplex on the outskirts of Bellvoir. It went up at the end of last year, brand new, granite countertops and all. It takes Mama less time to get to work in New Orleans than it did in Atlanta. Daddy can be at the marina in about an hour and when I visit home, I’m always there helping him, getting out on the water or fixing up boats, which I’ve now become pretty good at. Shrimping is the same as it’s always been, up and down, scraping by. But it’s in him. I can’t say that Mama and Daddy are who they used to be. But they are trying. Maybe that’s all anybody can do.

Ground has been broken on Evangeline Beauchamp Elementary near Bayou Perdu. Not enough kids have come back to make a whole new school, so all the kids from the south part of the parish will go to this one. When they do the ribbon cutting, the superintendent says that we can plant an orange tree out front. Mamere would have liked that.

Sometimes I take out the copy of Evangeline she gave me on my sixteenth birthday and leaf through it. It can’t replace her warmth or the comfort she always gave me, but it feels like a part of her that I can still hold in my hands. When she gave it to me, she didn’t know that it would be one of the only material things I’d be able to keep from my old life. I always thought she wanted me to have it so that I’d be proud of my heritage and my name — the girl in a book. But now I think it was to remind me that loss and longing are a part of everyone’s story. And that no matter how broken I might feel, I can still find the inexpressible sweetness that the first Evangeline found, even when things seemed the darkest. Maybe it will come like it did for her, in a moment when the setting sun turns the sky and the water golden and a birdsong pierces through the silence right into my heart. Or maybe it will come with a kiss after an impossible-to-bear separation. But in all the low times, and the in-between times, those moments will echo through me like a melody.