Epilogue

Fourteen months later

 

She was just taking the cookies out of the oven when she heard the familiar little voice drifting up her driveway and through her front window screens. Glancing at the clock above the sink, Dani wiped her hands on the nearest dish towel and turned back to the chubby-cheeked baby happily gumming a pale yellow teething ring and watching her every move with wonder and fascination.

“Do you hear that, little one?” she asked, grinning. “I think we’re about to get a visit from a friend!”

The tiny mouth, wet with drool, spread wide in the same endearingly crooked grin Dani saw, times four, every morning when she opened her eyes. In those framed smiles, as well as the one in front of her now, she found the courage to tackle a new day. And when grief darkened her path forward, it was their light, their beauty, that got her back on track time and time again.

“C’mon, pumpkin. It’s a perfect day to—”

“It’s me, Dani! Me and Mamm! Are you home?”

Unbuckling the baby from the swing, Dani pulled the sweet wiggly body against her chest and waved the tiny hand at the heart-shaped face now peering back at them through the living room screen.

“They are home, Mamm! They are home! I see them!”

“Perhaps you should not press your face to Danielle’s window.”

“But I see them, Mamm! I see them both! See?” The screen pushed inward with Nettie’s index finger, then retracted at Lydia’s command. “They are right there. In the kitchen! And I smell cookies! Yummy ones!”

“Yummy cookies? Did someone say yummy cookies?”

Bobbing her head to the right, Dani traveled her gaze out the kitchen window to the black pickup truck stopped in line with her front porch. An added lean yielded the man who’d been a steadfast beacon through some of her stormiest days. With his solid hand and quiet friendship, she’d found a way to put herself back together—piece by piece. Very few of her pieces looked as they once had. Some were battered and worn around the edges. Others had required a few strokes of a marker to restore their missing color. And still others had come so close to breaking in two they’d required a piece of tape here and a piece of tape there just to keep them intact. But when they finally fell into place where they belonged, she was still the same person in all the ways that mattered most.

She was still Jeff’s wife . . .

She was still Maggie, Spencer, and Ava’s mom . . .

And she was still her mother’s daughter.

Nothing, not even death, could ever change those things.

But she was more than that now, too.

She was someone who sat outside and savored sunsets . . .

She was someone who looked at the clock merely as a point of reference rather than a timer . . .

She was someone who took walks to nowhere in particular. . .

She was someone who savored the here and now and tried hard to let her battle-tested faith take care of the rest . . .

All good things, no doubt.

But of all the changes that had come her way—good and bad—the very best one was in her arms at that very moment. For in her baby’s face she saw a dash of Spencer, a pinch of Ava, and a sprinkle of Maggie combined with equal parts Jeff and her mom. Yet, even with those little reminders she so cherished, Grace was just Grace, too.

Sweet.

Loving.

And a daily reminder of the importance of faith, and friends.

Breathing in her daughter’s sweet scent, Dani gathered four cookies in her hand, bypassed the stack of napkins deemed unnecessary by summer’s unwritten rules, and headed toward the front door of her new home—a home she’d fallen in love with the moment she’d laid eyes on it.

It wasn’t that it was big and fancy like the home she’d shared with Jeff and the kids. Quite the contrary, in fact. But the small rental cottage on the edge of Caleb’s property was the new start she needed. It was just far enough away from Lydia and Elijah that she had to learn to stand on her own two feet a little, yet still close enough to know Caleb’s listening ears were less than fifty feet away.

In the beginning, she’d worried that she was robbing Grace of the chance to grow up in the same home in which her brother and sisters had once lived—a home her daddy had worked so hard to buy for all of them. But if there was one thing Dani had learned since that fateful day, it was that love wasn’t defined by space or time. It was everywhere. All the time. And it was up to Dani to make sure Grace grew up truly knowing her father, her brother, her sisters, and her grandmother via the photographs and stories that would forever hold a special place in their lives.

Swinging her gaze to the table beside the door, she drank in the sight of the blue sticky note now framed and purposely placed in a spot where she and Grace would see it every time they walked out the door. Because while the words had been written for Dani, she knew they applied to Grace, as well.

“We will love you for all eternity, too,” she whispered.