Four hours later, Nick Flemming was waking up in a hospital bed, surrounded by his family. Liv and Ru stood on one side of his bed, Atty and Esme on the other. Augusta was holding his hand. When she came into focus—her beautiful gaze—she smiled and stroked his hair.

“The girls,” she said, “have decided what they really want from you.”

He pursed his lips to ask what he could give them, but Augusta hushed him.

“We want to know you,” Ru said. “And for you to know us.”

“Before you die on us,” Esme said.

“We probably need you,” Liv said, “in a similar way to how you need us.”

“In short,” Atty said, “there’s been a lot of bullshit in this family.”

Nick nodded. “I’ll try not to die. Not yet at least.” And then the faces poised around him blurred to small bits of shimmering color. He blinked. Two quick tears streaked his temples. And then he fell back to sleep.

“All this time I thought you were the center of the wheel and we were all just spokes,” Esme said. “But it’s him now. It’s him.” She stared at her father while he slept.

“In the spirit of less bullshit,” Liv said to Ru, “I’ve been thinking about cherry-picking your fiancé.”

“He’s not my fiancé. He’s coming to pick up the ring tomorrow. It’s over.”

“Honey,” Augusta said. “I’m so sorry.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” Esme asked.

“We don’t know how to really talk to each other, do we?” Ru said.

Atty was still a little woozy, but her brain function was back. She felt good, in fact. Better than she had in a long time and not just because of the drugs, but because things had felt strained for a long, long time and now they had finally broken. “You were really going to steal her fiancé?” Atty asked Liv.

“I was thinking about it.”

“Are you still thinking about it?” Esme asked Liv.

“Well, it’s no longer cherry-picking now,” Liv said. “They’re already broken up.”

“I might be falling in love with Teddy Whistler,” Ru said to Liv.

“It’s because you absorbed all that love meant for me,” Liv said, with a strange sense of peacefulness. “All that shouting when he was on our front lawn that summer.”

“Remember conducting the storms in front of the third-floor windows?” Esme asked, wistfully.

The room was quiet except for the beeping of machinery, tracking Nick Flemming’s vitals.

“I kept doing it, for years, storm after storm,” Liv said softly, and then, inexplicably, she started to tear up. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she wasn’t crying for the sake of manipulation. She was crying because she suddenly thought of herself as a girl then a teen, standing in front of the glass, with her pear-cork-handled conductor’s baton. She was crying because she was recognizing this secret self, this vulnerable girl. She missed who she’d once been. More than her husbands and more than Teddy Whistler in a boardwalk booth or on the front lawn, she missed that girl in the window during a storm—most of all.

“About that,” Augusta said to Esme. “You were right after all. I was afraid of daily intimacy, the kind you build a life on. I had trouble trusting.”

“To be fair,” Ru said, pointing at her father with both hands. “It was a tricky situation.”

“I wanted a tricky situation, and I wanted a family.” Augusta shook her head and said, “I didn’t just want a family. I wanted this family.”

“So I had it wrong,” Esme said, “but also kind of right.”

“Are you crying?” Atty asked Liv. “For real?”

Liv was too choked up to answer. She just gave a quick nod.