If that is the tale they want to tell over coffee for the next twenty years, they are welcome to it.

There are worse things to be remembered for than having stood on your own steps and refused to be moved.

Chapter 14 — The Rainstorm Visitor

Three years passed.

Good ones.

On an autumn night with the rain drumming steady on the tin roof and the woodstove throwing amber light across the pine walls, Colette sat across the oak table from me going over the quarterly numbers for the trust on her laptop.

She was not the woman who had once signed her name to whatever was set in front of her.