My daughter, who had once signed a piece of paper without reading it and nearly lost everything, needed to stand in front of the stove and watch a piece of paper burn without signing it, all the way to ash.

It was not about the money.

It was the closing of a circle.

The signature had opened the wound; the refusal to sign, made visible in flame, was how she finally sealed it.

When the last of it went up the flue, she let out a long breath, and her shoulders came down from around her ears where they had lived for three years, and she was, at last, all the way home.

Spring came six months later, and with it the dogwoods along the drive and the lake turning the exact deep blue Faye used to mix on her canvases.