Iris sat on the floor with the letter in her lap and cried.

Her grandmother had died before she met Garrett.

Iris used to wish the older woman had been present at the wedding.

Now she wondered whether her grandmother would have noticed the warning signs that she had dismissed.

She couldn’t know.

She could only hear the wisdom in a sentence written years before the trouble began.

That afternoon she planted the tomatoes.

Soil stained her hands and slipped between the balcony tiles.