And as I did, my phone chimed with a message, and I smiled before I even opened it, because I knew who it would be.

It was Patricia.

She had sent a photograph: a vibrant, sun-drenched garden overlooking the ocean in Santa Barbara, a garden she had planted herself, in soil that was entirely her own.

And beneath it, a single line: The white roses bloomed today, Jessi.

Dinner is at six.

Don’t be late.

I looked at that photograph for a long moment — the roses, and the ocean behind them, and the whole impossible fact of it.

Thirty-two years that gentle woman spent believing she would die in a house that hurt her.