He set them down on the little table between us, and then he leaned over and pressed a long, gentle kiss to my forehead, and then he gathered Fiona up out of my arms and lifted her high into the air above his head until she shrieked with pure delight, her little legs pedaling in the sunshine.

I watched them, my husband and my daughter, framed against the blue Maine sky and the distant glitter of the ocean, and I felt the deep, settled peace of a family that has come, at last, through the storm and out the other side, into calmer water.

Fiona would grow up here, I thought, watching her laugh in her father’s raised hands.

She would learn to walk on these floorboards, learn the names of the seabirds, grow up thinking of pine and salt and safety as the ordinary texture of the world.