Chapter 15 — Spring

Spring came to Illinois the way it always does, all at once after holding out too long — rain, then apple blossom, then a green so sudden it looks like an argument the winter lost.

I sat in a cedar rocker on the front porch of the house Niko built with his own hands, with our daughter one month old and asleep against my chest, and I watched the quiet street where the convoy had once come, and I was, to my own surprise, at peace.

Rina had his eyes.

That was the first thing everyone said and it was true — his dark serious eyes, already watching the world as though taking notes on it — and a soft dark curl of his hair on her forehead, and when she slept she made the small contented sounds of a person who has never once in her life been cold or unwanted, which was the entire point, which was the whole thing I had left to do.

She had come in late April, in a hospital where the staff had no idea who I was or who her father had been, just another exhausted woman doing the oldest hard work there is.