A small flag moved by the door.

The garden Niko had planned was coming up where he’d said it would.

I had a life now that was mine and hers and, in every board and blossom of it, still his.

And then a car I didn’t know slowed at the curb — an old sedan, ten years old at least, rust blooming along the rocker panels — and it stopped, and the door opened, and my father got out.

He was not the man from the kitchen.

Six months had taken the color out of his hair and the starch out of his spine; his clothes hung wrong, cheap and ill-fitting, bought in a hurry by a man who used to buy things carefully.