My husband had spent years warning me never to set foot on that farm. So after he passed away and the lawyer handed me the key, saying that from now on the place belonged to me, I was ready to sell it right away and put everything behind me. But before making my final decision, I still wanted to see it once for myself. When the door opened, I finally understood why, all those years, he had never wanted me to set foot there.

“You never complained,” he continued. “Which is exactly why I knew how much it mattered. Some people shout when they lose what they love. You did something harder. You folded it away neatly and kept living. I always told myself that if the day came when I could give it back, I would.”

He glanced off-screen for a moment, toward the studio around him. Toward the room I was now standing inside.

“There’s one more thing. Check the cabinet beneath the window seat.”

I crossed the room almost without feeling my feet.

The cabinet door opened on a large archival box.

Inside were my paintings.

Not all of them, but enough to make the room blur. College work. Figure studies. Landscape attempts. Horse sketches. My final senior project. Pieces I had thought were lost in one move or another, or damaged, or left behind in storage units when life became too crowded for sentimental inventory. Joshua had saved them. Preserved them. Carried them through years I had spent assuming that part of myself had simply been misplaced beyond retrieval.

On top lay a note in his hand.

She’s still in there, Cat.

I sank to the floor with the note in one hand and an old canvas in the other.

There are moments when grief changes shape. This was one of them. Until then it had mostly been subtraction. The absence of his voice, his body, his routines, his place at the table, his side of the bed. But here, in the studio, grief became revelation. He had not only loved me. He had been paying attention to the rooms inside me that I myself had abandoned.

I did not hear the cars at first.

Only when a shadow crossed the studio wall did I look up toward the long drive.

The black SUV was back.

And behind it, a silver sedan I recognized immediately.

Jenna.

My daughter stepped out first, wind catching her dark hair and pressing her coat against her long frame. For one impossible second, with the prairie light behind her and Joshua’s posture in the set of her shoulders, she looked so much like him it hurt.

Then I saw Robert approach her.

She smiled. Shook his hand. Allan did the same. David leaned in and said something that made her nod.

A coldness spread through me with terrifying speed.

They had gotten to her.

I stood at the studio window, one hand still gripping the cabinet door, and watched my daughter exchange greetings with three men Joshua had spent most of his life avoiding.