History hasn’t been kind to women in general, but it has been especially hard on our kind. We’ve been both revered and reviled, sought for our wisdom, yet spurned for our otherness. We’ve been cast out, hunted, tortured, and killed, blamed for everything from dead cows and failed crops, to hailstorms and stillborn babes. We remember the burning times, and because we remember, we’ve learned to be careful, to keep our own company and trust no one.

But there can be a cost to keeping your own company, a cost I know all too well. Over the years I’ve seen that cost at work in you. You’ve been hiding for as long as I’ve known you, playing small as they say nowadays, afraid of making others uncomfortable. The world has always been afraid of a singular woman—as it is of most powerful things. It would much rather keep us in the shadows, where it needn’t acknowledge our gifts. But the world has no right to keep us in the shadows, Lizzy. Not without our permission. At some point, we must step into our stories, and claim them for our own.

Anything else is half a life.

It won’t be easy. Stepping into the light never is, but it’s what we’re all called to do. To find our truth—whatever that may be—and live it without apology. Each generation has had its burdens to carry, and you will almost certainly have yours. But you will never be alone. When life is hard, when your soul is parched, look to your roots for sustenance—like the dandelion pressed between these pages—and remember those who came before you, their strength and their resilience, their refusal to remain in the shadows and not bother anyone.

How I would love to say I’m one of those strong, resilient women, that I have always lived according to my own truths, but I am not—or wasn’t when it mattered most. What I tell you next, I have never told anyone. I have kept it hidden, locked up tight in the deepest reaches of my heart. But there is a lesson in it—a lesson for you, Lizzy—which is why I must tell it now, before my pages run out . . .

FORTY-FIVE

Lizzy stared at the book, still open on her lap, the world as she knew it—or thought she’d known it—suddenly and irrevocably unshaped by Althea’s parting words. The lines from the journal’s final page continued to echo, a confession, but a cautionary tale too, about the choices we make and how they echo down through the years, until the sand in our hourglass eventually runs out.

She had wondered once about the thread of wistfulness that crept into Althea’s entries from time to time, but had shrugged it off, unable to imagine her grandmother needing anything more than the farm and her work. It never occurred to her that there might once have been another dream, or a yearning for something lost.

Lizzy blinked away tears as she traced her fingers over the thinly scrawled lines, Althea’s pen strokes achingly fragile, yet indelible somehow. Each of us comes into the world with a story to tell. Was her grandmother right? Did she have a story to tell? A book she had yet to begin? And could she begin it here?

It would mean leaving Chenier. Walking away from everything she’d worked for, and toward everything she’d sworn she never wanted. And maybe a few things she believed she could never have. It would mean stepping into the light, being seen for who and what she was—or at least who Andrew thought she was—the girl with the light inside her.

The wind lifted suddenly, rustling the leaves around her feet into tiny whorls. It was there again, Althea’s earthy-sweet scent, swirling in the warm breeze. Lizzy closed her eyes and tipped up her face, reveling in the soft caress of it against her cheeks. And this time she knew. It wasn’t wishful thinking. It was a call to follow her heart.

FORTY-SIX

Andrew checked the dashboard clock as he exited the Spaulding Turnpike. Nearly six o’clock. Five hours since his phone had pinged with the text from Lizzy’s new cell.

It’s Rhanna, so don’t reply. Our girl’s getting antsy. Get home ASAP if you want to say goodbye.

Goodbye. The word had left him gutted, as if a door he’d been feebly propping open had suddenly and irrevocably slammed shut. Not that there’d ever really been a door. She’d made her position clear from the get-go. Her life was in New York, and there had never been a chance that she wasn’t going back to it.

And yet there’d been a flicker of hope, a flimsy thread he’d chosen to cling to, that something, anything, would change her mind and convince her to stay. He’d been a fool. And now he was playing the fool again, navigating rush hour traffic with a knot in his gut, asking for one more kick of the mule.

He hadn’t replied to the text. Or dropped everything to hurry home. He’d wrestled with it a bit, playing their last words over in his head, searching for the slimmest hint that there was some opening, something he could say to make her stay. He’d come up empty. He couldn’t make her feel what he felt, or want what he wanted. If slipping out of town while his back was turned was how she wanted to end things, so be it. But he wasn’t letting her go without seeing her one last time.

His stomach did one of those roller-coaster plunges when he turned the corner and spotted her car still in the drive. He hadn’t been quite sure how to interpret the word antsy, and was afraid she might already be gone. Now, as he pulled up and cut the engine, he realized he should have given some thought to what he actually planned to say.

He was holding his breath when the front door pulled back. He let it out when Rhanna appeared instead of Lizzy. She grabbed his sleeve, pulling him over the threshold and into the foyer.

“I’m sorry about the text, but I didn’t know what else to do. She’s been packing all afternoon. I was afraid she’d be gone by the time you got back.”

“Where is she?”

“Out back last time I saw her. What are you going to say?”

He shrugged. “Goodbye, I guess.”

Rhanna’s face fell, making it clear that she’d been hoping for some grand MGM ending, where the hero drags the heroine into his arms for a bruising kiss as the credits roll.

He stepped around her, headed for the mudroom door. From the steps, he scanned the yard, the fields, the ridge overlooking the place where the barn had stood. There was no sign of her. But there was a book lying open on the wrought-iron bench. He was moving down the steps, making another scan of the yard, when he saw her coming out of the woods, her head down as she moved toward him. It was the third time he’d come upon her like this, but the effect was no less startling, the way the sun filtered through the trees, bathing her in light, the brief moment of confusion as her head came up and she saw him.

“You’re back,” she said, going still.

He nodded stiffly. “I heard you’re heading back soon. I thought I’d come say goodbye, wish you good luck, or safe travels. Whatever it is neighbors do when one of them moves away.”

“Andrew . . .”

He shook his head. He didn’t want to hear all the reasons she was going, any more than she wanted to hear all the reasons he wanted her to stay. They’d done that to death, and he’d come out on the losing end. He had no claim on her. He got that. But it stung that she’d intended to go without a word.

“It’s not that you’re leaving,” he said, fighting to keep his voice even. “You never made any secret of that. It’s the way you were going to do it. Blindsiding me. I’d come back, and your car would just be gone. Maybe there’d be a FOR SALE sign in the yard, just to make sure I got the message.”

She stood there looking at him, as if he were some exotic species of wildlife she hadn’t expected to encounter. “Who told you I was leaving?”

“Rhanna sent me a text from your new phone. She said if I wanted to say goodbye, I’d better get back here pronto. I wasn’t going to come at first. I tried to talk myself out of it. I thought if that’s how you want it—” He broke off, leaving the rest unsaid. He’d promised himself he wouldn’t do this, wouldn’t try to guilt her, wouldn’t ask her to stay. “I wasn’t going to come.”

She blinked hard, as if fending off tears. “Why did you?”

He dragged a hand through his hair. Why? It was a ridiculous question. And he had absolutely no idea how to answer it. “When I left for Boston, I didn’t know . . . I thought you’d still be here when I got back, that there’d be time. If I had known you wouldn’t be . . .” He dropped his hands to his sides, abandoning the pretense. “I came because I needed to see your face one last time.”

The tears Lizzy had been fighting finally spilled down her cheeks. How had she ever thought it would be easy to leave this man? Or that skipping town while he was gone would be less painful for either of them? It seemed incomprehensible now.

But then, so much seemed incomprehensible after what she’d just read. She should say something, make him understand, but she couldn’t seem to find the words.

“I wasn’t trying to hurt you, Andrew.” She reached for him, but he pulled away. “I was trying to make it easier.”

“You thought this would be easier?”

“Andrew . . . listen to me.”

“I’ve been listening. I’ve heard everything you said. Every single time you said it. Did I hope you’d change your mind? Yeah. But I get it now. So I came to say goodbye.”