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“This one says ‘thankful we made it,’” Olivia reads, low. It’s mine. It isn’t dated, but I know the year.

“That was a hard one,” Dottie says, gentle, not making it more than it is.

I don’t explain it. Olivia doesn’t ask. She just puts one finger to the edge of the leaf, careful, and leaves it where it hangs.

Then Dottie hands out this year’s leaves, and we write.

Bo writes fast and hangs his first. “Fluffy. My hundred on spelling. My pie.” He thinks. “And Olivia.”

“That’s four things on one leaf,” Dottie says.

“It was a good year,” Bo says.

Dottie writes hers where nobody can read it and hangs it high. Olivia writes hers slowly, the way she does everything, and I don’t look, because some things you let a person keep.

I write mine last. I always go last. And when I reach up to hang it on a high branch, my hand brushes an old leaf loose, and it drifts down and lands on the carpet by my foot.

I pick it up.

It’s soft with age, the marker gone gray. My handwriting, from a year I can place by how few words I had in me.

Please let me be enough for him.

I stand there holding it. A few words I wrote at a kitchen table at two in the morning, when it was just me and a toddler and a future I couldn’t see the shape of, and I begged God on a paper leaf to make me enough for a boy everybody else had already left.

Bo’s ten now. He got a hundred on his spelling test. He’s over by the door arguing with Dottie about whether Fluffy can have his own leaf next year.

And there’s a woman who wore my grandmother’s apron with flour still on her sleeve, watching me hold it, and she doesn’t ask what it says, and I find I want her to know.

I hand it to her.

She reads it. Her jaw ticks. She reads it again.

“You were,” she says. Like she was there. “You are.”

I take the old leaf and hang it back where it fell from, up high, next to the new one I just wrote, which says the only thing I had room for this year.

Thank You for all of them.

Chapter 23

Olivia

It has been ten days since Luke told me he loved me.

He’s said it every day, multiple times a day since. In the driveway. On my couch. Once into the top of my head when he thought I was asleep during a movie, which I was not.

I’ve said it back every time. It gets easier. That surprises me. I expected it to feel like standing on a ledge. Instead it feels like the opposite.

The past ten days have been busy.

Work, which I’m good at and which asks nothing of me it hasn’t asked for years. A trip to the park and bakery again with Bo. A Tuesday I made too much soup on purpose so I’d have a reason to drive some to their house, and then stayed two hours, and drove home at nine forty-five, which is forty-five minutes past the time I like to be in bed.

Natalie calls me now on her drive home from work, every day, about nothing and everything at the same time.

I keep waiting for the part where it curdles. Where somebody remembers they have somewhere better to be, or looks a little closer and finds the thing that makes me not worth the trouble. It hasn’t come. That’s the part I can’t get comfortable with. Not the good. The way the good keeps not ending.

This morning it’s church, and Luke is off, which means all four of us in the third row.