The letter came on a Tuesday, in a brown envelope with a Cornwall postmark and a stamp that had been put on slightly crooked.Margaret brought it in from the hallway. She set it on the round table between the salt shaker and the bread basket. She did not open it. She went back to the stove.Dani saw it first. She was wiping the counter, her sleeve rolled up, her hands smelling of soap. She looked at the envelope. She looked at the postmark. She looked at Margaret."It's from Cornwall," Dani said.Margaret didn't turn around. "I know."Dani put down the cloth. She walked to the table. She picked up the envelope. She turned it over. She looked at the handwriting on the front. Small. Slanted. The kind of handwriting that took its time."It's Julian," Dani said.The kitchen shifted. Not dramatically. Not the way kitchens shift when someone says something that stops everything. Just a small shift. Peter looked up from his book. Tommy stopped chewing. Lily turned her head from the window.D

Victoria drove down on a Saturday in March.She did not tell Julian she was coming. She did not call ahead. She just got in the car at seven in the morning with a paper bag in the passenger seat and drove west, watching the motorway turn into lanes, the lanes turn into hills, the hills turn into the grey smear of the sea.The paper bag was on the seat beside her. Inside it, wrapped in damp newspaper, was a foxglove seedling. Small. Pale. No bigger than her thumb. She had grown it herself, in a pot on the windowsill of her flat in London, from a seed she had taken from the foxglove in the orphanage garden. The one that had flowered last summer. The one that had taken two years.She had not told Julian about it. She had not told anyone. She had just grown it, in the pot, on the windowsill, watering it every morning before she went to work, watching it push up through the soil, watching it grow the way foxglove grows. Slowly. Stubbornly. Without asking permission.She reached the cottage