Spring slid into summer. I hiked alone because I wanted to, and with Sarah because she insisted on bringing Moose to introduce him to every creek in Boulder County. In June, I took the most radical vacation of my life: three days at a cheap motel in Santa Fe with a paperback and a promise to myself that if my phone lit up I didn’t owe anyone an answer. I bought a turquoise ring from a woman who hammered it into shape in front of me and said it would hold any oath I told it. In my room that night, I whispered into the silver, “I will not go back,” and the ring felt warm for a long time afterward.
A letter arrived in July printed on cheap municipal stationery. “Ms. Beckett: Your presence is not required at the hearing in People v. Cheryl Beckett, but you have the right to attend.” I didn’t go. I went to the dog park with Moose and watched him discover the concept of sprinklers. Later, I pulled the docket and read the minutes. Probation confirmed. Community service reassigned. The judge used the phrase “coercive family system” and “financial grooming,” and it landed like a care package in my chest. Words matter. Especially when they show up wearing a robe.
At the end of August, I found a cardboard box on my porch with no return address. Inside: eight of my high‑school notebooks, once lost to a garage purge, pages stiff with dust, my handwriting a narrow, disciplined march. On top lay a smaller envelope addressed in Sarah’s tidy printing: “These were left in the Littleton evidence room after the property release. Thought you’d want them.” There was no note from my mother. There was no note from anyone. I took the notebooks inside, brewed a mug of tea, and opened the top one to a random page.
March 17: “It doesn’t count if no one sees it.”
I traced the words with my thumb. Then I took a pen and added, in the margin, “It counts anyway. I see it.” I didn’t know whose voice that was yet—thirteen‑year‑old me learning to say it, or twenty‑seven‑year‑old me reaching back to say it for her. Maybe both. Maybe that’s how time works when you finally stop begging it to turn you into somebody else’s dream.
In September, I started something that felt like a dare. The week I closed on the bungalow, I’d stumbled on a Craigslist listing for a battered rolling workbench someone had left in a storage unit. It had a foot‑deep burn along one side and a vice so rusty you had to sweet‑talk it to open. I bought it for $40, oiled the joints until they remembered how to move, and pushed it into the one‑car garage behind the house. Now I began to collect wood the way other people collect recipes: offcuts from a cabinet shop, salvaged fir from a renovation, a plank of walnut a retired luthier sold me for half price because “you’re going to do something honest with it.”
I wasn’t trying to build furniture. Not at first. I was trying to build time. Hours where my hands made an argument my mouth didn’t have to. The first thing I made was a box, crooked as a grin. The second was a stool that wobbled until I learned how to true a leg. The third was a low table with a seam dead center I could have hidden if I’d chosen better boards. I left it right where it was. I’d spent my whole life learning to disguise the joins. I wanted a house full of them now.
People appeared—because the world is full of them when you stop trying to win the wrong ones. My next‑door neighbor, a retired surveyor named Frank, taught me to read the sky for weather in the Flatirons. Reina brought over a label‑maker and made my filing cabinet look like a surgeon’s tray. Hector called to say his daughter had picked CU and asked which breakfast burrito was worth the line (Santiago’s, always Santiago’s). I started leaving a second chair on the porch because sometimes the best use of an evening is watching sunlight climb down a mountain with someone who knows how to be quiet together.
On Halloween, a girl dressed as a catcher rang my bell and reached for the bowl with both hands. She was seven, maybe, freckles like commas and an intensity I recognized from a lifetime ago. “You play?” I asked, nodding at the chest protector. “Softball or baseball?”
“Baseball,” she said, chin out like it was a test.
“Good,” I said. “Want a handful?”
Her dad hung back on the sidewalk, smiling. “She insists on her gear,” he said. “We tell her she can be whatever she wants.”
“Hold on,” I said, and stepped inside. I came back with the turquoise ring’s twin I’d bought and never needed and a card with the name of a nonprofit Sarah had pointed me toward—girls who wanted to pitch and didn’t have a field to do it on. “If she ever needs a place to borrow gear or a clinic that won’t make a spectacle of her, call these people. And tell her to keep her knees up on the block.”
The girl grinned, ferocious and perfect. “I know,” she said, like of course she did.
By Thanksgiving, the serviceberry had lost its leaves and the mountains had taken on that faint, haunted blue that means snow is practicing just out of sight. I drove to East Aurora with a pecan pie and a bag that said, optimistically, WEEKEND. Sarah opened the door with Moose wedged against her hip and her parents right behind her because apparently we were doing the whole thing, and no one thought to warn me. Her mother hugged me like I’d been in the family since 1998 and her father invited me to carve the turkey because “surgeons do delicate work and ad folks just make things pretty,” which is how I ended up crying on a trivet while Moose snored under the table and Sarah squeezed my knee once under her napkin so I didn’t float away.
Somewhere between pie and dishes, Sarah took me out onto the porch where the Christmas lights were indeed still blinking from last year and handed me an envelope. “Don’t kill me,” she said. “I filed paperwork under your name.”