I sat down between my two daughters, pulling Maya into my left arm, pulling Chloe into my right, feeling their small, warm, fragrant heads resting against my ribs, their little hands sticky with peach juice curling around my fingers.
“Daddy?” Chloe asked, looking up with her big, clear green eyes:
“Are you going back to work tomorrow?”
I looked across the green lawn of Willow Court where the morning sun was turning the blue spruces into an endless canopy of liquid emerald and pure gold:
I looked at Clara standing by the door, her hand resting against the wood of our home.
I looked at Eleanor Sterling, who had looked through my windshield on Route 6 and seen the soul of an honest man.
“No, Chloe,” Sebastian Miller whispered into the mountain breeze:
“Daddy isn’t going back to that office.”
“Daddy is staying home to build the treehouse.”
“Because around here…”
