CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

Wulfecombe

Six months later

The day was September warm, sunlight pouring down on the small church that was almost always too cold. Clare had been waiting for this day for nearly three months, and she'd written the ritual herself.

Rituals mattered. People needed them to mark time and enormous events, to connect with each other and their community. Weddings and funerals were the prime example, of course, but other moments mattered, too. Christenings and baptisms, coming-of-age ceremonies like quincea?eras and bar mitzvahs, graduations and birthdays. She loved and studied ritual, and had performed dozens of types over the years.

This one needed to encompass both sorrow and joy, loss and new beginnings. She'd studied and thought, and rewritten several times, and thought she'd come up with something beautiful.

The church, built an unimaginably long time ago, with priests' names carved on a stone tablet as far back as 1140, was festooned with flowers supplied by the entire village—enormous dahlias and late roses wound with baby's breath and yellow daisies. Sunlight shone in the windows.

Her family sat in the front pews. Levi and the daughters he'd brought with him, Meg and Amelia; the boys they'd made together, Ben and Arthur, tall and good-looking like their father, with the Evely blue eyes. Next to them was Paula, glowing with her nascent pregnancy, though few knew it yet. Sage held Clover, the plump baby who'd been born with her mother's calm nature, and Tillie sat next to them, rubbing Clover's toes. Then Liam, causing a stir with his beauty and his fame, holding Tillie's hand. Jon, Tillie's best friend, was there with a slim Greek man. George, the blind dog, had been adorned with a flower collar.

Clare had flown to New York over the summer for Tillie's show. It thrilled her to travel on her own, to see her daughter's life and meet her friends. She'd been dazzled and proud to admire Tillie's paintings, seeing herself in them, and the girls as children, and even Arlette, who'd caused them such pain. There was a painting of the twins, peering into a mirror, showing past and future, and an owl/mermaid something that was breathtaking.

But her favorite was the enormous painting of a Wulfecombe cat, big and muscular and somehow cheerful, flying through the woods with a girl on his back, a girl who was laughing in utter joy as her hair flew out behind her. Joey and Rosemary, long ago.

And now.

"Today," she said to the gathered number, "we're here to welcome back our lost daughter, Rosemary Tillie Evely Morrisey. Tillie, will you come up first?"

Tillie walked to the front, and Clare tied a long red ribbon around her wrist. "Now Sage." Sage carried her daughter with her, and Clare wrapped a pink ribbon around each of their wrists.

She followed with more ribbons of different colors for the family sitting in the front row, green and yellow and bright blues, and they all stood in a circle, waiting. The boys looked skeptical, but she forgave them. They were doing it.

When all were assembled, Liam, too, she wrapped a white ribbon around her wrist, and looped it around each of the others. "Love binds us even when we can't see it, even when one of us is lost," she said, and began to weave the ribbons all together in a particular way, one to the next to the next. "We are renewing our family bond in front of the community, to declare that the past is remembered but doesn't claim us, that we love one another as we are now."

In a bit of magic, she wound the center ribbons into a simple wreath and held it aloft. "We are family, now and forever. May it be so."

Clare looked at Tillie. Tillie looked back.

"All is well," she said.

"All is well," Tillie said.

"All is well," Liam said.

"Bah, bah, bah!" Clover cried.

They all laughed, and kissed. Clare held her daughters' hands, one on either side. A pain, the loss of so many years with her child, would always live within her, but life was never everything a person wanted.

But it could be good. It could be sweet. It could be so very rich, right in this very moment.

Right now.