The winter of my ninetieth year, I stopped worrying about the future.Not because I had given up — because I had finally understood that the future was not mine to control. Celeste had taught me that, in the end. The only thing we could control was how we showed up. How we loved. How we stayed.The book continued to sell. Slowly, steadily, finding its way into the hands of people who needed it. I still answered every letter, though my hands were slower now, my handwriting shakier.Your story saved me, a woman wrote from Australia. I was going to leave my wife. I was going to run. Your book made me stay.I wrote back: Staying is hard. But it's worth it.---Sofia visited in February.She was fifty now — an age I remembered as the beginning of wisdom, though I hadn't known it at the time. Her hair was gray, her face lined, her eyes still the same — Celeste's eyes, watching, witnessing."Mom," she said — she still called me that, even though I was not her birth mother, even though Celest
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