And right now, it was overflowing.
39
There is a reason we love the story of the phoenix who is reborn from the ashes. Because in life, there will always be moments where we catch fire, and have to rebuild from what remains. The trick isn’t to avoid the flames, flames are inevitable. The trick is choosing to rise again.
Lark Ashwood’s diary, June 25, 2021
Lark
It was quilting night, and they had already been at it for hours. Because the squares were finished, and all they needed was to be joined together. Which was Lark’s responsibility, since she was the one who knew how to use a sewing machine.
It was all fine and good to do the squares by hand, but when it came to the big task, she needed equipment.
She began assembly while her sisters and mother talked, while they laughed and shared passages from the diaries that they had each been studying. Taylor had joined them tonight, which made Lark’s heart feel bruised, but in the best way.
This was bigger than them. That all the women who had come before them, and lived and loved and made mistakes and been redeemed, were right there with them. Wordlessly, she placed her square at the center, the square she hadn’t shown anyone yet. With embroidery that had taken the better part of twelve hours yesterday.
But holding the blanket had felt good. Right and real. It had connected her with Gram in a deep, beautiful way.
There was no judgment in these stitches. It was love, pure and simple.
And ultimately, that was what she was holding close to her heart. That even though she and her grandma had never been able to speak of it, her grandma had been prepared to offer her what she herself had never been given.
Acceptance.
She felt the strongest sense of certainty as she worked, as she moved the fabric through the machine.
Because she was just ready. Ready to make the life she wanted, not just wish for it. Not just drift into it.
She was ready to build her home. With her own two hands. And his own two hands, too.
The conversation in the room hushed and the only sound was the hum of the sewing machine, just as Lark finished stitching together the last piece.
She looked up to see what had everyone so silent, and saw a woman with shoulder-length gray hair standing in the doorway, looking around the room.
“Linda,” Mary said. “You came.”
The older woman nodded, tears in her eyes. “I did. These must be your daughters.”
“Yes,” her mother said. “Lark and Hannah and Avery.”
Lark took the quilt out from beneath the sewing machine and held it close to her chest.
“This is Linda,” her mom said. “My half sister. Gram’s daughter.”
It felt right that she was here. And Lark felt hungry to know everything about her. Because they didn’t keep secrets anymore, they shared stories.
“You’re right on time,” Lark said. “We just finished the quilt.”
She draped it over the wooden rack she had set up earlier, the colors bright and rich. Interlocking triangles of blue and silver, cream colored lace and rich brocade.
The party dress, the wedding dress, the parlor curtains.
Those fragmented pieces joined together, telling a story, of who they were. And there, at the center, was the baby blanket. Lark had finished the tree that her grandmother had begun, and beside it she had embroidered the words: You have never gone so far that you can’t come back home again.
Lark had always believed that it was art, creation, that healed. And this had healed them.
Their history. Their secrets. All right there, bright and brilliant and shared.
Lark’s mother put her arm around her, a tear rolling down her cheek. “It’s beautiful,” she said.
“It is,” Lark said. It was beautiful. Not just because of what it was, but because of all it represented. And Linda came to stand beside them, and Lark looked at her sisters, her mother, at her mother’s newfound sister. “She gave us this. She didn’t tell us all her secrets. She didn’t ever find a way to ask you to forgive her, Mom. She didn’t find her way back to Linda. We never spoke about the baby. But she left us this quilt. And gave us a chance to make it together.”
To stitch together the rifts between them, like squares joined by the finest stitches.
She had been waiting. For this moment. When she’d looked at her grandmother’s pieces she’d seen that it wasn’t finished, and she had been waiting for that word to echo in her soul.
Finished.
But that wasn’t it. It wasn’t about finished, or unfinished. For their work, their lives weren’t done.
They would always grow and change.
But here and now pieces of their history were brought together. Each stitch like a path, showing where their ancestors had walked, and where they could walk forward.
And their stories would show the ones that came after them how to keep walking forward too. She could see it all in front of her now, all that history, all that time.
Time didn’t pass on by, never to be seen again.
It moved through the earth, through all that they were, like stitches in a quilt. Each thread, each fabric creating a bigger picture, a bigger truth. Each piece an integral part of the story of what had created them.
The sorrow, the joy. The loss, and the chance for new beginnings.
And the certainty that home would always be there.
She stood there, with her family, with her future stretched out in front of her, bright and brilliant however it would unfold.
And the word that echoed inside her was better than finished could ever be. Sitting with her sisters, her mother, and making this quilt, reading about her ancestors, learning to love all over again...
It was as though joining each bit of fabric had restored a part of her she’d thought was gone forever.
Lark Ashwood was no longer a woman in pieces.
She was whole.
epilogue
Three months earlier...
Adeline Dowell knew she was dying. She
