My sister humiliated me at her wedding by banishing me from the family table, but when I quietly walked away, someone suddenly stood up.

Seven months passed before the earth began to thaw.

The winter had been long and brutal in the valley, burying the apple orchards under four feet of blue-shadowed snow. I stayed in my studio over the bakery. I worked. I drew eighty-two plates of indigenous northern mosses for a Harvard monograph; I designed three book jackets; I bought a secondhand wingback chair covered in mustard-yellow velvet and placed it right where the afternoon light pooled on the floorboards.

My life, which had felt so fragile and provisional for thirty years, began to set like good plaster.

The family had changed. The walkout at Greystone Manor had been a fracture, but like a broken bone that is properly reset, the limb was growing back thicker than before.

Every Sunday, Aunt Patricia called. Not to talk about Vanessa, but to ask about my work, to complain about Robert’s cholesterol, to tell me that Marcus had finally passed his real estate license on the third attempt.

Grandma Margaret came to visit in April, when the river ice finally broke into great, floating slabs. Robert drove her up in the Lincoln. She climbed the sixteen stairs to my apartment one step at a time, her cane tapping a steady rhythm against the pine, refusing to let Robert carry her oxygen tank.

She sat in my mustard-yellow chair, sipping black coffee, her sharp old eyes inspecting every inch of my brick walls.

"You have your mother's light," Margaret said, pointing her cane at the watercolor sketches pinned to the timber beams. "Elena was a dreamer. But you have Vance bones, Clara. You don't break when the wind hits you."

"How is she, Grandma?" I asked, leaning against the kitchen counter, my fingers tracing the rim of my mug.

Margaret took a slow sip of her coffee.

"She’s in therapy," the old woman said, the word sounding strange and foreign in her old-fashioned mouth. "Julian gave her an ultimatum in January. Either she sat down with a doctor to figure out why she has to burn down every room she walks into, or he was filing for an annulment."

I looked out the window. Down on the river, a pair of mallards were paddling against the brown spring runoff. "Did she go?"

"She goes twice a week," Grandma said. "She lives in that big house alone three days out of seven while Julian stays in the city for work. She wrote me a letter, Clara. Four pages. Hand-written."

"Did you answer it?"

"Not yet," Margaret said, her gaze steady. "A tree doesn't grow back its bark in one season, child. An apology is just words. Restitution is time. When she has lived six months without insulting someone who loves her, I might let her bring me a pot of tea."

She looked at me, her faded eyes soft behind her bifocals.

"Have you heard from her?"