Zadie pulled back, quickly brushing a rogue tear from her cheek.
“What about you?” Finn asked. “What are you going to do now?”
“I think I might stick around here a little longer. I have some things I need to work out.”
“With Mom?”
“Yeah. Well, and there’s this other thing…”
Finn waited.
“I’m pregnant.”
“I was wondering when you were going to tell me,” Finn said, her tone unexpectedly blasé.
“You knew?”
“It wasn’t hard to guess. You’ve looked nauseated ever since we left Texas.”
“Oh, I thought I was hiding it well.” Zadie should have known she couldn’t pull one over on her sister.
“Does Dustin know?”
“Not yet.”
“What about Mom?”
“She knows.”
Finn smiled, eyes bright. “I’m so excited.”
“Me too.”
How many lies would she tell? Zadie wondered. How many drafts of the story of this world would she write before there was one good enough for her baby? And what if her child could see into future? Then it didn’t matter how many lies she told, her child would discover the truth eventually. Nora had kept secrets. Maybe she could try being honest.
EPILOGUE
TWENTY-EIGHTA SONG ABOUT A BIRD
“She’s here!”
Jenna turned away from the window toward her sister, who was bounding down the stairs two at a time. Nora’s hair—which she had recently dyed a vibrant shade of purple—had been pulled into a messy bun, and her clothes, which had once hung off her too-thin frame, now clung to the muscles she’d built loading trucks at the tuna cannery. She hurried past Jenna to the window. “She looks taller. Don’t you think?”
“Looks the same to me.”
“Don’t you think she looks taller, Zadie?”
Zadie looked up. Through the window, she could see Finn heaving a suitcase out of the trunk of her car. She didn’t look taller, but she looked self-assured, happy. Most of their weekly phone conversations had revolved around her new college life: the friends she was making; the culinary merit of various dining halls; which professors asked their students to call them by their first names and which professors had sticks up their tweed-clad butts. It came as no surprise to Zadie that her sister was thriving there and, aside from an unfortunately timed echo in her dorm’s laundry room, Finn’s gift had given her little trouble. As far as the rest of the student body was concerned, she was just a normal eighteen-year-old.
“Maybe a little taller,” Zadie answered, which was met with a playful glare from her aunt.
Moments later, Finn burst through the front door, and both she and Nora let out short squeals like two piglets getting their tails pulled. “My college girl!” Nora said as she smothered her daughter in a bear hug and then proceeded to spin her in circles. It made Zadie dizzy just looking at it.
After staggering away from her mother, the Tilt-A-Whirl, she gave Jenna a quick squeeze before saying, “Where’s my baby niece?”
The little Star—now known as Wren—lay wriggling in Zadie’s lap. At present, she was three months old and roughly the size of a husky cat. It wouldn’t be long, Zadie thought, before she was big enough that her spunky kicks and punches would start to inflict actual pain. She would gladly take her little one’s blows, however, because she’d never been more in love with anything in her life.
Finn sat down on the couch next to Zadie. “Can I hold her?”