I stayed in that house. Then, when I was twenty-three, Ellie walked into my garden center. She wore blue nursing school scrubs and a student badge from the hospital in Macon. I recognized her immediately from years of photographs, though she had never seen my face. She wanted a dogwood tree for her church’s memorial garden, explaining that her fiancé’s family had lost someone. I assumed she meant my grandmother. I chose a healthy white Cherokee Princess dogwood, checking its graft carefully, just as Hattie had taught me. On its tag, I wrote my usual care instructions: “Graft is good. Water deep the first summer. She’ll bloom.”

As I helped Ellie load the tree into her car, she stopped and studied my face. “You look like someone I should know,” she said. For one second, I almost told her the truth. But I didn’t. Two more years passed. Then, on the Saturday before Easter in 2021, when I was twenty-five, another message arrived from my mother. The Ashcrofts were coming for supper, and there was a sunrise service Sunday. I had to be gone by 9:30. I left fifteen minutes early and drove south to Hattie’s farm, where I spent the day working in the orchard. That evening, while standing at Hattie’s kitchen sink, I suddenly realized I’d forgotten something important.