Page 65 of The Strawberry Field
And everything, pretty much everything, even in this scarred world we call home, feels possible.
“In the depth of winter, I finally learned thatwithin me there lay an invincible summer.”
—Albert Camus, “Return to Tipasa”
Epilogue
Two Years Later
Sawyer
IT’S THE KIND of late summer day that reminds me why I love this place.
The sun is high, the sky endlessly blue, and cicadas hum in the trees. We’re back in Bull Run Cove, where the water is glass smooth. Ideal conditions for Hannah’s water-skiing lesson.
She’s been working on it for weeks, determined. Jake is patient with her, his voice never losing its calm.
“There you go,” he calls, tossing her the rope.“Keep the edge of your ski angled once you’re up.”
“Okay, Daddy. I think I’ve got it.”
She started calling us “Mama” and “Daddy” a while ago. The words just came one day, unannounced but completely right. Her choice, her timing.
Jake and I got married over a year ago, nearly a year after I finalized Hannah’s adoption. Because I’d been the doctor who helped her at the scene of the accident, and because the county’s social worker knew my family’s long roots here, the foster approval process moved faster than I ever imagined possible. After the wedding, Jake adopted her too.
The process wasn’t without its struggles. Nothing about the last two years has been. There were home visits and pressing, painful interviews, nights when Hannah couldn’t sleep from nightmares, mornings when I questioned whether I was strong enough for any of it. But I know that healing doesn’t follow a straight line. And little by little, we found our way forward.
There are moments, like this one today, where I still can’t quite believe where I am. Who I am. What we’ve become.
Jake sits beside me in the boat, steady, kind, quietly strong. I look at our daughter, cutting across the lake. I think about Hattie, tail wagging from her perch at the back of the boat.
And I feel… peace.
It’s not that I think nothing bad will ever happen again. Of course, I know better than that. We’re all temporary here, and pain is a recurrent visitor.
But I believe in now. In this moment. In the life the four of us have together.
I volunteer two days a week at a local free healthcare clinic. The work grounds me.
At the clinic, I still see the aftershocks, lungs that never fully healed, families still unraveling, grief that shows up in quiet, unspoken ways. But I also see resilience. And that helps.
I let myself remember on a regular basis. Not to reopen wounds, but to honor the people I couldn’t save. To remind myself why I keep showing up.
And sometimes, before the house is awake, I walk the rows of the strawberry field.
It’s peaceful in the early light. The dew clings to the leaves. The air smells like soil and sweetness.
There’s something sacred about those rows. Something honest.
Jake says strawberries are stubborn. That they’ll survive a frost when they shouldn’t. That they come back even after a burn, growing through the ash, quietly beginning again.
Sometimes I think I understand them better than I understand myself.
There was a time, not so long ago, when I didn’t believe anything would grow in me again. Not joy. Not purpose. Not love.
But here we are.
The strawberries came back.
