Winter Garden

by Kristin Hannah

Meredith felt a kind of sadness. It wasn’t what she’d felt before: not disappointment that her kids didn’t call, or fear that Jeff didn’t love her, or even worry that she had lost too much of herself. This new feeling was the realization that she wasn’t young anymore. The days of frolicking with her little girls were gone. Her children were on their own now, and Meredith needed to accept that. They would always be a family, but if she’d learned anything in the past few weeks it was that a family wasn’t a static thing. There were always changes going on. Like with continents, sometimes the changes were invisible and underground, and sometimes they were explosive and deadly. The trick was to keep your balance. You couldn’t control the direction of your family any more than you could stop the continental shelf from breaking apart. All you could do was hold on for the ride.