They had welcomed her as a girl, broken and wandering in dirty jeans—and they soothed her now, forty-six years old and a different person entirely. The scent always brought her back: to the deck behind the farmhouse, all cedar breeze and alpine sigh. Sometimes Lavender caught a whiff of milky breath, puckered baby lips, tiny hands flailing, and in these moments, she pressed her forehead to the mottled bark and prayed.
