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my fingers over my daughter’s back. Her spine is a string of pearls. “Does that mean anything?”
    The nurse shakes her head. “No, it’s just unusual.”
    Mom leans over me. “What are you going to name her?”
    “Antoinette,” I say. I picked the name two weeks ago after flipping through a baby name book Lily gave me. “It means praiseworthy.”
    At my voice, Antoinette opens her cornflower blue eyes and turns toward me. My heart stops again, but this time it’s from love.

Chapter Three

    Lily sat on the edge of her bed, a well-worn book in her lap. Its white cover had grayed over the years, and the rose on the front was more peach than pink.
    Tomorrow she would drive to Redbud and see Rose for the first time in years. She had already called her boss to request a leave of absence. She knew she should be packing now. Her barely used black suitcase sat open on her bed, a pile of T-shirts and jeans beside it, but she was spellbound by the old book. She flipped through the pages until she found what she wanted. As she looked down at the artist’s rendering of honeysuckle, her mind drifted to the last time she had been home.
    Two years ago, on the first Friday in June, Lily had called in sick to work. She shoved T-shirts and jeans into a suitcase. Then she sat in her car and counted to fifty before heading south to Redbud.
    It was Rose’s thirtieth birthday.
    When they were children, thirty had seemed mythical, like a land they’d never visit. Like China, real but out of reach. They used to sit in the rafters of the drying barn, legs dangling over the beams, eating lavender shortbread cookies while conjuring their futures.
    “Paris,” Rose said once. Her daydreams played out anywhere but Kentucky. “I’ll paint the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. By thirty, I’ll be exactly where I want to be.”
    I want to be here , Lily thought, though she didn’t say it out loud. Her dreams seemed small next to her sister’s.
    “Promise me, you’ll be there when I turn thirty,” Rose said as she stretched out across the wide wooden beam. “Wherever we are in the world, we’ll spend our thirtieth birthdays together. First mine, then yours.”
    They hooked their pinkie fingers and swore to be together. Rose might have meant they’d be together on their birthdays, but Lily had meant forever.
    Yet here it was. Rose’s thirtieth birthday. They were apart and neither of them had the life they imagined.
    Lily had arrived in Redbud early that Friday morning. She checked into her hotel room, but instead of leaving the room and driving to Eden Farms she stood at the door, twisting the knob first left, then right, counting each turn. She was stuck. It was late afternoon before she could stop.
    When she finally left the hotel, she drove north, to Richmond. She ate at a diner that looked like a 1950s museum. Her legs sweated against the red vinyl booth. She drank her sweet tea and picked at her country fried steak. Then she walked around town, ducking into antiques shops and candy stores until it was too dark to do anything except drive back to the hotel.
    The following day, she drove even farther north, stopping in Lexington at the Kentucky Horse Park. She bought a ticket and watched the Parade of Breeds. She looked at the statue of Secretariat and measured her steps’ length against Man o’ War’s impressive twenty-eight-foot stride.
    Finally, on the morning she was heading home to Covington, she gathered her courage and drove to Eden Farms. She pulled off on the side of the road and stared at the blue clapboard farmhouse where she grew up. The house stood well back from the road, the drying barn several yards to its left. Oak and birch trees arched over the drive that split in front of the house. One path led to the house and the other to the drying barn.
    Their land was wedge shaped, with the widest portion of their fifty acres in the back. Most of it was cleared, but a thick stand of woods made up their back border. The