Ellie drew back. “Mom and Dad would be so proud of you, Jules.”
That made Julia smile. “Yeah.” She closed her eyes for just a moment, a breath, and remembered all of it—the woman she’d been less than a year ago, afraid of her own spirit and the danger of sharp emotions . . . the little girl named Alice she’d taken into her heart . . . and the man who’d dared to push past his own darkness, toward the light they’d found deep in this old-growth forest. For years to come she knew that the people of Rain Valley would talk about this special time, when a child unlike any other had walked out of the woods and into their lives and changed them all, and how it had begun in mid-October, when the trees were dressed in tangerine leaves and danced in the chilly, rain-scented breeze, and the sun was a brilliant shade of gold that illuminated everything.
Magic hour.
For the rest of her life she’d remember it as the time she finally came home.