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I reached for the Princess phone, then stopped with my hand on the receiver.

There was no one to call. My children hadn’t yet been born. Paul was somewhere in the world, twenty-five years old, probably at his parents’ house or on a golf course or reading the financial pages with the confidence of a man who believed the future would all work out perfectly.

I remembered my children. I knew everything, from Claire’s crease between her eyebrows when she concentrated to Ben’s dark curls and the way his lips twitched before he apologized. Paul’s hand resting on my knee at a red light. The blue ceramic dish by the door at my house on Milburn. The refrigerator that made four kinds of ice because my husband had researched the issue as if one of them might save the republic.

I held those memories close.

“Laura Catherine,” my mother called from across the lawn. “Breakfast.”

The sound of her voice hit me so hard I had to grip the edge of the table.

My mother was alive. Not a photograph in a drawer or a tombstone in the ground. Not earrings passed to my daughter. Alive, impatient, and using my full name because I was late to breakfast.

“I’m coming,” I called, and my young voice wobbled on the words.

I dressed in the cutoff shorts and my father’s old James Taylor T-shirt, brushed my hair, pulling it up into a ponytail, then caught myself in the mirror and stared for one last second.

Twenty-three-year-old Lorrie looked back at me, legs bare and strong, face open in a way I’d forgotten mine had ever been.

“You have no idea,” I told her softly.

Then I crossed the yard. The kitchen smelled like bacon, toast, coffee, and Coco by Chanel. My mother stood at the stove in a white tennis skirt and a sleeveless navy top, her blond hair pulled back sleek and perfect, the diamond and gold watch I would one day inherit flashing at her wrist as she turned eggs in a skillet. My father sat behind the newspaper in a pale blue polo shirt, his reading glasses low on his nose, his hair thick and silver at the temples.

For years, I’d remembered him near the end, diminished beneath hospital blankets while I held his hand and pretended I wasn’t frightened. This man rustled the sports section and reached for his coffee with broad, freckled fingers.

“There she is,” he said. “You look flushed.”

“I ran down to the lake.”

My mother glanced over her shoulder. “On purpose?”

“It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“That’s how most trouble starts.” She slid eggs onto a plate and set it in front of me. “Eat.”

I laughed, then had to look down at the grapefruit dusted with sugar because if I kept looking at her, I would cry onto the bacon, and my mother didn’t like a show of emotion.

A box of Wheaties stood near the toaster with Mary Lou Retton smiling from the front. The Olympics were everywhere that summer. My father had watched gymnastics with the solemnity other men reserved for tax law, while my mother declared every leotard scandalous.

“Your mother says Patricia and Alan are coming next Saturday,” Dad said from behind the paper.

Paul’s parents.

“They want to go over details for the club dinner on the twenty-fourth,” she said, pouring coffee into my mug. “Just seating, flowers, and the menu.”

The twenty-fourth. The club. The Ellsworths. The ring Paul wouldn’t mention until the moment everyone expected him to, the ring I wasn’t supposed to know about.

“I remember,” I said.

My mom studied my face. “Do you?”

“Yes, you wrote it on my calendar.” I wrapped both hands around the mug, letting the heat steady me. I took a sip of coffee and made a face. It was scorched, bitter, and so familiar that my throat tightened.

“Oh, Lorrie.” Her voice softened in the way it did when she thought she understood everything. “Nerves are normal.”

She thought this was about Paul.

It was, but it was also about the girl I’d been, the woman I’d become, the parents I’d lost, and the chance to make a different choice, choose a different life.