My husband had spent years warning me never to set foot on that farm. So after he passed away and the lawyer handed me the key, saying that from now on the place belonged to me, I was ready to sell it right away and put everything behind me. But before making my final decision, I still wanted to see it once for myself. When the door opened, I finally understood why, all those years, he had never wanted me to set foot there.

We kept watching Joshua’s videos every morning, though increasingly they became less about secrets and more about companionship. Instructions about where the best sunrise sat in January. Stories about his first horse as a boy. A recording of him trying, and failing, to fix a gate latch while muttering things he would never have said in front of Jenna at twelve. Memories of the first apartment we rented in St. Paul, where the radiator hissed all winter and our downstairs neighbor practiced saxophone badly after ten p.m.

Some mornings we cried. Some mornings we laughed. Some mornings we simply let him sit at the kitchen table with us while frost crept over the windows and coffee steamed between our hands.

By Christmas, Maple Creek no longer felt like a place I had inherited. It felt like a place I was participating in.