One unremarkable March day, a man began puncturing random holes in his withered pasture with a post-hole digger.

In the dark, from my twin bed, I listen to Romy and her latest visitor in the sheets.

She was eight and at the beach and she felt like a movie star.

Inside the ovaries of my husband’s grandmother, Sylvie, resided an egg the size of a grain of sand that would have been Hannah, my brilliant and accomplished mother-in-law.

Mum died in the last days of October, leaving—among other things—a lot of fall-time chores incomplete.

Whatever the color, there had been a balloon. There had been a boy. And there had been a fall.