I looked. There, poking through the hard, frozen ground, was a single, stubborn green shoot. A daffodil. It was weeks early, a tiny, defiant splash of life in the middle of the February grey. It looked fragile, but it was holding its ground against the frost.

"A sign?" I asked.

"A neighbor," Peter replied with a grin.

I went back upstairs with two mugs of tea. Mama was awake, sitting up and watching Tima, who was staring at the ceiling with wide, dark eyes. I sat on the edge of the bed and pointed out the window toward the garden.

"The first one is up," I said. "A little daffodil. Just like you."

Mama smiled—a wide, bright, effortless true smile that seemed to light up the whole room. She picked up Tima, holding her toward the window so she could see the light hitting the mountains.

"See that, Tima?" she whispered. "That's the valley. That's home."

We sat there together, the three of us, as the sun filled the cottage. The story that had begun in a youth camp and struggled through the London rain had finally found its rhythm in the heart of the hills. There would be more fog, and more storms. But as the little bird let out a soft, contented sigh, we knew that we were no longer waiting for the future. We were living it.

The winter was ending, and spring had finally begun.

The cottage had developed its own rhythm by the time March arrived. Not the careful, tentative rhythm of those first days after the hospital, but something louder, messier, more alive. Tima had opinions now—about feeding times, about the temperature of her bath water, about the quality of sleep she was willing to tolerate. She made those opinions known with a remarkably powerful set of lungs for someone who weighed less than a bag of flour.

"She's going to be a singer," Peter announced one morning, standing in the kitchen with his fingers in his ears as Tima performed her 6 AM aria from upstairs. "Or a town crier. Either way, she's got projection."

But when she wasn't demanding the world's attention, she was perfect. Her eyes had started to focus, tracking faces and light with an intensity that suggested she was cataloging everything for future reference. When Mama sang to her—old folk songs, nonsense rhymes, sometimes just humming—Tima would go still, her tiny fists unclenching, her dark eyes locked on her mother's face like it was the only thing in the universe worth watching.

Mama was radiant. There was no other word for it. The exhaustion was still there—the purple shadows under her eyes, the way she moved carefully around her healing body—but she was *present* in a way I'd never seen before. The drift was gone. All of her was here, in this moment, with this baby.