My daughter was standing at the bottom of the stairs when I came home, holding the yellow ribbon her mother used to wear.

By April, the grass on Cherokee Road had returned to that deep, aggressive Kentucky green that smells of wild onions and damp earth after the spring rains.

The legal work was finished.

The divorce had been finalized in an empty courtroom on a Tuesday morning in February. Brooke had signed the decree without looking at me, her signature hurried and thin, her lawyer whispering in her ear while she agreed to return every cent of the thirty-five thousand dollars from the Meridian account, along with eight thousand dollars in legal fees Eleanor Vance had extracted from her personal severance package. Her firm had “accepted her resignation” three days after the sheriff’s department visited her office.

Chloe had taken a diversion program for her part in the forged communications, which included two hundred hours of community service—clearing brush along the highway in Warren County.

The house was ours again.

The gray paint in the hallway was gone. June and I had spent three weekends in March rolling two coats of butter-cream yellow over the walls, the original color Natalie had chosen when we moved in after the wedding. We had stripped Brooke’s stark linen curtains from the living room and hung the old floral ones that let the afternoon sun fall across the floorboards in patterns like water.

It was a Saturday morning, 10:00 AM.

The kitchen windows were open, the breeze carrying the sound of the lawnmowers from the park across the street.

Ella sat on the tall wooden stool by the counter, swinging her legs against the rungs. Her hair had grown three inches over the winter—it was no longer a pixie, but a soft, thick bob that brushed the tops of her shoulders, dark and healthy, the curls at the ends beginning to return where the weight had lifted.

I pulled the cloth measuring tape from the kitchen drawer.

“Ready?” I asked.

“Ready,” Ella said, sitting up straight, her chin level, her hands resting flat on her knees.

I laid the tape against the crown of her head, drawing it down through the dark strands to the very edge of the new growth.

“Seven inches,” I announced, reaching for the blue notebook that lay open beside the toaster.

Ella took the yellow crayon and wrote the number down in the column: *April 18: 7 inches.*

Beside it, she didn't draw a star. She drew a small, green sprout with two leaves reaching upward.

“Do you think we can get to fourteen again before middle school?” she asked, looking up at me through her bangs.

“If we don't cut it,” I said, kissing the top of her head, smelling the sweet apple shampoo she had picked out herself at the pharmacy yesterday. “Just the ends, once every three months, with Maria.”

“Just the ends,” she agreed.

The front door opened with a soft click, and June’s voice floated down the hall.

“James? Ella? The truck is loaded. If we don't get these tomato plants in the ground before noon, the sun’s going to bake the roots.”

“Coming, Grandma!” Ella yelled, sliding off the stool.

She ran toward the hall, then stopped at the coat rack by the door.

Hanging from the brass hook was her sun hat—the straw one Natalie had bought her at the state fair when she was four. Tied around the crown, knotted with the same firm square knot that had held through the wind, the rain, and the winter, was the yellow ribbon.

Ella picked up the hat, settled it firmly over her short, dark hair, and turned to look at me from the doorway.

“Does it look magnificent, Daddy?”