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the peace and quiet up here, the space to think and clear her mind.
    The garden had easily accounted for eighty percent of why she’d bought this particular property two years ago. The real estate agent had showed her dozens of properties for sale but this was the only one where she had felt immediately at home. The garden’s design was somewhere between formal and haphazard English garden. It was large enough to have walking paths that meandered between trees and bisected flower beds, half a dozen granite benches for enjoying a breeze or pondering the meaning of life, and a startling assortment of bird baths that seemed to have been divvied up among the birds according to species.
    Cherise had begun looking for a caretaker while Phlox was still in the hospital. Phlox’s heart would have broken if all this had been allowed to go to seed. Cherise was worth her weight in gold. If she ever left the company, Phlox wasn’t sure she’d know what to do.
    She cut a bouquet from one of her lilac bushes, then sat on a granite bench and watched the ants crawl over her peonies, collecting the nectar off the buds. Peonies had always been Phlox’s favorite flower, even as a child. Naturally, people expected her favorite flower to be phlox but it was a more interesting name than a flower.
    The ants were busy on her flowers, crawling up and down and around. Ants never questioned their mission, second-guessed their lives. Phlox was full of second guesses these days. The pre-accident Phlox had been bold and outspoken, inquisitive and driven, unafraid of anything. That Phlox got left behind the day of the accident, the day a stock pot of wax and oil exploded in her face. That wasn't the woman who was carried out of the house on a stretcher, an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. The Phlox who woke up in the hospital was quieter, a little more hesitant to take risks, and a lot less sure of herself.
    No one seemed to know this new Phlox, and it made everyone uncomfortable. They missed her old self, she got that. She missed her old self, too. Who was she now? Would she ever breathe easy in her house again? Would she ever stop beating herself up over her stupid, stupid actions that day?
    Honestly, she had no idea.
    Hell, she didn’t even recognize her own face when she looked in the mirror. And she had spent untold hours staring at her new visage in the bathroom mirror in the apartment in New York, trying to find something of the old Phlox in it. Sometimes she greeted acquaintances on the street only to be met with the blank city stare reserved for crazy people. Then there would be the awkward exchange.
    "Phlox Miller? We met at ...?"
    "Oh right! Phlox ... how are you doing ... these days?"
    Phlox doubted that a two-week stay in the country would get her any closer to feeling comfortable in her own skin again. But maybe waking up here and finding herself safe and sound—like the old days—would vanquish the awful dreams that haunted her sleep. The ones where she woke in a cold sweat, moaning and keening, feeling the burning wax and oil hit her face like a scalding hot wall.
    Maybe she would find some tiny trace of her old self here, in her lilacs and peonies, in the quiet solitude of the countryside, and maybe it would be enough to build on.
    Or maybe it wouldn't. Phlox couldn't shake the nagging feeling that perhaps the old Phlox was gone forever.

Chapter 5
    M uffins . She could bake muffins, she told herself with more confidence than she really felt. Muffins did not require the stovetop. Muffins did not require an open flame. If a tin of muffins exploded mid-bake, the inside of the oven would be a mess but nothing a little oven cleaner and some elbow grease couldn’t fix.
    Phlox practically chanted all the reasons why baking muffins was a kitchen activity she could handle. She tried to channel the old Phlox, who would be shouting, “Damn it! It’s Day 2. Get moving already.”
    Plus muffins were fattening. There would be no fat-free,