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planted avocado trees, chickens in newly built chicken coops. Sitting here now, Ava wondered if she should have accompanied him. Would that have made a difference? Would Delia Lindstrom go to Honduras with him and yarn bomb the avocado trees?
    â€œThere was one book that I read over and over,” Jennifer was saying, “and that book was The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera.”
    â€œI love that book,” Kiki said.
    Luke nodded. “Good choice.”
    â€œAnd that brings us to our newcomers,” Cate said. “John?”
    John got awkwardly to his feet, rocking slightly in his Topsiders.
    â€œMy wife was the reader in our family,” John said. “So this was kind of hard. But one book does matter to me. A lot. Slaughterhouse-Five? By Kurt Vonnegut?”
    â€œThat’s a wonderful choice, John,” Cate said.
    â€œGood one, man,” Luke said.
    â€œI’ve never read Mr. Vonnegut,” Penny said as she carefully wrote the title in her notebook. “It’s about time I did.”
    As soon as John sat down, Cate said gently, “Ava?”
    â€œLast but not least,” Ava said, stalling.
    She felt everyone’s eyes on her. She did not have a book that mattered to her, she thought, suddenly having to fight back tears. Her life mattered to her, her heartache, her losses, piling up with resounding thuds.
    Then she heard herself say, “ From Clare to Here .”
    She hadn’t thought about that book since the summer after Lily died, when Ava read it over and over again, as if it had beenwritten just for her. Someone had delivered it to their house, Ava remembered now, shortly after the first anniversary of Lily’s death and just two weeks after her mother left them to jump off the Jamestown Bridge. A woman drove up in a big black Cadillac and handed the book to Ava. “This is for you,” she’d said.
    â€œIsn’t ‘From Clare to Here’ a song?” Kiki asked Ava, who was grateful to stop the onslaught of memories threatening to be released.
    â€œNancy Griffith sings it, doesn’t she?” Honor asked. “‘From Clare to Here’?”
    â€œA lot of people have recorded it,” Ava said, the song reverberating in her mind. It almost breaks my heart when I think of my family . . .
    Ava swallowed hard, thinking of Jim and the family she’d lost this year. And thinking too of those other long-ago losses—her sister and mother—that still sat like rocks in her gut.
    â€œBut there was a book with the same title,” she said softly. “By Rosalind Arden. That’s the one,” she said, her voice stronger now. “That’s the book that matters most to me.”

Maggie
    When she first arrived in Paris, with the vague notion that she would become a writer, she went to all the cafés that she’d read Hemingway had frequented. Les Deux Magots and Café Flore, La Closerie and La Rotonde in Montparnasse. “No matter what café in Montparnasse you ask a taxi-driver to bring you to from the right bank of the river, they always take you to the Rotonde,” he wrote in The Sun Also Rises . But as far as she could tell, only tourists went there now. Or to any of the other cafés she’d so carefully marked on her Street Wise Paris map, finding the best route by Métro or on foot. She spent most of the afternoon and into theevening sitting in the cafés, drinking house wine and waiting for her life to begin, for something to happen.
    But nothing did.
    She managed to leave drunk and disappointed, but not inspired. Not feeling alive, which was what she needed. She had been dead inside for too long, and she had come here with her worn paperbacks of everything Hemingway wrote, and her knapsack, and her little notebook to jot down things she saw and ideas for stories and clever phrases. She’d come here—escaped, really—with all the hope she could muster.