Ottoline read that line for a long time. Then she signed it. Then she slid it across the table to me and I signed it, too, as a witness, which seemed like what Radhika would have wanted.
Dashiell wanted to frame it. Hesper said absolutely not. They argued about it, cheerfully, all the way down the front walk.
One thing hasn't changed. The jar is still in the fence. I know because last Thursday, cutting back the hydrangea at last, I saw the loose knot and couldn't help myself. I pushed it out. The jar was there. The note in it wasn't graph paper this time. It was a square of cream-colored stationery, the kind with a little embossed oak leaf in the corner, folded into thirds, and on the outside, in a slanted, schoolteacher print, it said: Sela.
I stood in my yard holding it for a long time before I opened it.
Inside, it said: I found a box of forty paper cranes on fishing line in a bag Dashiell left on our patio. Hesper says he wants to give them back to the window they came from. I think the window is mine. I'm not sure yet what to say about that. Coffee, Saturday, after spin class? I'll bring the lasagna recipe. You never made it right. O.
I haven't decided what to write back. I've started three times. All three drafts are sitting on my counter, under the mail. The first one is too long, the second is too careful, and the third just says Yes, which is the truest one and also the one I'm most afraid of, because yes is the kind of word that leaves you open.
Saturday is in two days. The jar is waiting. The fence, as far as the association is concerned, is still due for staining in the spring, in a color called Weathered Pewter, and I've been thinking that a fence is just a fence, and a knot in it is just a knot, and the whole question, really, is what you're willing to pass through.