Once the carousel started to turn, Devin and I sat back into our seats. In all honesty, I forgot my friend was even sitting next to me for a few minutes.

“I think I’m in love.” Devin covered her heart with her hand.

“You should probably let the man who put that obnoxiously huge rock on your finger know, then.”

She smiled from ear to ear. “Say it. Devin Marie Abandandalo was right.”

I rolled my eyes. “I guess he’s kind of cute.”

Devin burst into laughter. “You are so full of shit. You wish he was riding you right now instead of that plastic horse.”

Well, it had been a while. “Shut up.”

She grinned. “Sadie and Sebastian sitting in a tree. K-I-S-S-I-N-G. It even sounds great, doesn’t it? Sadie and Sebastian. There’s a ring to it. Like it could be a TV show, even. Sounds better than dumb Corey and Lacey.”

“Cagney,” I corrected.

Devin shrugged. “Whatever.”

I sighed. “Birdie didn’t see the black horse with the blonde mane.”

“Eh. You’ll send her a stuffed one and a live hamster to make up for it. Let’s go back to talking about the hot dad.”

The carousel ride lasted about five minutes, and when it slowed to a stop, the black horse was directly in front of me. I tapped Devin’s arm. “There it is!”

“Maybe she’ll notice it on the way out.”

Birdie and her dad were nowhere in sight, so I figured the ride had stopped with them on the other side. The exit gate was only about two horses to the right, so if they came from the right, she wouldn’t have a chance to even see the black one. I watched as people got off the ride and started to walk toward the gate. Unfortunately, when Birdie and Sebastian appeared, they were walking from the right side. They were the last two people to exit from the group they’d ridden with, and it looked like my attempts to play Santa Claus and God had all been for naught.

Until . . . a butterfly flew by Birdie as she was about to exit. She smiled and ducked under her dad’s arm to chase it. Sebastian called after her as she took off, but she’d already run pretty far. When he called after her a second time in a deeper, more stern voice, she froze . . . directly in front of the black horse.

I literally held my breath.

I swear, the entire thing happened in slow motion after that.

Birdie turned around, seeming like she was going to walk away. But she must’ve caught sight of the black horse as she did. Her head whipped back, and her eyes grew as wide as saucers. Both hands came up to cover her open mouth. She stood there frozen for a long time. At least it felt like a long time. Until her dad walked over and grabbed her hand.

She said something to him I couldn’t hear, and then they started to walk away. Birdie made it about three steps before she wiggled out of her dad’s grip, ran back to the plastic horse, and kissed the mane on the horse that ran like the wind.

CHAPTER 5

SADIE

Watching that butterfly lead Birdie right to the horse had been truly magical. It was like the universe had intercepted to prove to me that if I thought I could control everything, I had another think coming.

Perhaps, somewhere up there, Amanda Maxwell was looking down on me and shaking her head. Maybe she thought it was about time she intervened to show me who really was in charge.

A part of me hoped that Birdie didn’t write back, because it was starting to feel like I was playing God. I didn’t want to have to continue to mislead her as much as I never wanted to disappoint her, either. This was honestly a great time to walk away from the situation—on a very happy note.

The Sunday afternoon after I’d seen Birdie in the park, I’d taken the train to Suffern to visit my father. It had felt like the perfect time to visit Dad. He was always good at offering insight when I felt stuck on something. Maybe he could give me his opinion on whether I’d taken things too far. Well, I knew I’d taken things too far, but I still wanted his opinion. And if I was being honest, I also wanted to pick his brain about what being a single dad had really been like all those years ago. There were certain things I would have never had the courage to ask him when I was younger. But now that I was older, I was curious about whether he dated more than I realized back then. I knew he’d had a couple of girlfriends in recent years, but had there been women I didn’t know about growing up?

I suppose my curiosity stemmed from seeing Sebastian yesterday. A man like that must have had women throwing themselves at him left and right. Yet from what I could tell from Birdie’s letters, he tried to be discreet so as not to interrupt their lives.

My father lived in the same house I grew up in. It was still brown on the outside, although the paint was flaking a bit now. The house had a large front porch with hanging plant pots. While our house certainly wasn’t the biggest in town, we had an incredible amount of land. Dad had the most amazing garden, and this was the time of year he’d be pawning tomatoes off on all the neighbors because he had so many, he didn’t know what to do with them.

Dad would always calculate the exact time it would take for me to arrive based on my train. As usual, he was standing at the door waiting for me.

He gave me a huge hug. “How’s my Sadie?”

Looking up at something dangling near the top of the door, I said, “I’ve been really good. I see you made a new contraption?”

My father loved to create instruments that he believed could predict the weather. Even though there was plenty of technology in this day and age to do so, he preferred to build tools from scratch that he swore were just as good if not better than the best Doppler radar. He would give them cute names, too.

“What’s this one called?” I asked.

“The humbug.”

“What does that stand for?”

“The ‘hum’ comes from the fact that the strip of paper right there expands when it becomes more humid. The more it expands, the more chance for a storm. The ‘bug’ just sounded good with ‘hum.’”

“You’re so funny.” I smiled.

The interesting thing was, I remember the weather-instrument hobby starting not too long after my mother died. It was his way of keeping his mind occupied, perhaps, so that it didn’t wander to things that were too painful.

“I just put on a fresh pot of coffee,” he said as I followed him inside.

“Ohhhh, a fresh pot,” I teased. “To what do I owe this honor? I must be someone special.”

I always joked with my dad whenever he made a fresh pot of coffee, because normally he made only one large pot in the morning for himself and poured from the same carafe throughout the course of the entire day. He’d just nuke it in the microwave. But he knew I liked my java fresh, so he’d suck it up and dump out the old coffee before making a new pot whenever I came over. I tried to buy him one of those Keurig machines once so that he could have fresh mugs of coffee all day, but he said he didn’t mind his coffee a little burned and stale and preferred not to contribute to the environmental hazard of plastic waste.

On the counter was a gigantic bowl of tomatoes in varying shades of red, green, and orange along with a lineup of cucumbers and peppers on some paper towel.

“Let me guess . . . cucumber and tomato salad for lunch?”