Lucien’s father passed peacefully and quietly in his sleep three years later, at the considerable age of eighty-one, having spent his final decade slowly, deliberately, and gratefully unlearning the isolation that had once defined so much of his own difficult and lonely life, surrounded by the grandchildren he’d come to adore and the daughter-in-marriage he’d grown to consider entirely his own family regardless of blood.

He had, in those quiet and contented final years, taken up gardening himself, inspired by watching Ezra’s own long, patient devotion to the terrace beds, and had grown surprisingly skilled and genuinely passionate about it, gifting Lucien a small potted rosebush on what turned out...