Happier Here With You

1

The exhibit opens to clinking champagne flutes, but Maggie hears only the ghost of Charles Dickens whispering from his grave: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It is the best of times for her career as a food anthropologist and curator at the Midwest Natural History Museum at Lakeside University. This exhibit is her tour de force: two hundred-plus years of influential American female cookbook authors, from Amelia Simmons to Julia Child, complete with handwritten recipes and kitchen replicas. But it feels like the worst of times for her motherhood report card.

Tonight, while she rubs elbows with Chicago's finest female chefs and fields questions from journalists, her five-year-old daughter, Hannah, graduates from kindergarten. Hannah will walk across a kid-size wooden bridge in her school gymnasium and receive her diploma, and she will look into the audience to see not her mother but her longtime babysitter, April. April promised to film the biggest ten seconds of Hannah's young life and text Maggie the clip. The opening gala date was set the moment they booked Ruth Rivers, the only living cookbook author featured in the exhibit—extremely hard to pin down, with exactly one night available in late spring: a Wednesday evening, the same night as Hannah's graduation. There was nothing Maggie could do.

When she told Hannah, Hannah didn't seem fazed. “It's okay, Mom,” she said. “April can just put it on YouTube.” It probably is okay with Hannah. It just isn't okay with Maggie. This isn't the kind of parent she wants to be. She knows it's acceptable and financially necessary for working parents to miss soccer games and ballet recitals. And because she's a widow—her husband, Sean, passed just two months before Hannah was born—she likely receives a double get-out-of-jail-free card. But just because she can do it, and has to do it to support them, doesn't mean she wants to. The truth is, she is in two places tonight: her body and brain at the museum, but her heart in that stuffy school gymnasium where Hannah steps toward another version of herself.

Tonight, Maggie tries to put Hannah's graduation out of her mind. She mingles, shakes hands, snaps photos, answers questions, laughs at a food-pun joke, smiles. She reminds herself to celebrate this accomplishment. The pièces de résistance are the kitchen replicas: every detail curated to whisk visitors back in time. Julia Child's Cambridge kitchen countertops, for example, were taller than standard to account for her six-foot-three stature, and the replica reflects this difference, complete with her blue pegboard, hanging brass pots, painted black refrigerator, and yellow oil-clothed dining table.

Then Maggie feels her phone buzz inside the pocket of her black dress pants. She heads immediately to her office. She wants to watch Hannah's graduation clip in private. Because she already knows she is going to cry. On the tiny screen, she watches Hannah bounce across the bridge, her brown curls grazing her shoulders. She smiles at her kindergarten teacher as she accepts the roll of white paper that is her graduation certificate. The whole ceremony is silly—Hannah's school is K-6, so next year she is moving just one classroom down the hall—but it seems so important to encourage her education, to celebrate her first full year of school. But this isn’t why Maggie is crying. The tears come because while she gets to see Hannah graduate thanks to April's cell phone camera, Hannah will not see her watching. No one is capturing the love and pride on Maggie's face for her daughter to view another time. The phone screen is a one-sided mirror: she can see Hannah, but Hannah cannot see her.

By the time Maggie arrives home and relieves April, it is almost 11:00 p.m. Hannah is fast asleep, but Maggie sits at the edge of her bed for a few minutes. Hannah's chest rises and falls in a steady rhythm—the epitome of peace. Her graduation cap, crafted out of black cardstock, sits askew on her pillow. She must have gone to bed wearing it. Maggie moves it safely to her nightstand.

She is bursting to tell Hannah about her night, how she finally met one of her all-time heroes. Ruth Rivers is a chef extraordinaire, entrepreneur, food-industry icon, and editor in chief of Mirepoix, a gourmet cooking magazine Maggie has long subscribed to. Her head still feels light from being in Ruth's presence tonight. She has conducted several phone interviews with her over the past two years, but actually seeing her in the flesh, hearing her iconic Minnesotan accent without the buffer of a television screen, felt surreal. Ruth was everything Maggie thought she would be, and also so humble. Maggie expected a well-earned air of importance, but she caught Ruth more than once serving drinks to guests, rearranging appetizers on platters, clearing crumbs—as if she were more comfortable in the back of the house than the front. Ruth called her Ms. Brodbeck several times, even though Maggie asked her to call her Maggie. This only reminded her of Sean. She was resolute in keeping her own name when they married, but after he passed, she questioned that choice. Sometimes she still does. It feels like more of a severing without this shared name forever binding them.

Maggie kisses Hannah's forehead, then heads to the kitchen and peeks inside the fridge. The food served tonight was catered and gourmet, but feeling anxious, she didn't eat a bite. Now she is suddenly starving. There are no leftovers because she asked April to treat Hannah to her favorite fast-food kids’ meal. Plus, she needs to go grocery shopping. Dinners have been haphazard: the exhibit opening, the end-of-school-year vibe, warmer temperatures. Easy and quick seem to be the core requirements of any meal since losing Sean. Once upon a time, she lingered at the stove, constantly stirring a roux for gumbo or pitting fresh-picked cherries for a cobbler. But cooking seems to be a gift of time and contentment—neither of which she has much of these days.

She grabs what's left of the bread—two ends—and slathers on peanut butter and cherry jelly. A cup of herbal rooibos tea completes her meal. She sits at the kitchen table and sorts through the mail April brought in earlier. Most of it is junk. She sees another issue of Mirepoix and winces. She has yet to look at the last issue. Has a month passed already? She should probably cancel her subscription. But that would be like canceling who she used to be, the hope of rebecoming that person.

At the bottom of the pile, there is a long white envelope with curvy scripted handwriting and a return address in St. John’s Ferry, Wisconsin. The trifold letter inside is typed—on a typewriter, the corners of each letter pooled with black ink. She starts reading, but it is late and her eyes blur. She blinks and begins again:

The time has come, Magpie. Spend the summer here on Rosehill Farm. You and Hannah. Anytime is fine. But I should warn you, they say the cell reception is “spotty.” No internet. And there will be work. But I promise, it will be the best summer of your life. The time to grow like wild. Alice

And then a phone number typed below her name. She reads the letter again, and then once more, trying to process. She has never even met her Great-Aunt Alice, and yet Alice is asking—no, practically telling—her to come to her Wisconsin farm for the summer. There will be work. Like what? Milking cows? Repairing fences? As if she could just drop everything—work, life—and do that. As if she could live three months without internet. And why did she call her Magpie? No one has ever called her that before. Her full name is Magnolia—like the flower—but everyone calls her Maggie. Could it be a typo? She wonders if Alice is almost blind or going senile, typing fragmented letters on a dusty typewriter and mailing them to estranged family members. Her tone is too casual, almost patronizing. The time has come. What does that even mean?

She glances at the clock. It is half past eleven, which means it is only 9:30 p.m. on the West Coast. Her mother, a math professor at UCLA, is probably still awake, grading papers. Maggie's impulse is to call her, read her the letter from Alice, gossip. But the idea sours her stomach. For some reason, it feels like breaking a trust with Alice. But how can she have a trust with someone she has never even met?

She knows very little about Alice. Alice is her late grandfather Albert Jr.'s much younger sister—by eleven years—her mother's aunt, the family outcast. Last Maggie knew, Alice lived alone: no husband, no children. In addition to her “wild” hair, curly and unruly, wild has also referred to the berry jam she makes and sells on the side of the road and the turkeys she eats. Throughout Maggie's childhood, Alice was a whisper at Independence Day picnics, a murmur over Thanksgiving pie, a heavy sigh between sips of Christmas eggnog, a cleared throat after Easter Sunday ham. She knew Alice only through stories, which made her a mythical enigma. Her juvenile brain placed her somewhere between Paul Bunyan and a unicorn.

Her mind travels

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2

Maggie calls her mom from work Thursday morning, Alice's letter open on her desk. Her mother asks about the weather, then immediately laments Maggie's choice to live in the Midwest, making it clear she still doesn't understand why Maggie stayed in Eastridge after Sean died. Maggie thinks about Sean—how she sees his memory everywhere in this town, and how leaving would mean leaving him forever.

Her mother pushes her to visit Los Angeles for the summer. Maggie deflects, citing her job at the museum and her boss Elena's upcoming retirement, which makes Maggie the top candidate for museum director. She changes the subject to Hannah's graduation video, which her mother hasn't watched. Then Maggie mentions Alice's letter.

The line goes silent. Her mother calls the letter "audacious," sounding more angry than curious. She hasn't heard from Alice in decades, and no one else in the family received a similar invitation. When Maggie asks what she makes of it, her mother dismisses Alice as eccentric and possibly developing dementia. Maggie bites her tongue, remembering the day in sixth grade when she first asked about Alice.

She had been researching her surname for a history project and discovered Brodbeck means "bread baker." She came home to a flour-covered kitchen, having baked bread from scratch. Her mother was horrified at the mess, but when Maggie made her taste it, she admitted it was good—and said she'd only known one other person who made bread like that from scratch. Maggie blurted "Alice?" and her mother's eyes went wide. She told Maggie that Alice is "different," old-fashioned, that she "marches to the beat of her own drum." When Maggie pressed further, her mother clapped her hands once loudly, switching gears, and they never talked about Alice again, no matter how many times Maggie tried to bring her up. Like Maggie's father, Alice seemed a topic her mother did not want to broach.

Now, her mother picks up on Maggie's hesitation. "You're not thinking of going, are you?" Maggie protests that of course not, but her stomach churns like it's a lie. Her mother warns her not to get "mixed up with Alice," the words sounding dramatic, as if Alice is a cocaine addict or a religious cult leader. Her mother has to go, but says she'll ask the family about the letter. Maggie suddenly wishes she hadn't told her. She feels protective of Alice—wondering if it's because being different from her mother was also Maggie's downfall, or because Alice's banishment never seemed fair.

By afternoon, the grilled cheese from the museum cafeteria sits badly. Maggie hasn't heard from April all morning—no response to her texts about sunscreen or photos of sandcastles. Letting Hannah go to the beach was difficult. Lake Michigan is where Sean drowned six years ago in May, and they just marked the anniversary. The sight of the lake still throws Maggie into fight or flight. But guilt over missing Hannah's graduation made her say yes.

She calls April. Voicemail. A half hour passes. Nothing. Worst-case scenarios flood her mind. Her breath turns shallow, her heart pounds in her chest and throat. She starts sweating everywhere. She has to leave, has to drive to the beach and find them right now.

She runs into Elena on her way out. Her boss takes one look at her, grips her arm, asks what's wrong. Maggie can't breathe, her heart is pounding so hard she can feel it in her head. Elena leads her to a chair, takes her pulse. Maggie insists she has to go to the beach. Elena won't let her drive in this condition. She asks about shortness of breath, sweating, nausea—Maggie nods to all of it. "Your pulse is 180," Elena says. "I'm calling an ambulance."

April finally texts a few minutes after they arrive at the hospital. Her phone died at the beach. They had a wonderful time. Hannah made up a story about a mermaid. But even as relief washes over Maggie, her heart rate sits at 150. The ER runs every test—blood work, EKG, chest x-ray—and finds nothing wrong.

The doctor returns when Maggie's pulse drops to 120. She didn't have a heart attack. She had a panic attack. The doctor asks why a perfectly healthy thirty-five-year-old woman has a resting pulse over 100. Elena chimes in that Maggie was worried about her daughter. Maggie explains about Sean drowning in the lake. The doctor asks if she saw a professional. Maggie had therapy for a year, but maybe it wasn't enough. The doctor gives her a referral and tells her to take it easy for a few days.

When the doctor leaves, Elena tells her she's taking a week off, boss's orders. Maggie hasn't slept more than three to four hours at a time. Her meals have been French fries and protein bars. Elena thinks her body is trying to tell her something. Maggie hasn't taken more than a day or two off in three years. Elena suggests an opportune time for a vacation before everything ahead—the promotion, taking on the director role. It's worth a week to ponder why a healthy woman has a resting pulse over 100.

Maggie thinks about how she used to be different. Calmer. Easygoing. Fun. But being a single mom, the sole breadwinner, has changed her. Every day feels like opening a new business while customers flood in, and everything behind the counter is still a mess. She wants to lock the doors and post a sign that says "Closed for Renovation." But you can't close a home or a family or a life. You can only vacate it.

She agrees to take time off. Elena asks if there's anywhere she'd like to take Hannah. Maggie's long list includes New York City, the Outer Banks, Key West. But none of those come to mind. She turns to Elena and says, "St. John's Ferry, Wisconsin."

3

Friday morning, Maggie wakes determined to make the most of her unexpected break from work, seeing it as a gift of more time with Hannah. She envisions celebratory French toast for her kindergarten graduate, but remembers she used the last bread ends on PB&J. Baking a loaf would take too long for the double rise, and she wants to go to the first farmers market of the season. Pancakes would work, but the flour canister holds only a scant tablespoon or two—she ran out a month ago. She thinks back to how she and Sean used to shop together every Friday night, a symbiotic team, but now she orders groceries online. When she asks Hannah if she wants doughnuts at the farmers market, Hannah squeals, and Maggie no longer feels like such a terrible mom.

At the market, they eat warm rings of cinnamon sugar as they stroll past the colorful offerings of late May. The morning air smells of potential and promise, and Maggie feels herself relaxing. Hannah points to a table and asks if something is pink celery. Maggie recognizes it as rhubarb, shows Hannah the stalk up close, and explains the leaves are poisonous. Hannah's lips twist in concern, then relax when Maggie assures her the farmer already cut them off. Maggie buys two bundles and asks Hannah if she wants to bake a strawberry-rhubarb pie with ice cream. Hannah licks her lips and declares this the best day ever.

By afternoon, Hannah sits in a carbohydrate-induced coma in front of her iPad after doughnuts and boxed mac and cheese. Maggie decides she doesn't have the energy to make the pie, feeling rusty after years of not making dough. She cuts and freezes the rhubarb for another day. Watching Hannah's zombie stare prompts Maggie to suggest a walk to the playground. While Hannah pumps her legs on the swings, Maggie sits on a nearby bench with other parents who mostly check their phones. She overhears a mom and dad on an adjacent bench bantering about weekend errands and whether their oldest is responsible enough for a cell phone. The exchange makes Maggie pause—she wonders if she and Sean would be discussing these things if he were with her on this bench, planning birthday parties and date nights. She shakes the thought away and opens the Maps app on her phone, typing in the address of Great-Aunt Alice's farm in St. John's Ferry. She can't stop thinking about the letter and begins to obsess, searching the internet.

She learns St. John's Ferry is a small town in southwestern Wisconsin on the Mississippi River, in the Driftless Area characterized by steep bluffs and dramatic valleys. The photos are breathtaking. From an aerial view, Alice's farm appears large with a pond, walking path, barn, henhouse, orchard, garden, and main house. Street view reveals little—just a black mailbox and a gravel driveway lined with oaks and maples. A Google search using her aunt's name and address yields no digital footprint. But something at the bottom of the list catches her eye: a recipe from over thirty years ago archived in the St. John's Ferry Gazette—Magpie's Zucchini Bread, submitted by Alice Brodbeck. Maggie peruses the recipe and finds it interesting—orange marmalade is a primary ingredient. But the most intriguing part is a postscript in italics: My three-year-old great-niece, who I call Magpie, can't get enough of this bread, especially if it's slathered with orange honey butter.

After Hannah's bedtime, Maggie calls her mother and cuts right to the chase: there's something she isn't telling her about Alice. Her mother's silence speaks volumes. Maggie presses, saying she spent time with Alice as a kid, that her great-aunt nicknamed her Magpie and made her zucchini bread—things you do when you interact with someone regularly. Her mother asks if she remembers, and Maggie admits she doesn't. But her mother's answer tells Maggie she's getting closer to the truth. Maggie asks if they stayed on the farm in Wisconsin. Her mother finally says yes, for a short time when Maggie was very young. Maggie pushes for specifics: when, and for how long. Her mother gives a ballpark of a month or so. But Maggie thinks back to the recipe calling her a three-year-old great-niece and says with certainty it was longer.

Her mother exhales in resignation and finally reveals the truth: Maggie went to live with Alice when she was about three months old. Her mother was finishing her master's degree, didn't know how to build a career and be a good mom at the same time. Maggie feels her stomach drop because her mother said you, not we. She asks about her father, but her mother repeats the old story—a handsome European man named Chris she met during graduate school, no last name, no real personal details. Maggie stops pressing. But she questions how her mother could leave her infant in someone else's care for so long. She asks if her mother let Alice raise her. Her mother argues she raised her, that it was temporary—Maggie lived with Alice until she was three, then her mother finished school, got a job, and took her back. She visited every few months, called every week, received pictures and updates. Maggie can't believe she was never told. Her mother admits maybe she should have, but didn't want Maggie to think she was abandoned or unloved. She could only see the downside.

Maggie realizes this is why her mother made Alice out to be such a pariah. Her mother regrets that now, admits she painted Alice in a negative light. Maggie pushes further, asking about her aunts. Her mother reveals Alice inherited the farmhouse from their great-grandmother Rose, and her sisters wanted their cut—developers tried to purchase the land for life-changing money, but Alice wouldn't sell. Maggie presses if they were happy to join the smear campaign. Her mother deflects, saying she was just protecting her. Maggie doesn't absolve her. Her mother asks if Maggie can understand how hard it was to not be able to take care of her and be her mother and go to school. Maggie understands in a way, but can't imagine leaving Hannah like that. Still, she softens and asks why Alice. Her mother explains Alice didn't have children, and her farm seemed a safe place. Maggie imagines herself running through a field of flowers, but the image is replaced by reality. She asks if they never saw Alice again after being taken home. Her mother says they lived in California, it was hard to travel, life happened, they lost touch—and that felt right. Maggie asks if Alice ever called or wrote all those years. Her mother's silence is incriminating. She says she acted in Maggie's best interest.

They hang up, and Maggie sits with her thoughts for a long time. She wonders what the first three years of her life were like, whether those early moments with Alice explain the divide between her and her mother—why they are so dissimilar, why they value different things. She remembers a night in high school when her mother came home from work and asked what was for dinner. Maggie had made shrimp pasta with spinach and Dijon mustard, adding fresh lemon juice. She asked if her mother tasted anything different. Her mother seemed to search for a deep thought but came up short, saying it tasted the same. Maggie said she added lemon juice. Her mother shrugged, saying Maggie could put coffee in it and she'd still eat it. Toward the end of the meal, Maggie asked if she could take a culinary class called Foods instead of study hall. Her mother narrowed her eyes, dismissing it as Home Economics. Maggie explained it was an advanced class where she'd learn sponge cake made with whipped egg whites and spaghetti sauce from scratch. Her mother shook her head, saying those were the kinds of classes women her age fought to get out of. She told Maggie to think about her future, her career, and that colleges would be impressed with a 4.0, not whether she could make a cake that resembles a sponge. Maggie felt her heart crumple like paper. She wanted to correct her mother, to explain the cake was airy and light like a sponge, but knew it was no use. The answer was no.

Now, comparing that memory to Alice's recipe, Maggie senses her great-aunt's strong attachment to food. The recipe reads like a diary entry, and Maggie knows, even without meeting Alice again, that they both see food for what it really is: love. She has no idea how Alice found her or exactly why she wrote, but she knows one thing for sure: she still holds a sacred place in Alice's heart. And this time, she's not going to let her mother keep her from following what feels right in her bones.

4

After a restless night's sleep, Maggie wakes Saturday morning with a headache that two cups of strong coffee can't cure. She pours a third cup, jittery, still sorting everything her mother told her last night like items in a junk drawer. She needs to leave the house, so she and Hannah spend the day following whims — the Metra train to the city, trying on wide-brimmed hats and cat-eye sunglasses at Macy's, eating Garrett's popcorn for lunch, then the Art Institute where they stare at the dots of a Seurat painting until their vision blurs. After gelato, Maggie lets Hannah run barefoot with countless other children in the Crown Fountain. She successfully escapes.

When they arrive home late in the day, legs rubbery from miles of city walking, a package waits on the stoop of their brownstone three-flat. Maggie doesn't remember buying anything online. A closer look shows it's from her mother in California, overnighted from the postage. She takes it inside, wondering. Once Hannah runs off to play on her iPad — Maggie tells her she can have one hour of device time before dinner — Maggie takes the box to the kitchen and slices it open with a paring knife. Under the flaps, the first thing she sees is a piece of notebook paper: I'm sorry. —Mom

Below that, the box is full of unopened envelopes. She grabs a stack and slides through them like a deck of cards. Every single one is addressed to her at her childhood home in California. Every single one has a return address in St. John's Ferry, Wisconsin. Every single one is from Alice Brodbeck.

A sting hits the corners of her eyes. Receiving one letter in the days of texts and emails is beautiful, but taking in decades of them at once overwhelms her. One after another, she opens each envelope to see Alice's scripty handwriting — birthday wishes, good fortune. Alice sent her a birthday card every year from the time she turned four until she turned eighteen, plus Christmas and Valentine's Day cards and other intermittent letters. Thirty-nine total. Her mother had not given her a single one. Until now.

Maggie looks again at her mother's note. I'm sorry. She knows those two words mean so much more: sorry for never giving you these cards and letters, sorry for never telling you about your childhood, sorry for keeping Alice out of your life.

It takes a good hour to read each card and letter in detail — a crash course in the history of her relationship with her great-aunt. She notices Alice's word choices change as Maggie ages: "baby girl" at first, then "sweetheart," eventually "my dear." But the dedication never wavers, even as the years pass, even when Alice doesn't hear back. Her faith remains. "The world is at your fingertips, my dear," Alice wrote in her high school graduation card, one of the last. "Just reach."

By the end, Maggie's eyes burn dry and her wrists ache. She feels content—like she's been tucked into bed after a long, hard day—but also insatiable, like there's still so much she needs to know.

Hannah finally comes out of her screen cave and finds Maggie sitting silently on the couch. "Are you okay, Mom?" she asks. Maggie pats the cushion next to her. "Just thinking." Hannah sits. "About what?" Maggie hesitates, unsure how to explain or whether she should. She doesn't want the story to paint her mother in a negative light or affect Hannah's relationship with her grandmother. She settles on a simpler version, mentioning how mail sometimes gets lost, and the box contained lost letters from her great-aunt Alice. Hannah's eyes widen with intrigue. "Was there money in them?" Maggie nods — Alice sent a few dollars here and there, urging her in postscripts to buy ice cream or a candy bar. Hannah scans the pile. "Will you write her back?" Maggie marvels at her daughter's ability to get to the heart of things. She tells Hannah about the letter she received a couple of days ago, inviting them to visit Alice's farm in Wisconsin. Hannah's eyes pop, her lips purse and bulge. "Like a vacation?!" Maggie nods, feeling a twinge of guilt at Hannah's reaction. They haven't gone anywhere in recent years. "Would you like that?" Maggie asks. "Yes, yes, yes." Hannah clasps her hands and bounces on the couch like a bobble head.

There's really no reason they couldn't drive up to Alice's farm, at least for a few days. No dentist appointments, no birthday parties on the calendar. And Alice did write Anytime is fine.

After dinner, Hannah insists on packing for the trip even though Maggie tells her she's not sure they are even going or when. Mostly, Hannah wants to decide which residents of her small stuffed animal village will tag along. While Hannah is occupied, Maggie grabs the letter and her cell and heads to the couch to dial Alice. It rings five times before a woman picks up — a raspy but sweet voice, familiar like a lullaby. "Hi, Alice? It's me," Maggie says hesitantly. "Maggie . . . Magpie," she adds, trying on the new nickname. "You got my letter?" Alice asks. "Yes." Maggie pauses. "I'm so happy you called," Alice says. "So, when can you and Hannah come visit?"

The conversation moves at breakneck speed. Maggie is silent for a beat. "Well, you have impeccable timing," she finally says. "I'm actually off work this whole next week," she adds, not mentioning the recent panic attack or ER trip. "How soon can you come then?" Out of habit, Maggie checks the refrigerator calendar, though she doesn't need to. "I guess as early as tomorrow? But I realize that might not be enough notice." Alice laughs, a deep and hearty chuckle. "Notice? You don't need to give notice with me. You could show up on my doorstep in the middle of the night."

Maggie's cheeks flush with the warmth of Alice's affection, her soothing voice resounding deep within her. Her eyes suddenly water because she believes her. She's not sure her own mother would say the same. "I feel like we have so much to catch up on," she starts, feeling like she just woke up from a dream. "How did you even find me?" Alice promises they'll catch up on everything, but she doesn't want to spoil their reunion over the phone. "It's been too long, and I want to see your beautiful face when you talk. I want to catch every smile and every glint in your eye. Okay?" Maggie agrees. She factors in what she has to do before they leave — at the very least ask their neighbor Mrs. Lee to collect mail — and does quick math on driving time to St. John's Ferry. She tells Alice they should arrive around lunchtime. "Then I shall see you ladies tomorrow," Alice confirms. "I love you, my dear," she adds before saying goodbye.

Maggie sits on the couch a moment with her phone in her hands. While she can't remember the days she spent with Alice in St. John's Ferry, she somehow — instinctively — knows she loves her too.