The light snapped on, starting him upright in his chair. Suzanne stood in the orange and gold halo of the hanging tulip lamp, zipped into her velour robe, her graying hair every which way. “What on earth are you doing here, sitting around with no lights on?” She stepped toward him, her slippers shush-shushing over the vinyl floor. “You didn’t get a call about a fire, did you?” Ed was a member of the Millers Kill Volunteer Fire Department.

“No.” He shrugged. “I was thinking about when the girls were little. This was the only quiet time I had back then.”

“Well, you’re going to get a chance to relive those days.” She crossed to the counter and opened a cupboard to retrieve her coffee cup. “I’m watching Bonnie’s boys while she’s finishing up that big sewing job, and Becky’s coming home for the weekend.”

He grunted. She waved the pot in his direction, and he held out his mug. “She coming up here to gloat?”

“Stop that,” Suzanne said sharply. “She didn’t force you to put the business up for sale. You can’t make the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation the bad guy in all this. It was your decision.”

“I wouldn’t have had to make any decision if the ACC wasn’t going to cut off my lumbering license.” He buried his nose in his coffee cup. “I can’t believe my own daughter turned into a damn tree hugger.”

Suzanne seated herself at the table. “It’s your own fault. You used to sneak her out to your cut sites when she wasn’t big enough to tie her own shoes.”

One half of a smile crooked his cheek. “You used to carry on something fierce about that.”

“A lumbering camp is no place for a four-year-old.”

He laughed. “Remember how she would stomp around in a fit if she couldn’t come with me?”

“Uh-huh.” Suzanne looked at him pointedly over the rim of her cup. “So now she’s grown up into someone who loves the woods, is hot-tempered, always speaks her mind-and you can’t figure out where she gets it from.” She snorted. “The only thing she doesn’t favor you in is her hair.”