Last year, things were hard. Financially, life was a disaster, and fear kept me paralyzed. I felt helpless, terrified. I was sure I couldn’t live through what I knew had to come next — leaving Aurora, leaving the kids. I didn’t know how to choose that. I didn’t know how to build a new life out of financial ruin. I was sure I was not strong enough.

One cold Sunday morning last year, I was driving out of Stow — I’d slept at Katie’s apartment — toward Aurora, on my way to pick up the kids from Dan’s. There wasn’t traffic. It was one of those crisp late winter mornings that makes you think, Will spring never come? I bet I was unshowered and groggy. I bet I’d stopped for coffee at the Speedway on the corner. I bet I had one of Katie’s CDs in, but I know I was too lost in my heavy thoughts to listen.

When I got to the railroad crossing on Stow Road, red lights were flashing, and the striped gate came down. I loved getting stopped for trains. They ran so fast here at this crossing, and consequently, they felt loud and big and close. The train’s whistle distorted in my ears because of the speed at which the engine roared past. I settled in to the rhythm of watching train cars race past my field of vision. Train car. Train car. Train car. Too fast to count. Some had graffiti painted on them. Some were the old-fashioned kind of boxcar. Some were double stacked with shipping containers.

And then: A boxcar appeared in front of me with a message painted on it. Just for a second — and then it was gone, and then it had been pulled fast from the spot of track in front of me. Some enterprising graffiti artist had painted across the entire boxcar. He’d have needed a ladder. Some of the letters were as tall as a person. This train car was pale — it had probably been white once — but the graffiti artist had covered it with thick, black letters.

They spelled: EVERYTHING WILL BE OKAY.

I blinked, and the car was gone. I looked around. Had anyone else seen it? I was alone on this side of the tracks — just me in my rusty minivan. No other witness to what I immediately thought of as a message from the universe. The universe, I thought, had not been subtle this time. I smiled, and then I laughed. “I got it,” I said to nobody. “I got the message.”

Just a couple weeks ago I told you this story about the train car graffiti. I told you how, in the months after I saw that train, things were not at all okay. Things were terrible. Life was awful. I told you I had come to believe the train had been wrong.

You have a little magnet stuck to your napkin box in your kitchen. It says, “Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.” When I saw that, I knew — it was as if that train last year had carried me here, brought me to you, dropped me off in your kitchen. So I could see the rest of the message.

It’s taken me more than a year to believe my train.

When I held you after I told you the train story — in my kitchen, not yours — we laughed because that Jason Mraz song was playing, and its lyrics were, “…and everything will be fine. Everything will be fine…”

“See?” I said. “The universe is sending us a message.”

After a minute, you said, “You’re my train, Lauren. You are my train.”