Opening
A cab ride home turns into a life-changing moment when Pattie Nguyen announces she’s put in an offer to buy the Gardens of Glenwood. As the shock fades, Willow Chance quietly reshapes her world: the number seven, once a coping mechanism, becomes a map of the people she loves and the home they build together, crystallizing the novel’s arc toward Found Family and Community.
What Happens
On the ride back from the courthouse, Pattie says she has formally offered to buy the apartment building. The cab goes silent, then floods with reaction. Dell Duke beams, already imagining his eviction troubles solved. Quang-ha Nguyen immediately pitches a skateboard ramp to replace the front stairs, revealing a passion Willow hadn’t known about. Willow replays Pattie’s earlier line—“nothing is for certain”—and decides it is the truest thing she’s ever heard. The announcement marks a turning point: the group isn’t a makeshift arrangement anymore; it’s becoming a permanent family.
That afternoon, after her mile loop, Willow sits in the garden she nursed from dirt into bloom. It’s the 7th of the month. She follows seven’s trails—its primeness, the seven kinds of catastrophe, days of the week, Newton’s rainbow, and Dell’s seven categories of people—then pivots. In a quiet epiphany tied to Grief, Loss, and Healing, she creates a new order for living: at every stage of life, there are seven people who truly matter.
She names them: her parents, Roberta and Jimmy Chance, who remain with her; Mai Nguyen; Dell; Quang-ha; Pattie; and Jairo Hernandez. From now on, when overwhelmed, she won’t count by sevens; she’ll count to seven—each person a distinct rainbow color—reframing her ritual around Belonging and Human Connection. She presses her lucky acorn into the soil—a small, rooted vow of Growth and Renewal—and watches two birds move through sunlight, telling her without words that life goes on.
Character Development
Willow turns intellect into intimacy, reshaping seven from an abstraction into a circle of care. Pattie steps fully into matriarchal leadership, converting initiative into home.
- Willow Chance: Transforms her coping mechanism into a relationship-centered practice; integrates her parents’ memory with her present; accepts the permanence of her new family.
- Pattie Nguyen: Commits to buying the building, providing stability and declaring a long-term future for the group.
- Dell Duke: Becomes part of Willow’s essential seven, his impact and reliability validated.
- Quang-ha Nguyen: Shows new dimension through his skateboard vision; his bond with Willow deepens as part of her seven.
- Mai Nguyen: Remains Willow’s steady anchor and chosen sister within the seven.
- Jairo Hernandez: Endures as a quiet guardian figure whose faith in Willow helped set her healing in motion.
Themes & Symbols
The chapter culminates the novel’s movement from isolation to connection. Found family isn’t theoretical—it’s deeded, named, and ritualized. Willow’s shift from collecting facts to collecting people reframes grief: love doesn’t replace loss; it steadies it. In turning seven into a living inventory of faces, she fuses logic with feeling and chooses continuity over absence.
Set in the garden, the scene binds personal healing to growth. Planting the acorn literalizes renewal: from a pocketed talisman of chance to a rooted commitment to the future. The rainbow metaphor captures complementarity—each person distinct, all necessary to the whole—recasting order as relationship rather than control.
Key symbols:
- The number 7: Redefined from obsessive order to completeness through community.
- The garden: A cultivated home where transformation takes root.
- The acorn: Potential made active—hope planted, not carried.
- The rainbow: Many colors, one spectrum—difference held together in belonging.
Key Quotes
I think that at every stage of living, there are 7 people who matter in your world.
They are people who are inside you.
They are people you rely on.
They are people who daily change your life.
Willow converts a numerical pattern into a human one, aligning her analytical mind with her emotional needs. The list format—so characteristic of her—now catalogs connection, not facts, signaling her integrated healing.
“Nothing is for certain.”
This line frames both Pattie’s gamble and Willow’s acceptance of uncertainty. Rather than seeking control through counting, Willow learns to live within uncertainty by naming and leaning on her seven.
Life goes on.
Wordlessly voiced by the birds, this becomes the novel’s final verdict. Survival turns to renewal: grief persists, but so does motion, attention, and care.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
Chapter 61 delivers the novel’s emotional climax and redefines its title: “Counting by 7s” becomes counting to seven people who sustain a life. Pattie’s bid secures a literal home; Willow’s epiphany secures an inner one. The ending affirms permanence for their chosen family and sets a forward path grounded in community, compassion, and the everyday courage of starting again.