Appreciate this so much, Susan! Ironically (or not), I finally opened the John McPhee piece on structure my fellow writer sent me years ago, but I somehow forgot to read. His second-to-last paragraph:

"Look back upstream. If you have come to your planned ending and it doesn’t seem to be working, run your eye up the page and the page before that. You may see that your best ending is somewhere in there, that you were finished before you thought you were."