And the little girl in the yellow raincoat.

I looked at the little girl, and my heart did a violent, sickening flip in my chest, because in her small hand she was holding something I knew.

Chapter 8 — The Ragdoll

The little girl was holding a tiny red plastic ragdoll.

I knew that ragdoll.

I knew it the way you know your own name.

It was the exact same red ragdoll that had sat on my grandmother’s mantle in South Chicago for my entire childhood, until the day she passed away.

It was the exact same ragdoll that I had buried, myself, in a shoebox, under a willow tree, when I was seven years old, in the raw grief of the year my mother vanished overnight and never came back.