That sentence — I know how to take care of myself now — did more damage to Adaira than the crash had.

She wanted to gather him up and tell him that no eight-year-old should ever have to learn such a thing, that taking care of him was her job and she was coming back to do it.

She wanted to promise him.

But her body was a locked room, and she could only lie there and receive the small, devastating reports of his day: the spelling test he’d aced, the friend who’d moved away, the father who kept forgetting him.

He never complained about Chandler.

That was the part that broke her most.