And maybe, that afternoon, it wouldn’t stay down anymore.

Maybe some animal part of me had done the math the conscious part refused to, and was trying to get my attention the only way it could, by making me unable to focus on a simple screw.

I’ll never know.

But I have decided to believe it, because the alternative — that I would have gone on obliviously fixing that hinge while Mason walked his sister across town — is more than I can bear.

What I know for certain is that when I heard those small footsteps and turned around, the unease of three years and the horror of the present collapsed into a single instant of terrible clarity, and I understood, before Mason said a word, that every quiet fear I’d swallowed had been right all along.

Chapter 2 — Thomas

To understand how a six-year-old came to be standing on my porch having walked his little sister across seven blocks, you have to understand the three years that came before it, and those three years began at my brother’s grave.

I loved Thomas the way you love a younger brother you half-raised — fiercely, and with a little guilt always mixed in, the sense that I should have called more, visited more, been there more.

When he died so suddenly, that guilt had nowhere to go, and it curdled into a desperate need to do right by what he’d left behind.

At the funeral, when the family gathered afterward in Evelyn’s living room, she stood in the center of the room, pale and composed, and said the thing that would shape everything.

“All I want right now,” she said softly, “is stability for Mason and Daisy.” And I believed her.

Of course I believed her.

She had just lost her husband; the children had lost their father; grief makes even simple things feel impossible, and a woman asking only for stability for her children seemed to me the most reasonable, the most admirable, thing in the world.

I decided, standing in that room, that I would give her exactly that — space, stability, whatever she needed — and that I would not be one more person making demands on a grieving young widow.