Silas’s face crumpled.

“I knew it,” he whispered, and he bowed his head, and I watched the worst fear he had named in the car arrive and land on him.

“I knew she’d —”

He didn’t get to finish, because then there were footsteps again, fast ones, thundering back down the hall and down the stairs, and Daisy came flying into the room at a dead run, and in her arms she was clutching something small and worn and faded — a stuffed rabbit, soft gray, one ear gone limp with years of being held, the kind of toy a child loves nearly to pieces.

I knew what it was before Silas’s face told me, because a toy loved that hard is unmistakable — the fur worn down to the weave in the places small hands had held it most, the limp ear, the general softness of a thing that has been cried into and slept on and carried through every frightening night of a childhood.